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      Qualcomm Asked Rival Intel if It Would Consider Sale

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      While Intel has struggled in recent years, other chipmakers are thriving because of a boom in demand.The chipmaker Qualcomm has approached its rival Intel in recent days about the possibility of acquiring the slumping Silicon Valley giant, two people familiar with the matter said Friday, requesting anonymity because the talks were confidential.Qualcomm has not yet made an official offer for Intel, one of the people said, and the obstacles to a deal remain steep. Any deal would likely draw significant regulatory scrutiny, given the mammoth size and national security importance of both chip companies. It is unclear whether regulators would allow Qualcomm to buy Intel without taking on its struggling foundry business, and it remains equally unclear whether Qualcomm would want to take on that complex endeavor. A deal would also be costly. Intel, which has seen its shares fall nearly 40 percent over the last year, has a market capitalization of $93 billion. Qualcomm, which has seen its shares rise 55 percent, has a market value of $169 billion. Qualcomm and Intel, through spokeswomen, both declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Qualcomm’s approach. That any chip-making rival would consider trying to buy Intel would have been inconceivable a decade ago. But years of management issues and whiffs on technology transitions have weakened what was once one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.Intel missed out on selling chips for mobile phones and has failed to capitalize on the boom in artificial intelligence, a field rival Nvidia now dominates with specialized chips used in data centers. Intel’s chip manufacturing operations, once the most advanced, also lost a technology lead to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.Intel’s problems were underscored in early August, when it announced a $1.6 billion quarterly loss and plans to cut 15,000 jobs. The company, the largest planned recipient of federal financing under legislation called the CHIPS Act, on Monday announced other moves that include plans to pause the setting up of new plants in Germany and Poland.Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is a leader in cellular technology and provides chips used in flagship smartphones from companies such as Apple and Samsung Electronics. Unlike Intel, Qualcomm has never operated factories, a costly business that most chip designers avoid. So it would seem more likely to be interested in the Intel operations that design chips, as well as its broad expertise in PC software and channels for selling those systems, said Patrick Little, a former Qualcomm executive who now is chief executive of SiFive, a Silicon Valley start-up that sells rival microprocessor designs.“Those are things Qualcomm would have to mature on their own over time,” Mr. Little said. “If they worked with or somehow had a piece of Intel that could accelerate that part of their strategy.”Any effort to buy Intel would likely face a tough antitrust review and would be scrutinized closely on national security grounds, since its design and manufacturing operations are important for defense applications and overall U.S. competitiveness in semiconductors.Lauren Hirsch reported from New York and Don Clark from San Francisco. More

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      Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Defends App in First Comments Since Arrest

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      Pavel Durov, held in France since last month, blamed “growing pains” for the company’s problems and pledged to make improvements.Pavel Durov, the founder of the online communications tool Telegram, said on Thursday that it was a “misguided approach” to hold him personally responsible for the spread of illicit content on the platform.Mr. Durov’s comments, made on his Telegram account, were his first public remarks since he was arrested at an airport outside Paris and charged last month by the French authorities for failing to prevent illegal activity on the app. The crimes on Telegram included the spread of child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug sales, French prosecutors have said.“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” Mr. Durov wrote. He said “growing pains” on Telegram, which has 950 million users, had made it easy for criminals to abuse the platform.“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he said.Mr. Durov’s case has become a point of contention in the politically charged debate over the limits of free speech on the internet. Telegram is committed to light supervision of what people say or do on the platform. The app has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate and organize. But it has also become a hothouse for disinformation, extremism and other harmful content.Telegram has long been in the cross hairs of global law enforcement agencies because it has refused to cooperate with the authorities. French prosecutors said Mr. Durov had been arrested in part because of Telegram’s “almost total lack of response” to requests related to criminal investigations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Start-Up Investors Push Back Against Venture Capital’s Bigger-Is-Better Mantra

