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.
‘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.”
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.
Amazon reportedly wants to snap up the potential Sprint/T-Mobile merger castoff Boost to create their own phone service. Some are saying Amazon’s interest is “economically insane“.
Meanwhile the WSJ noted that the Department of Justice is looking into investigating Google for anti-trust practices. Google, who has been fined several times by the European Union, has not been given much scrutiny in the US to this point.
Acquisitions/Investments
LinkedIn Snaps Up Drawbridge, Its Second Known Acquisition In 8 Months
Drawbridge helps companies better understand their customers using machine learning. It addresses user-focused issues like customer experience, digital security, and risk detection according to its website. The company, led by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan has also been recognized for its focus on consumer identity, was awarded an early patent for identity resolution.
LinkedIn plans to use Drawbridge’s strength in the area of observations around customers to better target professional audiences, it says.
Amazon is reportedly interested in buying Boost Mobile
If helping to create a competitor is a necessary condition to get the Sprint/T-Mobile deal done, then perhaps Amazon can help. A report from Reuters suggests the retailer is interested in buying Boost Mobile from the combo, particularly because it would come with the ability to use T-Mobile’s network for six years. The unnamed sources also claimed the company could be interested in spectrum the newly-merged pair would have to divest.
IBM Sells Face Recognition Surveillance to a Dictatorship: Report
The American technology titan IBM alongside Chinese tech giants Huawei and Hikvision are selling biometric surveillance systems to the UAE’s police and spy agencies, according to an extensive report in BuzzFeed.
The UAE is a dictatorship famous for the oppression of dissent, human rights violations, abuse of laborers and migrants, an ongoing ban on international human rights workers and a fight against freedom of expression. It’s also a wildly rich Persian Gulf authoritarian regime that makes a hell of a customer for companies willing to do business with dictators.
Amazon Web Services Is Worth Half a Trillion Dollars, Analyst Estimates
The survey found that 19% of IT workloads are now running in the public cloud. About 55% of the survey group is using cloud-based email systems, 53% rely on the public cloud for web hosting, 52% for sales and marketing applications, and 52% for e-commerce.
Blackledge also nudged up his estimates for AWS—and for Amazon—this morning. He sees AWS revenues of $36.1 billion this year, growing about 31% a year to $140 billion in 2024. He raised his target price for Amazon stock to $2,500 from $2,400, and more remarkably, estimates the value of AWS alone as $506 billion. That is more than the current valuations of IBM, Oracle , and SAP—combined—and about even with the public market valuations for Facebook or Berkshire Hathaway.
Microsoft Begs Windows Users To Update Now Citing ‘WannaCry 2’ Security Threat
The warning, which reads almost as if Microsoft wrote it on bended knee, was posted on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog. Referring to the critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, that has become better known as BlueKeep, Simon Pope, director of incident response at Microsoft, states that “Microsoft is confident that an exploit exists for this vulnerability.” What’s more, Pope says that such an exploit could “propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017.” An internet-scale port scanner has already determined that there are at least 923,671 internet-facing machines which are vulnerable to BlueKeep on port 3389 which is used by the Microsoft Remote Desktop feature.
It is worth reading between the lines here, especially concerning that apparent confidence that a BlueKeep exploit exists. While it is not clear if Microsoft has intelligence that suggests active malware has been weaponized in this way, what we do know is that there is proof of concept (PoC) code available already. One BlueKeep demo on GitHub will crash a system that is vulnerable but does not execute the wormable threat that Microsoft is obviously so worried about.
Apple, Google and WhatsApp condemn UK proposal to eavesdrop on encrypted messages
In practice, the proposal suggests a technique which would require encrypted messaging services — such as WhatsApp — to direct a message to a third recipient, at the same time as sending it to its intended user.
Levy and Robinson argued the proposal would be “no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips” which are currently used in wiretaps of non-encrypted communications. This refers to the use of chat and call apps that can silently copy call data during digital exchanges.
Opposing this plan, signatories of the open letter argued that “to achieve this result, their proposal requires two changes to systems that would seriously undermine user security and trust.”
AWS announces general availability of its document reading service Textract
Amazon says Textract is more of an “OCR++ service” because it can recognize tables with a document and understand that the data is placed in rows and columns.
