NSA boss had cash stashed in tech companies

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

KeithAlexanderFormer top spook Keith Alexander, who served as its director from August 2005 until March 2014, had thousands of dollars of investments during his tenure in a handful of technology firms

It seems that he did not think that when he warned the American public that it was at “greater risk” from a terrorist attack in the wake of the Snowden disclosures the companies he was investing in would make more money.

Alexander was very honest about it. Each year he had reported his investments, but he also ticked the checked box next to this statement: “Reported financial interests or affiliations are unrelated to assigned or prospective duties, and no conflicts appear to exist.”

The documents were obtained and published Friday by Vice News as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit against the NSA brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.

From 2008 through 2013, document that as of 2008, Alexander had as much as $50,000 invested in Synchronoss, a cloud storage firm. Synchronoss provides services to major mobile phone providers, including AT&T, Verizon and others.

He had cash in  Datascension, a “data gathering and research company.” Public trades in the firm were suspended by the Securities and Exchange Commission in August 2014 due to “a lack of current and accurate information” about it.

Pericom, a semiconductor company makes hardware for “DVR solutions for the CCTV security and surveillance markets,” also appears in his portfolio, with investments up to $15,000 appearing as of 2008.

Until 2013 he had money squirreled away in RF Micro Devices, a company that makes “high-performance semiconductor components” for “aerospace and defence markets,” among others. RF Micro Devices has done $10.5 million worth of business with the government, including $9.5 million of the Department of Defence.

Alexander has been a little controversial since leaving the NSA. He founded a company called IronNet Cybersecurity, which offers protection services to banks for up to $1 million per month. This has led some cynics to suggest he is advising companies how to avoid the sort of snooping he set up while working at the NSA.

 

GT Technology set for messy divorce from Apple

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

600full-kramer-vs.-kramer-posterIt seems that the maker of Sapphire glass is about to go through a messy divorce with its partner Apple and already the name calling has begun.

GT Advanced Technologies said it will cut 890 jobs, close an Arizona plant expected to make scratch-resistant screens for Apple and has threatened to pursue legal claims against the iPhone maker while revamping under bankruptcy.

The outfit said that if GT winds down these Apple based operations it will be able to stop its mounting losses and re-focus its resources on the operation of its core business of selling sapphire furnaces and other products.

GT Advanced said it was burning through $1 million a day at the operations it intended to close.

The company said that it has many claims against Apple arising out of its business relationship with Jobs’ Mob.

The company said it could not pursue the unspecified claims at the outset of its bankruptcy, but that the claims would allow GT Advanced to terminate several Apple agreements that it said were burdensome and of no value.

Apple said that it was committed to preserving jobs in Arizona and was consulting with state and local officials on its next steps.

Apple still needs GT to make the glass for its iWatch.

The company has provided only scant details of the cause of its bankruptcy and turnaround plans.  But it appears to have relied a little too much on Apple.

The outfit reached an agreement with Apple last year to transform itself from a supplier of sapphire furnaces to a manufacturer of sapphire for Apple. The iPad maker provided $578 million in funding for the Arizona plant, and GT Advanced agreed to repay the money over five years, starting in 2015.

However in September when Apple indicated its iPhone 6 would use rival Gorilla Glass instead of sapphire material.

GT Advanced asked the bankruptcy court to end 13 contracts with Apple, including a confidentiality agreement that has forced the bankruptcy to be conducted with unusual secrecy.

At the moment GT Advanced would be liable for $50 million for each violation of the confidentiality agreement.

Bono sells Robin Hood image to defend Apple

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News, Opinions

bono-cash-facebookSuddenly it is hard to use the words “credibility” and “Bono” in the same sentence.

The U2 popular beat combo  artist  has done his best to champion all the right causes over the years. He has been a significant leader in the fight against poverty, and has helped to create the ONE Campaign, DATA, (RED) and EDUN, a clothing company which is striving to stimulate trade with poverty stricken countries. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize three times for his efforts to help the poor.

This is why the U2 frontman stepping in to defend Apple’s method of screwing up the tax system of Europe is particularly hypocritical and nasty.

Bono is currently in a business partnership with Jobs’ Mob so having him stand up this weekend and defend Apple’s right to save a bob or two by shafting the health and welfare policies of the EU damaged any lefty street cred that the former 80s rocker might have had.

The U2 frontman believes large companies that avoid paying billions in taxes bring prosperity, rather than harm the economic growth of the country. Unfortunately, Bono, they do not.

