Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all business operations related to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.

Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

NSA, GCHQ colluded to steal SIM encryption keys for millions of phones

Edward Snowden’s data trove continues bearing fruit — and the implications of the latest release are dark for anyone who cares even slightly about mobile privacy. According to the once-secret documents, the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, engaged in a massive operation against one of the world’s largest mobile SIM card manufacturers, Gemalto. To understand the significance of this release it helps to know a bit about how SIMs are used. When you use 3G or 4G connections, the connection between your device and your cell phone carrier is encrypted. That encryption isn’t perfect, but cracking it is still time-consuming, particularly if the goal is to monitor millions of people simultaneously.