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      A small but vocal group is forming new funds and taking new approaches to counter the swell of money into venture capital in recent years.After nearly 10 years running his own venture capital firm, Nick Chirls decided to call it quits this year.His firm, Notation Capital, had raised three funds and invested in more than 100 companies. But Mr. Chirls said he had become disillusioned as venture capital grew from a collection of small partnerships into an industry dominated by firms that managed enormous sums.The focus on accumulating and deploying as much money as possible “completely dehumanized the entire business,” he said.Instead, Mr. Chirls is starting a new kind of firm. From the outside, the endeavor, Asylum Ventures, looks like his old firm, with a $55 million venture fund that will invest in very young tech companies. But the approach is set to be very different, making fewer investments over a longer period in companies that will not need to raise increasingly large funding rounds, he said.Mr. Chirls and his partners, Jonathan Wu and Mackenzie Regent, are part of a small but vocal group of start-up investors who are pushing back against venture capital’s changing scope and priorities. Venture capital investing has traditionally involved small groups of financiers who backed very young, very risky companies that couldn’t obtain traditional loans. The sums invested were often small.But that changed in recent years as investors poured billions of dollars into unproven start-ups with little diligence and investment firms expanded rapidly into new strategies and geographies. Last year, venture capital managed $1.1 trillion, up from $297 billion in 2013, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brazil Threatens to Ban Elon Musk’s X

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      The country’s Supreme Court gave the service 24 hours to name a legal representative in Brazil or face suspension.Brazil’s Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Elon Musk 24 hours to name a legal representative for X in Brazil or face a ban of his social network across the nation of 200 million.Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week in protest of orders from a Brazilian Supreme Court justice to suspend certain accounts. If X refuses to comply, it could lose access to one of its largest markets outside the United States — a blow as the company struggles to regain revenue after Mr. Musk battled with advertisers and told them not to spend on the platform.The court posted its order on X on Wednesday night, suggesting that Mr. Musk had until about 8 p.m. local time Thursday to respond.The moment is one of the biggest tests yet for Mr. Musk’s efforts to mold X to his personal ideology, and how he responds will shed light on how far he is willing to take his stated commitment to protecting his social network from what he calls censorship.X and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the possible ban.Mr. Musk has been enmeshed in a monthslong feud with Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice whom he has accused of censoring conservative voices online. Justice Moraes has ordered the suspension of more than 100 X accounts in what he says is a battle against misinformation, hate speech and attacks on democracy.Most of the accounts that Justice Moraes has targeted belong to right-wing supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. Some of them questioned Mr. Bolsonaro’s 2022 election loss and sympathized with protesters who raided Brazil’s halls of power, hoping to invoke a military takeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Telegram’s Top Executive Pavel Durov Reportedly Detained in France

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      The founder of Telegram, an app with more than 900 million users, was taken into custody by the authorities, French media reported.The French authorities on Saturday detained Pavel Durov, the top executive of the online communications platform Telegram, on charges related to the spread of illicit material on the service, according to French news reports.Mr. Durov, 39, a Russian-born entrepreneur, was reportedly arrested at Le Bourget Airport near Paris after landing from Azerbaijan. His detention could not immediately be confirmed.The Russian Embassy in France said in a statement on Sunday that it had asked the French authorities for clarification on news of the arrest.Representatives of the French police and Interior Ministry declined to comment and redirected questions to the Paris prosecutor’s office. The Paris prosecutor’s office, citing an open investigation, also declined to comment.Telegram did not respond to requests for comment.In an interview on Telegram, George Lobushkin, a former press secretary for Mr. Durov who remains close to him, wrote, “This is a monstrous attack on freedom of speech worldwide.”Telegram, with more than 900 million users, has long been on the radar of law enforcement agencies around the world because terrorist organizations, drug runners, weapons dealers and far-right extremist groups have used it for communicating, recruiting and organizing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Mabel Addis, Who Pioneered Storytelling in Video Gaming

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      She was a teacher when she participated in an educational experiment with IBM. As a result, she became the first female video game designer.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the 1960s, Mabel Addis was an elementary-school teacher in a small town in New York State when she was offered a unique opportunity that would make history: Create an educational game with IBM.What resulted was the Sumerian Game, an early video game that taught the basics of economic theory to sixth graders. In it, a student would act as the ruler of the Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash, in Sumer, in 3500 B.C. In Level One, the primary focus was on growing crops and developing tools; Level Two oversaw a more diversified economy; and in Level Three, Lagash interacted with other city-states. In each round, students responded to prompts issued by Urbaba, the royal steward.The video game was text-based, but it is believed to be the first to introduce storytelling and characters, and the first in a genre now known as edutainment. It also made Addis the first known female video game designer, according to several game historians.The Sumerian Game “is pretty rudimentary by today’s standards, but the thing about being ‘first’ is that just existing at all becomes innovative,” Kate Willaert, the author of the blog “A Critical Hit!,” who has studied the game extensively, said in an email. Addis, she maintained, was the first video game writer ever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

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      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More