Apple has paid an average tax rate of 2.5 percent over the past five years, despite turning over a profit of around $109 billion. This is a fraction of Ireland’s standard tax rate of 12.5 percent.

While Ireland was busy making its deals with big technology companies like Apple to act as a tax haven, the country was going through its biggest debt crisis ever. Apple might have provided jobs in Ireland, but its impact on the Irish economy has been minimal.

Bono said that Ireland was a tiny little country, which did not have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known.

“We don’t have natural resources; we have to be able to attract people.”

Because of its generous tax allowances, he added, Ireland has reaped the benefits of “more hospitals and firemen and teachers because of the tax policies.”

Now this is a bit of rubbish from the bloke who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for his campaign to alleviate world debt. Tax avoidance schemes rarely help the economies of any nation and take away cash from countries that need the cash.

Ireland might not have attracted the likes of Jobs’ Mob, or Google, or other tax avoiders, but it would have had a fair taxation system. The other countries in the EU which Apple was avoiding paying tax would be able to afford betters health care standards, teachers and firemen.

 

 

Apple, Samsung want your dabs

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

fingerprintFingerprint sensing technology has been with us for some time. But it seems that smartphone and tablet giants Samsung and Apple want to promote it a little bit more.

Research outfit IHS said the fingerprint sensor market will grow to be worth $1.7 billion by 2020.

The number of handsets and tablets using fingerprint sensors will total 1.4 billion units – four times the number of the 317 million units that will ship by the end of this year.

While Apple has been at the forefront of fingerprint sensing to date, other vendors are going to pick up the baton, said IHS. Samsung hasn’t yet got to the starting gate but is expectedto do so as soon as it finds a smaller rectangular sensor.

But while fingerprint sensors will have their vogue, swipe sensors will continue to exist, particularly in lower end smartphones.

One important element that will push adoption of fingerprint sensors are financial companies – companies like Mastercard, Visa and Paypal think they will be ideal for mobile payments.

Fingerprint sensing was first pioneered by Japanese banks but saw the sunset when there were several incidents of gangsters chopping off the fingers of victims to access accounts at ATMs.

Quantum silicon computer gets accurate

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

Scientists at the University of New South WalesTwo teams working at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claim to have an answer to problems creating quantum supercomputers.

Quantum bits – qubits – are building blocks for quantum computers and the teams now say they’ve come up with qubits that process data with an accuracy above 99 percent.

Quantum computers won’t become a reality until very low error rates are achieved, said Professor Andrew Dzurak, director of the Aussie fabrication unit at UNSW.

The teams claim to have arrived at two parallel pathways for building a quantum computer in silicon.

Dzurak said that the teams have created a so-called artificial atom that is very similar to silicon transistors used in MOSFETs. He said the experiments are the earliest using solid state devices and the first in silicon.

How far off is an effective quantum supercomputer?  The answer to that question is unclear but the next step is to create pairs of qubits, with the real thing containing thousands of millions of qubits, perhaps using thousands of millions of artificial and natural atoms.

Plastic promises hope for batteries

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

plasticsA University of Stanford team is outlining the future of batteries and solar cells – and it’s plastic that will lead the way.

The university said that there’s an emerging class of electrically conductive plastics called radical polymers that promise low cost solar cells, flexible and lightweight batteries and antistatic coatings for electronics and for aircraft.

Essentially, according to professor Bryan Boudouris, a polymer called PTMA is 10 times more electrically conductive than convential semiconductor based polymers.

Plus, he explained, it’s as easy to manufacture as Plexigas with the difference that it has electronic properties.

Nevertheless, although these polymers are used in new types of batteries, it will be necessary to increase the conductivity by 100s or 1,000s of times.

The polymers are created by replacing a specific hydrogen atom with an oxygen atom.

The research is funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US air force, and DARPA – the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Internet of things: it’s trouble

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

Internet of ThingsThe much touted internet of things will bring a world where just about everything has microcircuitry from lightbulbs to coffee machines.

But, according to a report from ABI Research, there are enormous security and other risks associated with its implementation.

Those include safety, consumer privacy and data protection, the firm said.

Further, this type of network has risks in all of its core layers and when manufacturers create devices they are cost conscious and may not implement the safeguards that are the ideal.

“Manufacturers are still trying to find their feet and justify investment in secure design, development, and product lifecycle,” according to Michela Menting, a director at ABI Research.

