With files from Samira Balsara
Amazon devices will soon be able to share its customers’ internet with neighbours, The ‘Silicon Six’ are being accused of inflating tax payments, and Intel’s CEO says the chip shortage may take years to be resolved.
It’s all the biz/tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, June 1 and I’m your host Alex Coop.
Amazon will soon share its customers’ internet with their neighbours. On June 8, Alexa and Echo users will become part of an experiment that automatically enrolls devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The service will share users’ internet bandwidth with neighbours who don’t have connectivity and vice versa. Amazon devices like Echo, Alexa, Ring, security cameras, lights, and motion sensors will all enroll into the system. The internet and subsequent reporting has pointed out that this is not something that users will be informed about prior to the experiment. Luckily, turning off the Amazon Sidewalk feature is quite easy and only requires users to open the Alexa app and access the app controls through settings. As of now, Amazon Sidewalk will only be available in the US. [ArsTechnica]
US tech giants known as the ‘Silicon Six,’ which includes Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Microsoft, are being accused of inflating their stated tax payments by almost 100 billion dollars over the past 10 years. A report by the Fair Tax Foundation revealed that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s owner Alphabet have all paid 96 billion dollars less in tax between 2011 and 2020. The ‘Silicon Six’ paid a total of 219 billion dollars in income tax in the past decade which is only 3.6 per cent of their total revenue of more than 6 trillion dollars. According to researchers, the companies deliberately shift income to low-tax jurisdictions so they can pay less tax. Spokespeople from Facebook and Amazon came forward claiming the report is misleading and not true. The other four companies have not made any comments on the research findings. [The Guardian]
And lastly, Intel Corporations CEO Pat Gelsinger says that it may take several years for the global shortage of semiconductors to be resolved. The shortage, he said during a recent virtual tradeshow, has been severely affecting auto production lines along with consumer electronics. The chip shortage is impacting the demand for laptops and tablets as a result of work from home procedures plus the closure of production facilities due to health protocols. In the past few months the company has announced plans to produce more chips and expand chip manufacturing by building two factories in Arizona. Tech distributors like D&H Distributing, for example, are reportedly starting to feel the pinch.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Friday at 3 pm. Thanks for listening.