Tag: China

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Supplier Report: 7/12/2019


Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

The 4th of July is over, people are back to work, and the tech industry is picking itself up after a rough couple of weeks.

Old school software companies Corel and Symantec are likely to be acquired. Broadcom is interesting in Symantec and KKR has agreed to purchase Corel. Fans of the “off-brand” (see WordPerfect and PaintShop Pro) software company will be happy to know KKR is looking to invest in Corel’s product line.

The U.K. doesn’t seem to have the issues with Huawei that the U.S. does. The Chinese company has been helping British telecom companies build out their 5G networks… interesting.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Broadcom Is in Advanced Talks to Acquire Symantec

    Broadcom could reach an agreement to buy the Mountain View, California-based company within weeks, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. No deal has been finalized and the talks could fall through, the people said.

    A representative for Symantec declined to comment. A representative for Broadcom didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-02/broadcom-is-said-to-be-in-advanced-talks-to-acquire-symantec

  • KKR confirms it has acquired Canadian software company Corel, reportedly for over $1B

    The terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but when the first rumors of a deal started to emerge a couple of months ago, the price being reported was over $1 billion.

    Corel has brought itself into the modern era, with acquisitions like Parallels — a virtualization giant that lets businesses run far-flung and very fragmented networks as if they weren’t — underscoring that strategy. And that is where KKR appears to be putting its focus. In the memo that a source passed us yesterday, Corel’s CEO Patrick Nichols assured staff that there would be no layoffs and that this acquisition would mean a significant new infusion of capital both to expand its existing business as well as to make more acquisitions to grow.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/03/kkr-corel-vector-parallels/

  • Oracle buys Brazilian firm Oxygen Systems

    Created in 2017 as a spin-off of Chilean IT integrator Sonda, Oxygen Systems is focused on the localization of the systems offering under Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) Netsuite.

    Oracle’s low-key announcement simply states that the acquisition, which has been completed, “strengthens Oracle NetSuite support for international and global customers, delivering a seamless ERP localization experience in Brazil.”

    Small and medium enterprises represent 20 percent of Oracle’s business in Brazil and over the last couple of years, it has been focusing on chasing more clients in that space.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-buys-brazilian-firm-oxygen-systems/

Cloud

  • It was a really bad month for the internet

    What can we learn? For one, internet providers need to do better with routing filters, and, secondly, perhaps it’s not a good idea to run new code directly on a production system.

    These past few weeks have not looked good for the cloud, shaking confidence in the many reliant on hosting giants — like Amazon, Google and more. Although some quickly — and irresponsibly and eventually wrongly — concluded the outages were because of hackers or threat actors launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, it’s always far safer to assume that an internal mistake is to blame.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/05/bad-month-for-the-internet/

Security/Privacy

  • China has been secretly installing spyware on some tourists’ Android phones

    Chinese border agents have been installing spyware on phones from tourists who enter the country through certain crossings in the Xinjiang region, an area where China is known to be conducting intensive surveillance of the largely Muslim ethnic minority groups who live there. The spyware was reported today by a group of publications, including The Guardian, Motherboard, The New York Times, and more.

    Border agents in the region have been requiring tourists to hand over their phones and passcodes before entering, according to the reports. The agents will then disappear with the phones in order to snoop through them. For iPhones, that reportedly includes plugging them into a machine that scans through the phone’s contents. For Android phones, it goes further, with border agents installing a spyware app that scans the phone and collects data.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/20679053/china-spyware-tourists-android-phones-xinjiang

  • 7-Eleven Japanese customers lose $500,000 due to mobile app flaw

    Approximately 900 customers of 7-Eleven Japan have lost a collective of ¥55 million ($510,000) after hackers hijacked their 7pay app accounts and made illegal charges in their names.

    The 7pay mobile app was designed to show a barcode on the phone’s screen when customers reach the 7-Eleven cashier counters. The cashier scans the barcode, and the bought goods are charged to the user’s 7pay app and the customer’s credit or debit cards that have been saved in the account.

    However, in a mind-boggling turn of events, the app contained a password reset function that was incredibly poorly designed. It allowed anyone to request a password reset for other people’s accounts, but have the password reset link sent to their email address, instead of the legitimate account owner.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/7-eleven-japanese-customers-lose-500000-due-to-mobile-app-flaw/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Huawei is helping all the UK’s top carriers build their 5G networks

    British carriers apparently aren’t put off by US pressure to ditch Huawei for their 5G network deployments. The Guardian’s sources understand that all four of the UK’s largest wireless providers (EE, O2, Three and Vodafone) are all using Huawei to build their 5G networks. The Chinese firm is reportedly involved with six out of Vodafone’s seven initial 5G cities, while it’s also helping with “hundreds” of EE sites. O2 and Three have also awarded contracts to Huawei, according to the tipsters.

