[link] [315 comments]
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/p4zeh/neil_young_piracy_is_the_new_radio/
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
U.S. Officials Point To Iran As Growing Threat
Before a Senate committee on Tuesday, the director of national intelligence cited Iran's unclear intentions as the nation moves toward nuclear capability as reason to consider it a growing security threat. The annual list of U.S. security threats also included al-Qaida and the growing intensity of unrest in Syria.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/31/146153459/u-s-officials-cite-iran-as-growing-threat?ft=1&f=1001
FIRST SOLAR FINISAR FEI COMPANY FAIRCHILD SEMICONDUCTOR INTERNATIONAL FAIR ISAAC
ReRAM and the memory chip contest
The race to make RAM that keeps its memory in a power outage
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-16725529
ADVANCED SEMICONDUCTOR ENGINEERING ALLIANCE DATA SYSTEMS ALLTEL AMAZONCOM AMERICA MOVIL
Siri makes a cameo appearance on The Big Bang Theory
Another triumph of product placement for Apple
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_technology/~3/1h7jjscnVd4/
MANHATTAN ASSOCIATES LSI LINEAR TECHNOLOGY LEXMARK INTERNATIONAL LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS
Twitter could block super-injunction tweets
Twitter could bar British users from reading tweets that break future celebrity super-injunctions, a senior executive from the web firm has told MPs and Lords.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Siri makes a cameo appearance on The Big Bang Theory
Another triumph of product placement for Apple
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_technology/~3/1h7jjscnVd4/
SANDISK SALESFORCE COM SAIC ROCKWELL AUTOMATION RF MICRO DEVICES
Computer Coding: Not for Geeks Only
Free online courses are instructing non-techies in JavaScript and other coding and design of Web apps
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/computer-coding-not-for-geeks-only-01262012.html
Best Companies: Social media stars
These Best Companies to Work For are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media to get even better.
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_technology/~3/-9UtMA3ncV0/index.html
QUALCOMM QUANTA COMPUTER RESEARCH IN MOTION ROGERS COMMUNICATIONS SAIC
Twitter Is a Critical Tool in Republican Campaigns
The candidates? teams can reach voters, gather data and respond to charges immediately, but the brief posts also carry danger.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5523fdf5d59463646c14434743d46ded
UNISYS TRIQUINT SEMICONDUCTOR TRIMBLE NAVIGATION LIMITED TRIDENT MICROSYSTEMS TRANSACTION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTS
VIDEO: Social exercise and school-wide web
Kate Russell looks at ways to keep motivated when exercising and new innovations for education websites.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9687591.stm
FISERV FIRST SOLAR FINISAR FEI COMPANY FAIRCHILD SEMICONDUCTOR INTERNATIONAL
Sunday, 29 January 2012
One-on-One With Sean Parker
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker talks with Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, former president of Facebook Inc. and investor in Spotify Ltd.
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/video#video=w5dnlkMzqnLHQ7rhIcnLdgRrmxmrepHU
TERADATA TELETECH HOLDINGS TECHNITROL TAKETWO INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE SYNTEL
Will Google have to start a patent war to get $9bn of value from Motorola?
The financial performance of handset, tablet and set-top box maker Motorola suggests that it won't add $12bn (including $3bn of cash) in value to Google's business. But how can Google possibly earn its money back from patents?
Google intends to buy Motorola Mobility (MMI) for $12.5bn. Is it a good deal? Following the announcement of Motorola's financial results for the fourth quarter, we can take a view. From the purely financial viewpoint, the simple answer is: no.
Judging by the numbers, owning MMI will be a significant drag on Google's profits - by about 10 percentage points, making its earnings per share around one third smaller. In profitability terms, the merged company won't actually make any more profit than before. It might even make less.
Nor will being owned by Google necessarily help Motorola's profitability - unless perhaps it rebrands its phones as "Google". But even that might not help. For example, after it introduced the Motorola Droid, the first big-name Android phone in the US, in October 2009, it make a whacking loss in the mobile division of nearly $200m in each of the next quarters.
And Google has repeatedly said that it will run Motorola at "arms' length", rather than trying to absorb it into the Googleplex.
Sure, we know the arguments: Google is buying Motorola for its patent portfolio (which is considerable) as some sort of protection for Android from legal assaults by Apple and Microsoft, among others.