“The power of Amazon Textract is that it accurately extracts text and structured data from virtually any document with no machine learning experience required,” Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s vice president of machine learning, said in a statement. “Subsequently, developers can analyze and query the extracted text and data using our database and analytics services like Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Athena and integrate with other machine learning services like Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Comprehend Medical, Amazon Translate, and Amazon SageMaker to help customers derive deeper meaning from the extracted text and data.”
Textract supports multiple image formats, including regular JPEG and PNG photo files, scans and PDF documents.
Dell Technologies fiscal Q1 mixed as storage, server and networking sales fall
The company reported first quarter earnings of $329 billion, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $21.9 billion, up 3 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter were $1.45 a share.
Wall Street was looking for Dell fiscal first quarter non-GAAP earnings of $1.21 a share on revenue of $22.24 billion. Earnings estimates had a wide range given that Dell is recently public.
VMware Q1 tops expectations, revenue up 13% to $2.27 billion
VMware delivered strong first quarter financial results Thursday that beat market expectations. The virtualization giant reported a net income of $505 million, or $1.21 per share. The income includes an unexpected gain of $132 million from VMware’s investment in Pivotal Software, the company said.
Non-GAAP earnings were $1.32 per share on revenue of $2.27 billion, up 13% year over year. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $1.28 a share and revenue of $2.24 billion.
Experts are furious over the FCC’s rosy picture of broadband access
To generate the report, the FCC relies on data from service providers. Using a form, the companies report on the census-derived “blocks” where they serve customers. Questions about the 2019 report started before it was even released: after an FCC press release put out in February trumpeted major gains in access, the nonprofit advocacy group Free Press noticed a major flaw in the figures. A small carrier, called BarrierFree, erroneously reported it served census blocks with nearly 62 million people, which would make it the fourth largest internet service provider in the country.
The FCC rectified the error before the release of the final report, reducing the number of people it believed to have access by about 2 million, but the fact that the flaw was uncovered by Free Press raised questions about how closely the agency was monitoring the data it received. Starks’ statement questioned the figures. “It’s incredible to me that an error this large — approximately 62 million in overstated broadband connections — didn’t materially change the report,” he said.
Lenovo channels the spirit of IBM: Lays off 500 staff, savages Data Centre Group
Lenovo is eliminating 500 staff worldwide, including some in its US headquarters at Research Triangle Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.
The tech giant’s data centre group is reportedly among the hardest hit, with 200 people set to lose their jobs.
**
The measures certainly don’t align with the manufacturer’s financial performance: Lenovo reported record revenues for its fiscal 2019, growing to $51bn for the first time, up 12.5 per cent year on year. It turned a profit of $597m, as opposed to a loss of $189m it suffered in FY 2018.
The Data Center Group was the Chinese biz’s fastest-growing business, with revenue going up 37.1 per cent year-on-year to $6.025bn – but the unit still made a pre-tax loss of $231m.
Justice Department Prepares Antitrust Investigation of Google
A Justice Department investigation would put Google—and potentially other tech giants—in an unwanted spotlight at a time when major internet companies already have seen their political fortunes turning, both in the U.S. and overseas.
The shift has come with multibillion-dollar antitrust fines for Google from the European Union. Facebook Inc. has come under intense fire over Russian use of its platform to meddle in the 2016 election. Policy makers also are increasingly skeptical of internet companies’ privacy practices, as well as their potential to create other public harm.
Update: Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators
Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators that puts it under closer watch by the Federal Trade Commission, three people familiar with the matter said.
The move is the result of the FTC and the Department of Justice, the U.S. government’s leading antitrust enforcement agencies, quietly divvying up competition oversight of two of the country’s top tech companies, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government’s work is confidential. The Justice Department is set to have more jurisdiction over Google, The Washington Post reported on Friday, paving the way for a potential investigation of the search-and-advertising giant.
There were several privacy/security events disclosed over the last week that continues the conversation about how our data is secured…
Google stored passwords in plain text for over a decade, Snapchat employees spied on users, and a real estate company leaked 885 million real estate documents to the web.