    There might be reasons to take a chance on Huawei, apart from the lack of publicly available evidence of surveillance. Assembly’s Matthew Howett noted that reliance on a single supplier for a cellular network is dangerous. A major failure in Ericsson equipment left O2 users without 3G and LTE service for a full day — if everyone had been using similar hardware, the UK as a whole might have suffered the same problem. It might also delay launches by as much as two years, Howett said. Like it or not, Huawei could be useful in helping some countries offer 5G in a timely and reliable fashion.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/06/huawei-gear-in-uk-5g-networks/

 

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Supplier Report: 6/21/2019


Photo by Adi Constantin on Unsplash

There is a looming trade war with China that is getting closer to reality as companies are trying to determine if they can survive without the Chinese manufacturing supply chain. It is getting so serious that some companies (like Foxconn) are firing off press releases that they have capacity outside of China to meet their production goals.

And as China prepares to face off against Trump, the country continues to interfere with communication applications and protocols (like Telegram) impeding their own citizens ability to communicate due to fears of protests (and those efforts didn’t really matter).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal

    On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.
    **
    This is a huge jump on Tableau’s last market cap: it was valued at $10.79 billion at close of trading Friday, according to figures on Google Finance. (Also: trading has halted on its stock in light of this news.)

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Amazon CTO says AI tools like Lex are the next big thing after AWS and it’s not Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically

    For instance, Rekognition is being used by an anti-sex-trafficking non-profit organisation, Thorn, to scrape classified ad sites and search for matches against a database of missing teenagers.

    But events like Re:Mars demonstrate that Amazon knows it has work to do in gaining the public’s trust in order to go ahead with its ambitions.

    One non-Amazon guest on stage, the AI pioneer Andrew Ng, gave a pretty scathing review of the technology industry’s reputation – and food for thought for his hosts.

    “Even as we lead the world through multiple waves of technological disruption, we’ve not always provided the best leadership. With the rise of the internet, we’ve created tremendous wealth, but we also contributed to wealth inequality. Let’s make sure that this time, with the rise of AI, we take everyone along with us.”

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48634676

Cloud

  • Amazon executives slam Oracle and Microsoft as the cloud wars heat up

    Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy derided other providers of traditional on-premises database services at the company’s 10th annual public sector conference in Washington DC on Wednesday. AWS has battled Microsoft, Oracle and others for the Department of Defense cloud services contract, which is worth $10 billion and runs for 10 years.

    “I think that most people are pretty frustrated with the older guard database solutions,” Jassy said. “They’re expensive, proprietary, high lock-in. They’re constantly auditing you, fining you unless you buy more from them. It’s just a model that people are sick of. And it’s why people are moving as quickly as possible to more open engines.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/12/economy/aws-jedi-contract-amazon/index.html

Security/Privacy

  • CFOs Grapple With How Much Cybersecurity Spending is Enough

    Finding comfort on cybersecurity spending comes down to developing strong relationships with the chief information security officer and other information technology managers, said Steve Priest, the CFO of JetBlue Airways Corp. “You can’t do everything.” he said during an interview. “You have to trust the subject matter experts to do the job that they’re paid to do.”

    Finance can help, though, by encouraging coordination between IT managers and the teams purchasing equipment, and by requiring purchases go through a competitive bidding process to ensure the company is getting the best deal, he said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cfos-grapple-with-how-much-cybersecurity-spending-is-enough-11560378386

  • Telegram faces DDoS attack in China… again

    The company went on to describe a distributed denial of service attack as when “your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper,” according to Telegram. “The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.”

    This isn’t the first time that someone has tried to take down Telegram at a time when China was experiencing significant unrest. Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/telegram-faces-ddos-attack-in-china-again/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Apple’s U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed

    “Twenty-five percent of our production capacity is outside of China and we can help Apple respond to its needs in the U.S. market,” said Liu, adding that investments are now being made in India for Apple. “We have enough capacity to meet Apple’s demand.”

    Apple has not given Hon Hai instructions to move production out of China, but it is capable of moving lines elsewhere according to customers’ needs, Liu added. The company will respond swiftly and rely on localized manufacturing in response to the trade war, just as it foresaw the need to build a base in the U.S. state of Wisconsin two years ago, he said.

    The U.S. market accounts for one in every four iPhones sold worldwide, “so it represents a huge portion of Foxconn’s manufacturing business inside China,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/hon-hai-has-enough-ex-china-capacity-to-make-u-s-bound-products

  • Broadcom to Take $2 Billion Hit From Huawei Ban

    Broadcom’s gloomier guidance could spread across the semiconductor industry as other big players, including Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. , begin to reconsider their outlooks in light of the Huawei ban and a broader anxiety about the geopolitical future, analysts say. Huawei is one of the U.S. chip industry’s most lucrative customers.

