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.
- 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/