In fact in October Andy Rubin, who heads the Android division, said "Part of [the Motorola purchase] is clearly about patents. I'm focused on delighting a lot of consumers, but there are other folks focused on putting me out of business."
It's an intriguing claim, since only Apple and Microsoft could be said to be attacking Android in any focussed way. Microsoft, however, seems content to get handset makers to pay it per-handset licence fees, and that doesn't seem to have put any of them off making Android devices - unless there's a threat that it might come back and raise the fee.
As for Apple, although it has pursued HTC, Samsung, and Motorola, and does seem intent on preventing them selling devices with Android as presently configured, it's only been successful in briefly preventing sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab in Australia and some European countries. Despite the ITC finding against it, HTC is still selling phones in the US; the ITC will make a final decision later this year. Samsung is still selling Android phones - lots and lots of them. It might not even be that hard for them to reconfigure Android phones where the software is found to be infringing.
So what use are the Motorola patents? One possibility is that Google might warn Apple off - in effect, quite literally sue for peace - by exerting patents owned by Motorola, which include the basic IEEE 802.11 standard (for Wi-Fi) and that for AVC/H.264, which is used for the overwhelming majority of video encoding. Including by Apple, of course. Read independent patent blogger Florian M�ller for more on Motorola's ownership of those patents. Motorola, he notes, is aggressive - to the extent that it is being sued by, guess who, Apple and Motorola in the US claiming that it is breaching its obligations for Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - FRAND - licensing of essential patents.
Furthermore, buying Motorola for the patents might even give Google back some of the control it has lost of Android. With Motorola's patents, Google might provide a blanket patent licence to future official Android licensees, which would give them at least initial protection against lawsuits. This is similar to what Microsoft does with Windows Phone (and before that Windows Mobile) licensees: it covers them against intellectual property lawsuits as part of the deal.
At the same time, "unofficial" Android versions might not get the same licensing. It might be the same underlying code, but Google could only license the patents to "approved" handset makers, leaving others - Amazon? - in the lurch and on the hook.
But what about just selling Android phones - which was meant to be the resurrection of Motorola? If we set aside the patent question, is MMI a good investment? It's hard to think so. The company made an operating and net loss in every quarter of 2011 (and has made an operating loss for six of the past nine quarters, and a net loss for seven of them) . The worst part of that was its mobile phone business (which makes both featurephones and smartphones), which lost $285m over the year.
Google, by contrast, hasn't made a quarterly loss since the middle of 2001. In fact, if MMI had been part of Google during 2011, the search giant's net profit would have gone down, and its overall profitability reduced from nearly 27% of revenues to below 20%. Still not bad, but that sort of fall is the sort of thing that Wall Street punishes.
And Google has already seen its stock fall after its own fourth-quarter results fell short of expectations, despite having a $10bn quarter. Search advertising growth slowed, and mobile advertising doesn't seem to pay as well as desktop.
Owning MMI will - if everything works out - see the combined company's revenues rise by just under a third, but the mobile phone and set-top box maker looks more like an anchor than a balloon. Even when you factor in the $3bn of cash MMI holds, that still means that MMI will cost Google $9bn. How is it going to make a return - even just break even - on that?
Not from the phone business. MMI's smartphone business has grown consistently, from 2m shipped in Q4 2009 to 4.9m in Q4 2010 (far better than the market, which grew from 172m to 297m). But growth slipped. In 2010 it shipped 13.7m; in 2011 it shipped 18.6m (36% growth), most of them in North America. Its year-on-year smartphones sales growth has been slipping through the year (from 76% in the first quarter to 8% in fourth). The market is growing faster than MMI's smartphone business. And half of the phones it ships are still featurephones, a business which is being hollowed out by cheaper Chinese handset makers.
The tablet business with the Xoom hasn't set the world on fire. Over the year it shipped just under 1m, including 200,000 in the fourth quarter, which - if you accept the estimate by Strategy Analytics of 10.5m Android tablets sold in the fourth quarter, of which about 6m were "Google-approved" - so in that quarter Motorola had about 3% of the "Google-approved" Android tablet market. Or 2% of the overall tablet market. Or 0.7% of the entire market.
The really profitable bit of the business is the "Home" division, which makes set-top boxes, but has been bumping along at around $900m revenues for the past year. It actually makes money - only around $60m per quarter, but at least it's profit, compared to the consistent losses in the mobile business, which has only made a profit in two of the past nine quarters. Even so, it would take 75 years for the Home business's profit to make back the money Google paid for the business.