Nevertheless she cites some companies that are taking the lead in making the internet of things safe rather than sorry.

Those include Arrayent, Hewlett Packard, Microchp, NXP Semi, Sonatype and Wind River.

Datacentres get cold corridors

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

corridorDutch company Minkels said it has started selling the free standing Cold Corridor.

What’s a Cold Corridor?  Minkels said that unlike the normal for the datacentre market, it lets you create isolated corridors without datacentre racks.

The reason for this it is modular and allows the optimisation of air flow, fire safety, and access security.

Minkels said that these days storage is often delivered as complete rack systems in different sizes.  But using its Cold Corridor lets datacentre managers fit other styles and sizes of racks later, meaning that it gives greater flexibility for future needs.

Minkels claims that using this product is much simpler and more cost efficient than customised projects. It’s a way of upgrading existing datacentres.

Minkels, a subsidiary of Legrand is a supplier of modular datacentre products and boasts large corporations as its clients.

Apple sued by sapphire firm

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

blue-appleStyle company Apple has had a writ from Taiwanese firm Tera Xtal, claiming it has infringed its patents.

According to the Taipei Times, Apple used patented technology to put sapphire substrates into cameras used in iPhones. Apple, of course, doesn’t manufacture these things but uses a supply chain to make them.

A company representative told the newspaper that it had taken action against Apple because of its large sales volume, but that this won’t be the end of the matter.

She said that it’s entirely possible that lawyers may be put on other manufacturers’ cases, including giant Korean companies Samsung and LG.

Tera Xtal wants to extract $9.88 million in damages if it’s proved that Apple has in fact breached its patents.

The company is also contemplating taking legal action against firms in other jurisdictions.

Notebook players change their focus

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

server-racksA few weeks back we reported that the lucrative datacentre market could well be the target for new vendors to enter the fray.

Now there’s some hard evidence for that. Taiwanese firm Quanta Computer, which previously played in the original design manufacturer (ODM) game, and made notebooks for the major brands, has branched out into the server market.

Digitimes reports that Quanta has completely re-invented itself and is positioning itself to sell into the European datacentre market.

It is offering servers and services to European datacentres and has hired a sales team specifically for the territory.

It faces stiff competition from the likes of HP and Dell. But the advantage it has is that it has its own manufacturing and further has played the very slim margin game when it made notebooks for multinational brands like HP and Dell.

The move is likely to be good value for the datacentre buyers because there’s no doubt such moves will prompt something of a price war in the sector.

Assassins bemoan poor console chip performance

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

assassins-creedAssassin’s Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has waded into AMD’s console performance saying that his new game’s 900p frame rate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance.

He said that while the GPUs on the machines are really powerful and the graphics look good, the game was technically CPU-bound and the CPU has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen. All these systems running in parallel.

Speaking to Hot Hardware, Pontbriand  said game designers were quickly bottlenecked and it was a bit frustrating.

“We thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second,” he said.

The comments are being seen as damning AMD’s APU. The Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One has a relatively low clock speed and, while both consoles may offer eight threads on paper, but it appears that games can’t access them.

Pontbriand said that one thread is reserved for the OS and several more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations. This means that the performance is about the same as the last generation of Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs.  In fact these were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.

To be fair it is hardly AMD’s fault. Microsoft or Sony could’ve specced out a variant of the core clocked at 2-2.4GHz and boosted total CPU throughput, but they didn’t. The programmable nature of the GCN architecture inside the Xbone and PS4 is meant to compensate for the relatively lightweight core, but AI calculations may simply be beyond this.  GPU calculations tend to be high latency, and AI typically requires fast response times.

Apple could be worth double

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

two-applesA man who owns rather a lot of shares in the fruity cargo cult Apple, claims that they are undervalued and wants them to go up a bit.

Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said Apple) shares could double in value if it used its $133 billion cash pile in a buy back scheme.

In an open letter to Apple’s board, Icahn said Apple was dramatically undervalued in today’s market, and the more shares repurchased now, the more each remaining shareholder will benefit.

Icahn who said he would be hanging on to his own stock out of any repurchase claimed that Apple stock should be trading at $203.

“At today’s price, Apple is one of the best investments we have ever seen from a risk reward perspective, and the size of our position is a testament to this. This investment represents the largest position in our investment history,” Icahn wrote.