Huawei is a good example of what happens to a company that the US government does not trust. Could this be the first draft of a playbook, or is Huawei unique in their punishment?
Acquisitions/Investments
As Amex scoops up Resy, a look at its history of acquisitions
In addition to Resy, AmEx has been on a buying spree as of late. In March, we reported on its purchase of LoungeBuddy, a former partner that helped travelers with reviews of various airport lounge areas. Also this year, AmEx picked up Pocket Concierge, a firm that we wrote “helps book in-demand restaurants and is similar to OpenTable.”
As Oracle’s growth stagnates, insiders say that its all-important cloud business has suffered layoffs, infighting, and confusion
But the interesting thing isn’t just how many people Oracle is cutting. It’s also the business units being targeted.
Specifically: 300 people were cut from Oracle’s Seattle offices in the early rounds of layoffs, including 25% of of the all-important group known internally as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, one employees told us and another, who was laid off in Seattle, confirmed. Corporations do not have to report layoffs in the state of Washington unless 500 people are impacted in a single location at one time, and Oracle has not publicly reported layoffs in the state.
This Seattle team is Oracle’s second cloud engineering and development group, but arguably its most important one. Its mission is to build what Oracle calls its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generation 2 cloud, which is also known internally as OCI. The new cloud has become the centerpiece of Oracle’s whole technology strategy. Gen 2 was announced in the fall.
An Amazon employee explains why thousands of workers want the company to stop selling cloud services to oil companies, just like it won’t sell guns
Amazon employees submitted a shareholder proposal and held a press conference calling for the company to become a leader in sustainability by vowing to quickly reduce its carbon footprint in line with recommendations by climate scientists.
They also want their company to ditch the unit that sells cloud computing services to oil and gas companies.
Their efforts seem to be having an impact, as Amazon has finally promised to share its carbon-footprint data and to reduce the impact of its massive shipping operations.But one leader of the employee protest explains that thousands of employees don’t think Amazon is doing all it can, and haven’t given up the fight.
Snapchat employees reportedly snooped on users with ‘SnapLion’ tool
In total, Motherboard spoke to four former employees and a current employee that verified the existence of the SnapLion tool. Two former employees said that the abuse of the SnapLion tool occurred “several years” ago, but it’s unknown whether it’s still happening today. Emails obtained by Motherboard revealed an employee using the tool to look-up a user email address in a non-law enforcement related context. Snapchat did not immediately respond to a request from Engadget for comment.
Amazon under greater shareholder pressure to limit sale of facial recognition tech to the government
Months earlier, shareholders tabled a resolution to limit the sale to law enforcement and government agencies Amazon’s facial recognition tech, called Rekognition. It followed accusations of bias and inaccuracies with the technology, which they say can be used to racially discriminate against minorities. Rekognition, which runs image and video analysis of faces, has been sold to two states so far, and Amazon has pitched Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A second resolution will require an independent human and civil rights review of the technology.
Now the ACLU is backing the measures and calling on shareholders to pass the resolutions.
Google says some G Suite user passwords were stored in plaintext since 2005
The search giant disclosed the exposure Tuesday but declined to say exactly how many enterprise customers were affected. “We recently notified a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers that some passwords were stored in our encrypted internal systems unhashed,” said Google vice president of engineering Suzanne Frey.
Passwords are typically scrambled using a hashing algorithm to prevent them from being read by humans. G Suite administrators are able to manually upload, set and recover new user passwords for company users, which helps in situations where new employees are on-boarded. But Google said it discovered in April that the way it implemented password setting and recovery for its enterprise offering in 2005 was faulty and improperly stored a copy of the password in plaintext.
First American security flaw leaked 885 million real estate documents
First American Financial Corporation left as many as 885 million real estate documents dating as far back as 2003 exposed, according to Krebs on Security. The company, one of the largest real estate title insurance firms in the US, has already fixed the vulnerability as of Friday afternoon after the security researcher notified it of the flaw. Before the patch rolled out, however, anybody armed with a link to one of the documents hosted on its website could simply change a single digit in the URL to access somebody else’s files. The documents didn’t require a password or any kind of authentication.