In other words, in purely financial terms, MMI is a dog.
Faced with all that, it looks increasingly likely that Google will instead use Motorola's patents aggressively - as M�ller suggests in the provocatively-titled Will Google break or save the internet?
He thinks that Google might use the heft of those essential patents to force companies which are forking Android - such as Amazon - to fall into line and use its "approved" service, (such as YouTube rather than the Amazon video service):
"With standards-essential patents, Google could wield another big stick to force non-compliant device makers, such as Amazon, to take a commercial Android license from Google rather than use the Android code under open source licenses."
That's a possibility. (One wonders whether all the Chinese companies building Android handsets but with different default services would also be subject to the same pursuit, or if it would just be the developed world companies.) Less likely is the suggestion from Farhad Manjoo that Google should close Android and wallow in the profit by licensing it per-handset. That's really not going to happen, because Google's business model - everywhere - is to disrupt by driving the cost of services down to zero, and monetising them by selling ads against them. Even if it goes after all sorts of companies aggressively with those Motorola patents, I can't see it charging per-handset for Android.
So what should we expect once Google owns Motorola? If the handset business is run at arm's length, it's going to keep sinking in the Android ocean. If its devices get Google branding, that might annoy other Android makers (such as HTC, which has its own struggles at present).
Most likely is that it will start using its patent portfolio - perhaps aggressively, even very aggressively. If there's really $9bn of value out there in Android that needs to be protected, we might expect Google to start showing just how it is going to do that quite quickly.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/jan/29/google-motorola-android-future
SYNTAXBRILLIAN SYNOPSYS SYNNEX SYMANTEC SYKES ENTERPRISES INORATED
Public Or Private: Keeping Google From Being 'Evil'
Google announced plans to adjust its privacy policy in order to allow the company to merge user data across email, social networking and other services. This has raised eyebrows from the tech community and even in Congress. So what exactly are the problems, and potential benefits, for this change in the policy of one of the world's largest tech companies.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/29/146062607/public-or-private-keeping-google-from-being-evil?ft=1&f=1001
AMKOR TECHNOLOGY AMPHENOL ANIXTER INTERNATIONAL APPLE COMPUTER APPLIED MATERIALS
The next ACTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is under negotiation NOW and is even more restrictive. (x-post from r/SOPA)
Users 'abandon' Blackberry phones
The firm's UK boss responds to claims its smartphones are falling out of favour
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/newsbeat/16740008
Facebook will need friends to justify IPO
Analysts are in a frenzy as indications grow that the social network is about to go public. But it's going to be difficult to live up to the hype
Another week, another rumour about a Facebook IPO. Stories that the social network is about to go public have been circulating for over a year now. One day soon, they will be true.
The excitement is palpable. Facebook is already the stuff of Hollywood movies. This would be the hottest tech flotation since Google and would create a listed company that could, by some estimates, be worth $100bn, more than Disney and five times the value of Yahoo, the company that once nearly bought founder Mark Zuckerberg out for $1bn.
Last week, Facebook's law firm, Fenwick & West, temporarily halted trading in Facebook's privately held shares on the secondary market, sparking fresh rumours that an announcement is imminent.
So what would life look like for Facebook after an IPO ? and why does it need to go public? "The company doesn't need to raise cash for its business: it's not like they are building factories," says one analyst close to the action, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of appearing a party pooper. "This is about paying off investors."
It's also about size. Facebook now has more than 500 private shareholders, a point at which it has to start reporting figures to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. So it is looking increasingly inevitable that it will join lesser social-media lights, such as LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga, on the US stock market.
None of this new wave of dotcom flotations has lived up to the initial hype but Facebook is a different beast. More than 800m people have Facebook accounts. More than half its active users log on in any given day and they all share information that advertisers find increasingly valuable.
On top of this ? unlike Myspace, the social network that boomed and busted ? Facebook has established itself as its own universe for other businesses. Zynga, the social gaming firm behind online phenomena such as Words With Friends and FarmVille, relies on Facebook for most of its business. According to the company, on average, Facebook users install apps more than 20m times every day. The company has created its own ecosystem of linked companies, a world where some of the most talented tech-heads on the planet dedicate themselves to coming up with new ways to attract people to Facebook with their apps.