Icahn urged Apple to buy back as much as $100 billion in stock and said he hoped other investors would also press for a buyback.

In June Apple split, its stock seven for one and in April it raised its share repurchase authorisation to $90 billion from the $60 billion announced a year earlier.

Shareholders did not seem that impressed. Apple shares rose less than one percent in early trading to $101.49 but slipped to $100.84 later. The stock has gained 25 percent since January.

Icahn owns 53 million shares and is one of the iPhone maker’s top 10 investors so he will get back a huge amount if the share price doubles. Needless to say he has been urging the company to buy back more shares and raise its dividend.

We would take all this with a pinch of salt. In his letter, he said he expects the Apple Watch, the company’s first new product category since the iPad in 2010, to boost the company’s growth and suggested that television is another large opportunity for the company, which is more than anyone else believes.

Apple has long signaled it will not be pressured into making hasty decisions. On Thursday, spokeswoman Kristin Huguet declined to comment directly on Icahn’s letter but said “We always appreciate hearing from our shareholders.”  We are sure she does.

Google avoids Texas patent troll fight

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

alamo-paintingGoogle has managed to avoid having to fight patent troll Rockstar Consortium in a Texas court that lawyers consider nicer toward plaintiffs

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday ordered proceedings stayed in Texas over whether handsets made by Samsung Electronics, HTC,  AsuSTEK,  LG Electronics and ZTE infringed on Rockstar’s patents because they used Google’s Android.

Rockstar had filed the lawsuits in a Texas federal court and Google filed a lawsuit in northern California in which it asked a judge to rule that devices using the Android platform had not infringed the patents cited by Rockstar.

The overlaps led the appeals court to rule that the spat should be decided first in California.

The court said that there was no need to proceed with the five Texas actions because the one California action would do. “There will be substantial similarity involving the infringement and invalidity issues in all the cases”, whatever that means.

Rockstar which as Apple as an investor, outbid Google and paid $4.5 billion for thousands of former Nortel Network patents as the networking products supplier went bankrupt in 2011.

Inventor of LEDs cross at Nobel snub

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

NobelNick Holonyak, who invented the first visible-light LEDs is a little miffed that he never got a Nobel Prize for his work.

This is particularly so now that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to three inventors of the blue light-emitting diode.

While Holonyak is not exactly complaining that he isn’t among them, he is a little cross that they got the prize while his 1962 invention has never been singled out for recognition by the academy.

He told the Associated Press that he was an old guy now, but found it insulting.

The Nobel Foundation highlighted the great potential social impact of blue LEDs, which made LED bulbs possible and could help dramatically reduce the amount of energy the world expends on lighting.

However you have to wonder why blue LEDs get the prize while  Holonyak never got much recognition.

Before Holonyak’s red LED, there was the infrared LED, along with even earlier discoveries, and there is a host of other researchers who could share credit in the device’s development.

Holonyak, who won the IEEE Medal of Honor (sic) in 2003 , originally set out to develop a red diode laser. In the process, he also succeeded in creating a red LED. Holonyak and several of his colleagues later went on to use compound semiconductors similar to those used to create the first LED to develop a transistor laser, a device capable of emitting both electrical and optical signals.

Microsoft CEO faces karma from foot in mouth

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

foot and mouthThe Microsoft boss has said sorry to his women employees after making a huge howler on the subject of equal pay.

In answer to a question from the floor, “What do you advise women who are interested in advancing their careers, but not comfortable … with asking for a raise?” Multiple studies have suggested that women in the workplace earn roughly three quarters of the salary, on average, compared to male counterparts doing the same job.

Satya Nadella said that women who don’t ask for raises have “good karma” and that not asking for equal pay with men is a “superpower”,

His exact words were: “women who don’t ask for raises have a “superpower … because that’s good karma, that’ll come back … that’s the kind of person that I want to trust.”

It is not as if he said the comment in private either. He said it on a stage at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, held in Phoenix, where no one is likely to take offence.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise,” Nadella told the audience, “but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along”.

We guess that at that point the conversion was drowned out by the cries of a thousand PR bunnies throwing themselves into Nadella’s mouth to stop him speaking.

Needless to say when he got back to the office there was a very cross representative from the PR department with an apology all written for him to send to all female employees who are being advised not to apply for raises.

Nadella wrote that he answered that question completely wrongly.

“I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

We suspect that Nadella will have to spend a little more time on the Wheel of Birth and Death to escape his karma on that one.