Reuters sources claim Google has suspended transactions with Huawei that require transferring proprietary hardware and software, hobbling much of its smartphone business outside of China. It “immediately” loses access to future OS updates beyond the Android Open Source Project, according to the insider, and upcoming phones would have to go without official apps like the Google Play Store and Gmail.
The company is still “internally” discussing which services are going away, the source said. Google would cut off all tech support and collaboration for Android and services, however.
Microsoft, once considered a stodgy software maker, has outperformed tech unicorns since 2015
For example, ride-hailing company Uber was valued at $55 billion at the time, and is now only at $68 billion following its IPO this month. Investors valued Snap at $16 billion in late 2015, and the company’s inability to find a profitable business model since its 2017 IPO has left it worth $15 billion on the public market. Pinterest went public in April and has a market cap of $12.9 billion, up just a bit from its $11 billion valuation in 2015. Dropbox has slipped from $10 billion then to a market value of $9.4 billion now.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is cranking out earnings from its dominant Windows products and its ability to push legacy clients to emerging cloud products like Azure and Office 365. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has recorded eight straight quarters of year-over-year double-digit sales growth. In April, it became the third public company to reach a $1 trillion market cap, though it’s fallen some since then.
Microsoft and Sony strike partnership for gaming and AI services
“The two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Sony’s existing game and content-streaming service will also set to be powered by Microsoft Azure in the future. The companies also hope to build better development platforms for the content creator community.
On top of this, the Microsoft and Sony will work together on AI, semiconductor and image sensing technology.
China’s largest chipmaker is delisting from the Nasdaq
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) announced in a filing published Friday that it plans to delist next month ending a 15-year spell as a public company in the U.S. The firm will file a Form 25 to delist on June 3, which is likely to see it leave the NYSE around ten days later. SMIC, which is backed by the Chinese government and state-owned shareholders, will focus on its existing Hong Kong listing going forward but there will be trading options for those holding U.S-based ADRs.
In its announcement, SMIC said it plans to delist for reasons that include limited trading volumes and “significant administrative burden and costs” around the listing and compliance with reporting.
With Barry Padgett leaving SAP, what’s next for new Intelligent Spend Group?
Barry Padgett has left SAP only weeks after being named president of the newly created SAP Intelligent Spend Group (ISG), a combination of SAP Ariba, SAP Concur and SAP Fieldglass.
Padgett had previously served as president of SAP Ariba, before being promoted to the new role as leader of the combined group. Spend Matters sources suggest he has accepted a new role as chief revenue officer for Stripe, a payments company, although this is unconfirmed at this time.
This cuts will result in annual savings of about $600 million, Hackett said in the email. “We also made significant progress in eliminating bureaucracy, speeding up decision making and driving empowerment as part of this redesign,” he wrote.
The layoffs were anticipated by employees. Ford informed employees last October that it would be restructuring the company, a move that would likely result in layoffs and voluntary buyouts.
The reorganization is part of a broader strategy to prepare for a future with autonomous vehicle technology, electrification and unconventional ownership models.
“This disagreement is less an indictment of the consultant model and more of a wake-up call to slow down and do a better job scoping a project,” wrote Mark Bachmann, partner and chief client officer at independent agency Marcus Thomas in an email.
Clients have been looking more closely at agency billings, which has resulted in the further splintering of agency-client relationships. Some of that has been a direct result of the issue at play in this suit: that the rise of digital means the old model of scoping a project and therefore deciding the payment plan simply doesn’t work anymore. As Digiday previously wrote, making 10 YouTube videos isn’t the same as making one TV spot.
This suit and the disagreement between Accenture and Hertz are likely part of that trend, a sign that the change clients were looking for in the move from agencies to consultancies may not be as great as they had anticipated.
Foxconn offices in Wisconsin are still empty. This is after the company assured the press that said emptiness was not the case. With recent news that AT&T did not live up to terms to get a large tax refund, should we be asking if these rebate programs are a good thing for the cities and states that leverage them?
SalesForce had a massive outage last week due to a database configuration gone wrong. The company shut down services to address a configuration that “broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.”
Finally – AI voice replication is getting really good. Google voice translation has improved the ability to detect tone and intent and there is a company called Dessa that published a voice cloning of podcaster Joe Rogan that is eerily good (NSFW).