The company even turns a profit ? reportedly more than $1bn last year, double what it made in 2010. But that pace of growth, and what lies behind it, will come under unprecedented scrutiny if and when Facebook goes public. If the stock market values the firm at $100bn, "they are going to need to grow revenue at a healthy clip to justify that valuation," warns Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners.
The big advantage to a flotation for Facebook is money, says Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, an analyst specialising in private companies. Facebook has tended to "acqui-hire" talent ? that is, buying small companies to add to its talent pool. The IPO will give it cash to buy firms and compete with Google, which has $50bn on hand. "Zynga has bought four private companies in the three months since its IPO," points out Hamadeh.
But the big negative is scrutiny. "You have to deliver every quarter," says Hamadeh. Other tech companies, including Google, have tried to shake off the tyranny of managing a business for the quarterly results, but ultimately if you go public, you end up playing the game, he warns. "For a little while it's cute, but not for long," he says. And it's not just institutional shareholders who lose patience: staff with shares do too.
Zuckerberg has ambitious plans for Facebook. In the long term, he would like the eight-year-old firm to be seen as a giant like Apple, Intel or Microsoft, he told the Wall Street Journal recently.
But in order to do that, Zuckerberg is going to have to live up to Facebook's admittedly big promise. A $100bn flotation would value Facebook's members at about $125 apiece. Alan Patrick, co-founder of the technology consultancy Broadsight, calculates that Google's customers are worth about 15 times that ? and that for Facebook to justify $100bn, it will have to prove it can approach those sort of numbers.
"Everything has to go right for Facebook for a very long time," says Patrick. It will prove to be the defining IPO of this tech cycle, he believes. "It's of an order of magnitude bigger than anything that has gone before."
But for all the hype ? which, if anything, is about to get even more intense ? there will be a lot to prove. "It's a classic dotcom sales pitch: 'You could imagine if ? dot dot dot'," says Patrick.
Investors will be able to join their own dots once Facebook goes public. Then we will see how many friends it really has.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/facebook-flotation-friends
SONIC AUTOMOTIVE SKYWORKS SOLUTIONS SILICON LABORATORIES SI INTERNATIONAL SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY
Globalisation can work, but only with a unified international plan | Will Hutton
We desperately needs economic and social institutions working across national borders
Britain has become a hub in the global web of car and engine production. This year, 1.4 million cars and more than 3 million engines will be produced here, most of them for export. The research-and-development spend in the industry is high and rising, while Tata's purchase of Jaguar Land Rover has proved one of its best-ever investments, as it now produces nearly three-quarters of the company's total profits. All considered, this is a modern capitalist success story and if and when the economy rebalances, production of this type will grow even further.
However, all this success is accompanied by very few new jobs. Fewer than 150,000 jobs are directly involved in the making of all those cars and engines and the numbers have been gently falling for years as modern production techniques transform productivity. Tata is building a new engine plant in Wolverhampton that will be a world leader in low-carbon engines; it might create 750 jobs.
Meanwhile, McDonald's has announced that it will be creating another 2,500 jobs this year. Hamburger flipping creates jobs and these jobs do require more than a modicum of skill and capacity to handle often truculent customers. But MacJobs are never likely to be highly paid, high-value-added jobs. Nor will McDonald's earn Britain much in the way of export revenue.
There's a similar pattern across the industrialised west, raising anxious and urgent questions about whether the modern economy can create mass employment at worthwhile wages. Yes, there is a manufacturing core that puts production on sites across the globe but that creates few jobs in a country such as Britain. And there is a modest service sector, which is either integrated with the manufacturers or, as is the case with fast food, which provides self-standing services in its own right. Beyond these, there's a vast web of "cream-skimming" services associated with brokerage and agency ? everything from investment banking to headhunters, estate agents and football agents ? taking a cut on some transaction or deal but adding precious little value despite sky-high personal rewards. Let's call this "agentist" capitalism.
At a dinner with Apple's Steve Jobs, President Obama asked him if the US's most successful and profitable company would ever bring some of the work it is generating back to the US. Never, replied Jobs. Apple, like Britain's car industry, is embedded in its global production networks.