    “Everybody probably has to cut just due to Huawei if nothing else,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “Almost everybody has some exposure.”

    Some smaller chip companies have already warned that the Huawei ban will ding their revenue. Qorvo Inc., which makes radio-frequency products, and Lumentum Holdings Inc., which makes optical networking products, both reduced their quarterly revenue guidance last month by about $50 million.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/broadcom-lowers-revenue-outlook-amid-trade-tensions-11560459528

Other

  • IBM to inherit over 13,000 workers from Red Hat

    IBM (IBM) is planning to cut around 1,700 jobs, according to a report from CNBC. The job cut comes as IBM prepares to add Red Hat (RHT) to its corporate family. IBM last year agreed to purchase Red Hat, an open-source software company, for $34 billion. Red Hat had more than 13,000 employees at the end of February this year. IBM itself has more than 340,000 employees worldwide. Therefore, IBM’s headcount is set to swell once the Red Hat deal closes. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year.

    https://marketrealist.com/2019/06/ibm-cutting-jobs-as-red-hat-deal-closing-nears/

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/12/2019


Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

  • A look at the many ways China suppresses online discourse about the Tiananmen Square protests

    Online discourse is already strictly controlled by the Chinese government, which requires all websites to do real-name checks on users when they register an account (for example, by linking phone numbers, which are tied to government-issued IDs). Discussions on Douban E Zu often center around politics, which may have prompted heavier restrictions. Real-time comments (called “bullet screens”) on Bilibili and AcFun are harder to monitor for banned content and even though the government recently issued new guidelines for screening comments on bullet screens, censors may still be working on ways to maintain control on them.

    Most recently, WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging, games and e-commerce platform, blocked users from changing their headshots, alias and What’s Up status. Then this weekend, users began reporting connection issues with their VPN services, which are used to get around mainland China’s “Great Firewall” and access forbidden sites.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/a-look-at-the-many-ways-china-suppresses-online-discourse-about-the-tiananmen-square-protests/

  • ‘I’ve paid a huge personal cost:’ Google walkout organizer resigns over alleged retaliation

    “I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” she wrote in an email to co-workers announcing her departure on 31 May. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”

    “The message that was sent [to others] was: ‘You’re going to compromise your career if you make the same choices that Claire made,” she told the Guardian by phone. “It was designed to have a chilling effect on employees who raise issues or speak out.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns

  • Your boss wants you to lose weight
  • I create presentations at Microsoft. Here’s how I avoid “Death by PowerPoint”

    As soon as you put up a slide filled with too much text, people stop paying attention to you—they’re trying to read the slide. Ultimately, you want people to focus on the speaker rather than trying to dissect the slide. The slide is there to support the speaker and guide the audience through the content.

    The audience is there to listen to the speaker, no matter how great your PowerPoint. Yet at the same time, you want the presentation itself to have meaning and utility, so it stands on its own. Balancing these forces is the eternal question—what should go on the actual deck versus the role of the speaker?

    The answer is generally the well-known KISS rule. Break large chunks of information down to high-level text that just covers the topic, and then speak to the rest of it. And, keep it simple. Less is always more.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90355066/i-create-presentations-at-microsoft-heres-how-i-avoid-death-by-powerpoint

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News You Can Use: 5/8/2019

  • The push to break up Big Tech, explained

    A few years back, for example, Amazon essentially monopolized the market for e-books. Major book publishers fought back by teaming up to take on the bigger company and the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against them. Why? Well, Amazon was using its power in the marketplace to keep e-book prices low. The publishers, the government argued, were trying to form a cartel to force Amazon to raise prices. And, indeed, even though the publishers ended up settling with the government, the introduction of more competition into the e-book marketplace (primarily from Apple) has had the impact of making e-books more expensive than they were when Amazon ruled the roost. The standard, in other words, isn’t that one company dominating a market is bad. It’s that it’s bad if a company’s market domination leads to bad outcomes for consumers.

    Back to Facebook and Instagram. At the time, few observers saw how significant this deal was. But technology industry analyst Ben Thompson told the Code Conference audience last year that allowing this acquisition was “the greatest regulatory failure of the last 10 years” by allowing Facebook to entrench its dominance of social media. Yet under the contemporary antitrust framework, one might argue there’s no harm to consumers here — Facebook and Instagram are both free, so there’s after all no increase in prices. Yes, the fact that the combined entity is such an advertising juggernaut, pulling in $17 billion last quarter, is a big problem for other companies trying to sell ads (such as publishing companies that use ad revenue to fund actual journalism, for example) — but that’s not necessarily a problem for consumers.

    https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18520703/big-tech-break-up-explained

  • Facebook Faces a Big Penalty, but Regulators Are Split Over How Big

    The F.T.C.’s five commissioners agreed months ago that they wanted to pursue a historic penalty that would show the agency’s teeth. But now, the members are split on the size and scope of the tech company’s punishment, according to three people with knowledge of the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    The division is complicating the final days of the talks.