Acquisitions/Investments
Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray
Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc. for $35 a share in cash in a deal valued at about $1.3 billion, net of cash.
The deal represents a 17.4% premium to Cray’s Thursday closing price of $29.81.
HPE said it expects the acquisition will add to adjusted operating profit and earnings in the first full year. The company said integration costs associated with the deal will be absorbed within its fiscal 2020 free cash flow outlook, which remains unchanged at $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion.
London-based Deliveroo operates in 14 countries, including the U.K, France, Germany and Spain, and — outside of Europe — Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and the UAE. Across those markets, it claims it works with 80,000 restaurants with a fleet of 60,000 delivery people and 2,500 permanent employees.
It isn’t immediately clear how Amazon plans to use its new strategic relationship with Deliveroo — it could, for example, integrate it with Prime membership — but this isn’t the firm’s first dalliance with food delivery. The U.S. firm closed its Amazon Restaurants UK takeout business last year after it struggled to compete with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. The service remains operational in the U.S, however.
Bellevue, Washington-based technology business management software company Apptio Inc is acquiring Cloudability, a Portland, Oregon company that makes software to manage public cloud spending across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Google’s prototype AI translator translates your tone as well as your words
Although capturing the inflection of a speaker’s voice is what’s most impressive to laypeople, Translatotron’s attraction for AI engineers is that it translates speech directly from audio input to audio output without translating it into the usual intermediary text.
This sort of AI model is known as an end-to-end system, because there are no stops for subsidiary tasks or actions. Google says making translation end-to-end produces results faster while avoiding the risk of introducing errors during multiple translation steps.
Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities
Microsoft is awarding grants to AI projects meant to make the world more inclusive. The grants are part of a five-year initiative that will invest $25 million in AI-based accessibility tools. This year, seven recipients will receive access to the Azure AI platform (through Azure compute credits) and Microsoft engineering support.
Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. That device detects micro-movements of the hands and arms and translates them into actions like a mouse click. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person’s EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment.
IBM Unveils Watson-powered Supply Chain Management Tool at Gartner Summit
The Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) service is powered by Watson and aims to help businesses detect anomalies that could potentially interrupt a company’s supply chain distribution.
BTI uses machine learning to identify velocity, volume and value patterns in an organisations data by ingesting all of the supply chain documents and transactions. Using this data it learns to spot patterns about which it can suggest optimisations, or it may detect anomalies causing it to send an alert to the client.
Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees
At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.
According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.
In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”
Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.
The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.
The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Intel Zombieload bug fix to slow data centre computers
Intel has confirmed that new problems discovered with its processor chips mean that some computer owners face a performance slowdown.
The company has said that data centres are likely to be worst affected by the fixes required. But it added that the impact on most PC owners should be minimal.
The so-called Zombieload vulnerability follows the disclosure of the earlier Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow bugs last year.
The latest flaw could theoretically allow an attacker to spy on tasks being handled by any Intel Core or Xeon-branded central processing unit (CPU) released since 2011.
According to IBM, security incidents caused by hacker groups operating under hacktivism causes has been on a decline since 2015, when the company recorded a peak, with 35 publicly reported incidents.
Since then, incidents have gone down at a steady pace, with only five reported in 2017, two in 2018, and zero during the first months of the year.
Attacks from hacktivist groups have continued to happen, but the number of actual incidents (successful breaches) has gone down at a constant pace.
Researchers blame two factors for this decline — the death of the Anonymous hacker collective and a sustained crackdown by law enforcement officials that have thinned out hacktivist ranks
Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop
Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.
“We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”
Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.
One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are
At the event announcing the Madison project, Foxconn’s Alan Yeung said the innovation centers were “not empty,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. Yeung also said The Verge’s story contained “a lot of inaccuracies” and that the company would issue a correction soon. He did not say what those inaccuracies were, and Foxconn never issued a correction, nor has it responded to repeated requests to clarify Yeung’s statement.
One month after Yeung’s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn’s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for “smart city” initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn’s Green Bay building, either.
AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead
The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.
But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.