Without globalisation, this new economic structure and accompanying pattern of reward would be impossible. But there is another twist: this "enabling" globalisation is itself unstable. It rests on countries such as Germany, China, India and Japan ? which do most of the producing in the new global supply chains ? building up never-ending trade surpluses, while other countries carry deficits, with no mechanism compelling either side to change. The banking system is then obliged to recycle the surpluses, exploiting the many loopholes to create an unregulated shadow system, which has now imploded.
George Osborne writes in the Financial Times that we are living through less a crisis of capitalism than a crisis in confidence, without ever inquiring whether those who have lost confidence might have some very good reasons for doing so. Lord Mandelson, once no less an innocent cheerleader for markets and globalisation, last week issued an extraordinary recantation. He told BBC's Today programme that he would never now, as he did in 1998, say he was intensely relaxed about businessmen becoming filthy rich doing whatever they chose.
Moreover, as he introduced "Making the third wave of globalisation work for us all", a new report by the centre-left thinktank IPPR, Mandelson urged a strengthening in global governance along with a serious commitment at home to industrial policy, a robust social safety net and regulation of errant business. Otherwise, he warned, the legitimacy of globalisation and modern capitalism would become profoundly questioned. Enlightened self-interest must prompt governments and business into a major change of direction.
It is an important intervention and Mandelson has unexpected allies at the IMF and World Bank. But the debate has to go further still. The decline of productive, high-employment capitalism is most marked in the English-speaking countries of the "Anglosphere" ? the countries most committed to the notion that markets are brilliantly wise and never need challenging.
These are the economies where "agentism" has gone furthest, the productive sector has shrunk most and where the resulting inequalities of income and opportunity have become most acute. All economies have their agentist service sector, but in the UK and US it has become over-large and over-rewarded. There has been an indifference, especially in the UK, to building the ecosystem that delivers productive enterprise. Instead, the doctrine, even if it is now changing somewhat, and erratically, has been to do the opposite. The consequent "squeezed middle" and doubts about modern capitalism are as much doubts about agentism as they are about globalisation.
There are multiple threats to confront. Only so much can be expected from enlightened self-interest. We need some counterbalancing international forces to hold government, business and banks to account. What is striking, for example, in the protests in Greece, Portugal and Ireland against the austerity packages is that they are so firmly national. There has not been one high-profile joint press conference, for example, of those parties in all three countries that oppose the measures. Not even the protesters or the trade unions make common cause. Nor has there been any practical prospectus for what could and should be different.
British trade unions are often attacked for being intellectually moribund and permanently on the defensive. But these are weaknesses they share with their counterparts elsewhere. The Occupy movement is a beginning, but it is transient. If the world is to have a constructive counterbalance to globalisation, then it needs grounded social institutions that work across borders and are likely to endure.
One would be powerful transnational trade unions, committed not to socialising the global means of production, but to insisting on worldwide responsible capitalism ? and creating new levers to get it. A pipedream? Something has to change. We can retreat to our national laagers, which would be an economic disaster, or we can build an interdependent world that works. There is only one option to choose.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/29/will-hutton-economic-global-cooperation
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS TERADATA TELETECH HOLDINGS TECHNITROL TAKETWO INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE
Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection ? review
PS3, Xbox 360, Konami, cert: 15, out: 31 January 2012
Comprising spruced-up versions of three "tactical espionage" classics, this collection is nothing if not a value proposition. Things kick off with 2001's MGS2, less a sequel than a postmodern meta-commentary on the game that preceded it (which, strangely, isn't included here). It's showing its age, but remains entertainingly audacious. The brilliant MGS3 pits the player against a cadre of psychologically damaged mercenaries and contains some of the most absorbing, ingenious and emotionally draining boss encounters ever designed. Then there's Peace Walker. Originally a hand-held game, it doles the action out in bus-ride-sized chunks and adds a surprisingly rewarding layer of RPG-style personnel management, plus a neat multiplayer mode.
All three shine in HD, with the higher resolution serving to foreground all those little touches ? from cartoon frogs to pregnant commandos' underarm hair ? that make the series special. In short, a pretty stellar package.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/metal-gear-solid-hd-review
SCIENTIFIC GAMES SANDISK SALESFORCE COM SAIC ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
Apple's new chief blasts the New York Times
Calls the suggestion that his company doesn't care about the health and safety of workers in the supply chain he built "patently false and offensive"
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_technology/~3/ApMjs2E0Nlw/
EARTHLINK DST SYSTEMS DISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICES DIODES INORATED DIEBOLD
Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Gmail's Pop-out Feature
What to do if you're composing an e-mail in Gmail, but want to refer to an earlier message at the same time.