    Along with disagreement about the appropriate financial penalty, one of the most contentious undercurrents throughout the negotiations has been the degree to which Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, should be held personally liable for any violation of a 2011 agreement, according to two of the people.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/technology/federal-trade-commission-facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

  • ‘Resulting’: Don’t mistake a bad outcome for a bad decision
  • Ajit Pai admits FCC got broadband growth figures wrong

    The impressive broadband growth numbers the FCC reported in February were actually off by millions, and now the agency has admitted in a revised draft that its figures were indeed inflated. It was advocacy group Free Press that originally revealed (PDF) the inaccuracy in March, though commission chief Ajit Pai didn’t even mention its role in the discovery. The organization found that a new ISP called BarrierFree falsely told the FCC that it has started serving 20 percent of the country just six months after it opened.

    That mistake led the agency to announce that the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed broadband connection was down to 19.4 million by the end of 2017 from 26.1 million the year before. Turns out, the correct figure is 21.3 million — a big difference, for sure, but not big enough for Pai to backpedal on his declaration that the changes he implemented led to massive broadband growth.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/02/ajit-pai-fcc-broadband-growth-figures-error/

  • ‘996’ Is China’s Version of Hustle Culture. Tech Workers Are Sick of It.

    Across the different groups, the basic strategy is to push, but not so hard that the Chinese government feels compelled to react.

    That means no strikes and no demonstrations. In one group on the messaging app Telegram, references to Marx and Lenin are forbidden. The philosophies of communism’s leading lights often run contrary to the way China is run today. The government cracked down against a labor rights movement in the tech hub of Shenzhen this year.

    Instead of sit-ins, the tech workers are harnessing the power of memes, stickers and T-shirts. Some have pushed for a holiday to celebrate beleaguered software engineers. Mr. Zhuge is rallying workers to mail paper copies of China’s labor law to Mr. Ma of Alibaba.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/technology/china-996-jack-ma.html

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/1/2019

  • The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age

    Not only did Americans with lower levels of income and education have fewer technology resources and lower levels of confidence in their ability to protect their digital data, but they also expressed heightened sensitivities about a range of overlapping offline privacy and security harms. This helped to illustrate a critical dimension of digital inequality that is often overlooked; the poor must navigate a matrix of privacy and security vulnerabilities in their daily lives — any of which could dramatically upend their financial, professional or social well-being. For example, when someone who is living paycheck to paycheck falls victim to an online fraud or loses the ability to use his or her smartphone after it gets hacked, the cascade of repercussions can be devastating.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/privacy-poverty.html

  • A Post About China’s “996” Workweek Went Viral On GitHub. Now Microsoft Employees Want To Protect It From Censorship.

    The original statement they’re trying to protect, posted by Chinese developers about a month ago (here is an English-language translation), says overwork in the Chinese tech industry could be both a health hazard and violation of Chinese labor law. The phrase “996.ICU” is a joke, suggesting that a 72 hour workweek could land workers in intensive care.

    While the post is still accessible in the United States, the Microsoft employees say it has been the target of censorship on some Chinese browsers and are concerned Microsoft could soon come under pressure by the Chinese government to remove the pro-worker repository as well.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/microsoft-petition-996-icu-workweek-china

  • Ageism in the USA: The paradox of prejudice against the elderly
  • This Is What Makes You Stressed at Work, According to New Study

    When asked about the biggest stressor on the job, the top concern wasn’t a commute or bad management — those were tied for second place. Forty-one percent of respondents put “unclear goals” as the top reason for stress. Difficult co-workers were third, and then too-long hours came in last.

    A third of women respondents and nearly half of men reported that those undefined work goals created more stress than anything else they dealt with at work. And more than half of women and half of men reported feeling burnt out at work.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/332359

  • Why You Might Need to Fire Your Most Talented Employee

    And if you have toxic employees within your organization, you’ll have other employees who are scared to have meetings with them. You’ll have people who are spending time navigating discussions with those employees than actually executing.

    Your people will be spending time on politics. Not on execution.

    When you build a culture where people feel safe and excited to come to work, they won’t worry about dealing with other employees as much.

    https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/firing-employees-who-are-talented-but-toxic/