AT&T’s total employment was 254,000 as of December 31, 2017 and rose to 262,290 by March 31, 2019. But AT&T’s overall workforce increased only because of its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. and two smaller companies, which together added 31,618 employees during 2018, according to an AT&T proxy statement cited in the CWA report.
HCL to bring 2,000 IBM staff onboard as part of $1.8-billion deal
As part of a $1.8-billion deal, HCL Technologies will take onboard nearly 2,000 employees of IBM. The deal between the two companies involved HCL acquiring some of IBM’s software assets. The move comes as the former company is strategising to shore up its IP-led business faster than the traditional software services.
The deal is expected to be complete by June. The acquisition of IBM’s products would give HCL access to over 5,500 clients globally. Chief Human Resources officer for HCL Tech, Apparao VV said to Economic Times in an interview, “Mode 3, which is the products and platforms segment, has their own salesforce. (With the IBM products), we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people.” Mode 2 and 3 are categories for the company’s emerging tech and IP-led businesses that garner more than 28 per cent revenue.
There is growing public pressure on Facebook to make some kind of change. Former employees and government officials want to break up the company calling it a monopoly, but are Facebook’s services essential?
Seeing this drama unfold, Google is quickly pivoting to privacy-based position. In recent weeks the company is allowing users to limit tracking and delete information Google has stored about usage. Very smart move… but is it enough?
Meanwhile Oracle just can’t give up on Project Jedi.
Acquisitions
Apple buys companies at the same rate you buy groceries
This weekend, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that Apple purchases a new company every two to three weeks on average, and has bought between 20 and 25 companies in the last six months alone.
That’s roughly as often as I bought groceries during some… oh, let’s just call them “fresh vegetable adjacent” periods of my life.
You know how human beings never fail to be surprised when they get to the cash register and see how much of their paycheck is about to turn into food? I wonder if Apple ever feels that way. I’d guess not, considering how the company’s reportedly sitting on $225.4 billion dollars of cash on hand alone — enough to settle a historic array of lawsuits with Qualcomm 50 times over, if push came to shove.
Marvell to Acquire Aquantia, Eying Automotive Networking Market
Marvell on Monday announced that it had reached an agreement to buy the networking specialist firm Aquantia for $452 million. The acquisition will allow Marvell to significantly augment their current networking capabilities, with the company intending to use Aquantia’s technology in future PC, enterprise, and especially in-vehicle applications.
Under the terms of the deal, Marvell will pay Aquantia shareholders $13.25 per share in cash, bringing the total value of the deal to $452 million. The transaction has already been approved by board of directors of both companies, and subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019.
The Morning After: All the important stuff from Google I/O
An AI-powered assistant that responds to voice commands faster than you can type or swipe, even offline? That’s what Google promised at I/O, with demos showing off how its next-generation assistant could operate across and through several apps, using voice control almost exclusively to get the information users need when they need it. Plus, it learns what you like and can even make restaurant or menu suggestions based on those preferences. Expect to see these features roll out on Pixel phones first later this year.
Oracle Alleges AWS Recruited DoD Officials To Influence JEDI Cloud Award
After Oracle first raised the issue, the DoD Inspector General, assisted by the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad, reopened a prior investigation and again concluded those potential improprieties didn’t impact the integrity of the process. A previous Government Accountability Office investigation also found no flaw warranting a change in how the military was selecting a cloud vendor.
But Oracle argued Tuesday the military’s contracting officer was wrong to take Ubhi’s claims at face value during the investigation, noting he actively sought to return to AWS, where he previously worked, during his short stint at DoD, where for a time he worked as a JEDI project manager.
SAP embraces cloud customization – with interesting partners
SAP is launching SAP Embrace, a new initiative to enable users of the SAP S/4 HANA ERP system to move it to the cloud, with platform, software, services and infrastructure customized to their specific industry needs. Interestingly, SAP is collaborating with cloud competitors Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. SAP Embrace customers will be able to select one of those three cloud services providers as a hyperscaler, and also leverage SAP’s network of global strategic service partners.
Google plans to permit users to navigate its maps, watch videos on YouTube and search for information in “incognito mode,” limiting the amount of information shared with the company. It will also allow users to delete web and app activity history automatically after three months or 18 months.