Presented By:
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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d0e38d6618bd1e1115195be667122bbb
Saturday, 28 January 2012
"71% of recently polled Americans feel that censorship is a far worse threat to society than piracy." - The start of a moral battle between pirates and copyright lobbyists
Azarenka Routs Sharapova To Win Australian Open
Victoria Azarenka took over the women's No. 1 ranking in her first Grand Slam final. She became only the third woman to earn the No. 1 spot after winning her first Grand Slam title.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/28/146021250/azarenka-routs-sharapova-to-win-australian-open?ft=1&f=1001
EMC ELECTRONICS FOR IMAGING ELECTRONIC DATA SYSTEMS ELECTRONIC ARTS ECLIPSYS
RIM’s Heins ‘Here to Fight’ for BlackBerry Revival Against Apple
Research In Motion Ltd.’s Thorsten Heins, five days into his job as chief executive officer, pledged to regain lost ground in the U.S. smartphone market and said he held talks with rivals eager to license its software.
MISCROSOFT OFFICE MICROSOFT MICROSEMI MICROS SYSTEMS MICRON TECHNOLOGY
'Battling Was Won': Romney Gets Boost In Florida
After his second-place finish in the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney arrived in Florida armed with money and organization. With three days until the primary, Romney's recent debate performances and an endorsement from Puerto Rico's governor are part of his campaign's growing momentum.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/28/146018807/battling-was-won-romney-gets-boost-in-fla?ft=1&f=1001
STANDARD MICROSYSTEMS SRA INTERNATIONAL SPSS SPANSION SONUS NETWORKS
O2 admits it gives users' numbers to sites
Network plugs security hole after it inadvertently provides users' numbers to websites accessed using 3G network
Mobile operator O2 has admitted that it regularly hands over subscribers' phone numbers to sites that offer age-restricted material and premium-rate billing, whether the users realise it or not.
The admission followed the revelation late on Tuesday that the company had since 10 January inadvertently been providing user phone numbers to any sites that its millions of users browse from their phones using the 3G network. That would mean site owners could find the details in their server logs, and potentially use them for marketing or SMS campaigns without the user's consent.
O2 is the UK's second-biggest mobile network with about 27.2m subscribers, and another 2.8m using its network through Tesco Mobile, plus an unknown number on the GiffGaff SIM-only network. With smartphone penetration at around 50% that could mean that up to 15m people have been affected by the data leakage.
The Information Commissioner's Office said it is considering whether to investigate further; a spokesman said it was not immediately obvious whether there had been a privacy breach. [See footnote]. A mobile phone number on its own is not classed as "personally identifying information" (PII), because it does not identify an individual on its own; but the spokesman said the office would consider whether other personal data was being processed at the same time.
An ICO spokesperson said: "Keeping people's personal information secure is a fundamental principle that sits at the heart of the Data Protection Act and the privacy and electronic communications regulations. When people visit a website via their mobile phone they would not expect their number to be made available to that website. We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed."
O2 admitted in a blogpost that the widespread leaking of phone numbers had been going on since a maintenance update on 10 January, and was only fixed after a London-based programmer on the network pointed it out. The security hole was fixed by 2pm on Wednesday, the company said.
The privacy breach could open phone users up to reverse-charge SMS spams which could cost them huge amounts in bills when their number is used for scams.
But O2 has also revealed that it regularly reveals users' phone numbers to a number of sites offering age-restricted material and premium content billing ? an admission that has puzzled observers.
"It looks like I don't get to make the decision about whether to share my phone number with those sites," said Graham Cluley, security consultant with the online security firm Sophos. "I don't see why. If I'm on a site and they need to know my phone number before I can proceed, why can't I decide whether I let them see my number? If I don't agree, they can stop me proceeding."
O2 did not respond to requests for clarification on its policy. The Guardian could not find any clauses in its web and WAP policy or its general terms and conditions that suggest it shares subscribers' mobile numbers.
A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it was not immediately obvious whether there had been a privacy breach. [See footnote] A mobile phone number on its own is not classed as "personally identifying information" (PII), because it does not identify an individual on its own; but the office would consider whether other personal data was being processed at the same time.