Google added incognito mode to its Chrome browser a decade ago.
The company also said it would make it easier for users to find and delete information they have shared with the company, including location data in maps. For its Android operating system, Google said a new update would simplify how to limit the sharing of location data with app providers.
Symantec CEO Abruptly Resigns Amid Financial Turmoil
Symantec CEO Greg Clark abruptly resigned yesterday immediately before the embattled security company reported its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings, which included weak enterprise sales and disappointing forecasts for the first quarter and full 2020 fiscal year.
The company appointed Richard Hill, current Symantec director and former chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems, as interim president and CEO, effective immediately, and said it will begin a search to find a permanent CEO.
IBM sells $28.6b of bonds to help fund Red Hat buy
The Red Hat purchase will push the combined company’s borrowings above $US60 billion with debt that’s more than three times a key measure of earnings, said Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Schiffman and Mike Campellone. Though IBM won’t buy back shares in the next two years, it still risks a potential downgrade to the BBB range, the tier of corporate debt that’s just above junk, they wrote.
IBM took out a $US20 billion bridge loan to fund the Red Hat deal and will use some of its cash pile, the company said in October when the transaction was announced. S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings cut IBM one level to A at the time, the sixth-highest investment-grade rating, while it remains on review for downgrade at Moody’s Investors Service.
Microsoft open-sources its quantum computing development tools
This move, the company says, is meant to make “quantum computing and algorithm development easier and more transparent for developers.” In addition, it will make it easier for academic institutions to use these tools, and developers, of course, will be able to contribute their own code and ideas.
Unsurprisingly, the code will live on Microsoft’s GitHub page. Previously, the team had already open-sourced a number of tools and examples, as well as a library of quantum chemistry samples, but this is the first time the team is open-sourcing core parts of the platform.
Apple’s would-be sapphire glass supplier charged with fraud
Apple loaned $578 million to a company called GT Advanced Technologies, which was supposed to build highly scratch-resistant screen covers from synthetic sapphire crystals. Instead, it produced flawed “boules” of sapphire that couldn’t be cut into displays and went bankrupt months after it started. Now, the SEC has announced that it’s charging the company and its ex-CEO with fraud for allegedly withholding key information from stockholders.
Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, calls for Facebook to be broken up
The tl;dr of Hughes’ argument against Facebook/Zuckerberg being allowed to continue its/his reign of the internet knits together different strands of the techlash zeitgeist, linking Zuckerberg’s absolute influence over Facebook, and therefore over the unprecedented billions of people he can reach and behaviourally reprogram via content-sorting algorithms, to the crushing of innovation and startup competition; the crushing of consumer attention, choice and privacy, all hostage to relentless growth targets and an eyeball-demanding ad business model; the crushing control of speech that Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s absolute monarch — personally commands, with Hughes worrying it’s a power too potent for any one human to wield.
Hughes and others have cited historical precedents such as the government’s breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T as a justification for stricter antitrust regulation against tech giants. But these companies not only had clear monopolies with pricing power that hurt consumers, they also offered products that were vital to the economy.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only three of many ways people can communicate digitally, and while many people spend hours every week using them, they are replaceable and inessential — and, in fact, getting away from Facebook and Instagram might make people happier. Even Hughes acknowledges, when he finds himself scrolling through Instagram at idle hours, “The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice.”
Elon Musk is going to trial for calling a cave diver a pedophile on Twitter
Defamation law doesn’t apply to opinions or derogatory hyperbole, and Judge Wilson concluded that Musk’s case would be stronger if he’d simply tweeted an insult. But Musk “did not call [Unsworth] a ‘pedo guy’ and leave it there,” writes Wilson. “Rather, he made follow-up statements indicating that he believed his statements to be true.” That included the emails to BuzzFeed, where Musk “purported to convey actual facts and even suggested that the BuzzFeed reporter call people in Thailand to confirm his narrative.”
The decision doesn’t mean Musk is guilty, but it means Unsworth’s case is strong enough to deserve a trial. A pre-trial conference will take place on October 7th. This won’t be the first time Musk has gone to court for some bad tweets. He recently settled a separate lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of making misleading financial statements on Twitter.