Cluley warned: "there will be a lot of sites out there which will now realise that their logs for the past two weeks contain all sorts of juicy details. Some unscrupulous marketing people might scour them for mobile phone numbers that they can use for campaigns." He said that he has a phone himself on a different network which he only uses for surfing ? and that he has received text spam on it despite not entering the phone number anywhere. "That's got me wondering whether this process is somehow behind it," he said.
A number of O2 users who contacted the Guardian confirmed earlier on Wednesday that their phone number was being transmitted and offered links to screenshots of the data.
The phone number is handed over as part of the "header" data sent by the phone to the web site, which usually contains information such as which browser the phone has so that the site can serve an appropriately formatted page, because mobile phones have smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers.
Headers often contain other information about the device contacting the site ? and in O2's case it has also included the phone number.
However users of BlackBerry phones said that their numbers were not handed over ? possibly because RIM, which makes the BlackBerry, uses its own encryption and forwarding system to connect to websites.
The discovery was made by Lewis Peckover, a London-based programmer who says he discovered the flaw on Tuesday lunchtime while working on a method of identifying whether users were accessing a site via their mobile.
The number forwarding only appears to happen on O2 and its associated virtual networks such as GiffGaff. Users of other networks confirmed to the Guardian that the number forwarding does not happen on Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile or 3's network. Peckover has created a web page specifically to let people check if their number is forwarded.
? This article was amended on 26 January 2012. The original reported a spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office as saying there was no immediate breach of the Data Protection Act in the 02 case. This has been clarified in the text. For the avoidance of confusion, the ICO adds that only after investigating in more detail can it decide whether there has been a breach.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/25/o2-data-users-numbers-websites
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Pirate Bay shares 3D designs
Filesharing website begins new cateory of three-dimensional templates as it looks forward to 'no more child labour' in favour of printing machines in homes
Filesharing site The Pirate Bay gained notoriety by enabling users to exchange music, movies and software. But now the site is branching out to provide a new category of downloads ? the templates for physical objects.
A new section of the site lists files that visitors can use to construct items with 3D printers ? machines which build three-dimensional objects by overlaying thin layers of fast-drying plastic resin.
But the site, which is famously unpopular with Hollywood for linking to torrents of films, has already drawn the ire of a major company for its new scheme. Games Workshop, which makes the popular Warhammer and Lord of the Rings tabletop war games, took exception when users traded designs for some of its products.
In a blogpost announcing the move, Pirate Bay spokesman WinstonQ2038 said:
One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour.
3D printing is an emerging technology, but it has attracted a passionate community of hobbyists who design and build a variety of objects. Some are designed from scratch; others are generated from 3D scans of existing items.
The community recently had its first run-in with copyright law when tabletop battle games company Games Workshop issued DMCA takedown notices against Thingiverse, a site where "makers" share designs.
Games Workshop spokesman Kyle Workman said: "We are very protective of our intellectual property, and our legal team investigates each issue on a case-by-case basis."
Asked whether the company might ever consider selling its own digital 3D designs, he said: "That would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment."
At the time of writing, one of the offending designs had appeared on The Pirate Bay.
But while 3D printing may eventually give manufacturers cause for alarm, for the moment the threat would seem to be negated by simple economics.
Games Workshop's Space Marine Dreadnaught model sells for �28. Makerbot 3D printers start at more than $1,000 (�637).
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/26/pirate-bay-3d-printing
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Getting Bullish on SAP in the HR Marketplace
SAP, the world's largest application software company, just announced the best revenue and earnings growth the company has made in many years. The company's quarterly revenues grew by 12% to over $3.4 billion Euros and profits rose by 23% to $1.6 billion. And now that the company has announced its plans to acquire SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, the company has become a very serious player in the $130 billion HR software and services marketplace.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/27/getting-bullish-on-sap-in-the-hr-marketplace/
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Acta protests break out as EU signs up
MEPs of 21 EU states, including the UK, have signed off on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
The UK and 21 other European Union member states on Thursday signed an international copyright agreement treaty called Acta (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), sparking more demonstrations by internet users who have protested for days both virtually and physically over fear it will lead to online censorship.
Following the signing, protesters rallied in the Polish cities of Poznan and Lublin to express their anger over the treaty. Lawmakers for the left-wing Palikot's Movement wore masks in parliament to show their dissatisfaction, while the largest opposition party the right-wing Law and Justice party called for a referendum on the matter.
The signing has yet to be ratified by the European Union parliament, and is scheduled to be debated in June. MEPs are already coming under intense pressure from activists on both sides over the forthcoming vote.
Poland's ambassador to Japan, Jadwiga Rodowicz-Czechowska, signed the agreement in Tokyo. Speaking on Polish television, she said that Poland was one of several EU countries to sign Acta on Thursday, including Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Greece.
Several other industrialised countries ? including the US, Canada and South Korea ? signed the agreement last year.
Poland's support for Acta has sparked attacks on Polish government websites by the hacking collective Anonymous that left several of them unreachable off and on for days. Street protests of hundreds, and in some cases thousands of people, have broken out across Poland for the past three days.
Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia did not sign on Thursday, and one French MEP quit the scrutinising process for Acta complaining that the European Parliament was participating in a "charade".
Acta has been significantly changed from earlier versions, removing an earlier demand that internet users found of repeatedly infringing copyright should be cut off from the web ? a suggestion the EU rejected.
Although the EU maintains Acta will not require any legislative changes in member countries ? and instead will bring other countries up to European standards ? controversy has been deepening in Poland over the proposals.
While many other industrialised countries have signed it, popular outrage appears to be greater in Poland than anywhere else.
Acta is a far-reaching agreement that aims to harmonise international standards on protecting the rights of those who produce music, movies, pharmaceuticals, fashion, and a range of other products that often fall victim to intellectual property theft.
Acta also takes aim at the online piracy of movies and music; those opposed to it fear that it will also lead authorities to block content on the internet.
A prominent Polish rock act, Zbigniew Holdys, has come out in support of Acta, accusing the internet activists ? mostly young people ? of profiting from pirated material online and trying to hold onto that practice.
Acta shares some similarities with the hotly debated Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the US, which was shelved by lawmakers last week after Wikipedia and Google blacked out or partially obscured their websites for a day in protest.
In reaction to the widespread opposition, Polish leaders have been struggling to allay fears over it.
Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski defended his government's position in a TV interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that Acta is not as threatening as young people fear.
But he said the internet should not be allowed to become a space of "legal anarchy".
"We believe that theft on a massive scale of intellectual property is not a good thing," Sikorski said.
In the Czech Republic, a local group aligning itself with Anonymous attacked the website of a group that supports Acta. The group collects money for music production and distributes it to artists.
? The UK's Intellectual Property Office has a guide to the aims of Acta
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/27/acta-protests-eu-states-sign-treaty
Friday, 27 January 2012
ReRAM and the memory chip contest
The race to make RAM that keeps its memory in a power outage
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-16725529
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Philanthropy is the enemy of justice | Robert Newman
The world's poor are not begging for charity from the rich ? they're asking for justice and fairness
It's strange that at this week's World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world's poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged �478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.
It reminds me of that dark hour when Al Gore, despite being a shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, was the voice of climate change action ? because Gates does not speak with the voice of the world's poor, of course, but with the voice of its rich. It's a loud voice, but the model of development it proclaims is the wrong one because philanthropy is the enemy of justice.
Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.
The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby's biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides ? none of them cheap ? and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can't stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.
Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don't end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I's model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, "bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver". His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there's no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.
And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires' to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.
AeA took the EU to the World Trade Organisation on a charge of erecting artificial trade barriers. (And according to the American NGO Public Citizen, "made the astounding claim that there is no evidence that heavy metals, like lead, pose a threat to human health or the environment".)
Now, the EU is big enough and ugly enough to have fought and won the case. But many an African country lacks the war chest for such a fight, and so will end up paying for the healthcare of those exposed to leaky old PCs' cadmium, chromium or mercury, instead of embarking on, let's say, a nationwide anti-malaria strategy. Bill Gates himself may not indeed have known about what the AeA was doing on Microsoft's behalf, but the fact remains that if a philanthropist's money comes from externalising corporate costs to taxpayers, and that if Microsoft is listed for its own tax purposes as a partly Puerto Rican and Singaporean company, then the real philanthropists behind these glittering foundations might be a sight more ragged-trousered than Bill and Melinda.
Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: "Oh, so you'd rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?" To which I reply: "Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn't work, after all?" But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man's whim for the right to life.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/27/philanthropy-enemy-of-justice
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