Business, Financial & Legal - Page 75

Apple has joined the growing list of tech companies asking its employees to work from home over coronavirus outbreak fears, with Bloomberg reporting that Apple has asked its staff to work from home for now.

The iPhone giant has asked its employees to work from home as an "additional precaution", but it's not forced -- it's a recommendation from Apple, and not a requirement as there are staff that simply can't pick everything up and just work from home. The news joins other companies that are asking their staff to work from home amid coronavirus spreading throughout the planet.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has tweeted: "Apple is encouraging employees in Silicon Valley to work from home today if they can as an "additional precaution." Its local retail stores remain open". Interesting that Apple retail stores are still open, and I wonder how long it'll be until we see those stores possibly being closed if the coronavirus / COVID-19 situation gets worse.

Google has reportedly ended all in-person job interviews over coronavirus fears, with the everything giant moving its job interviews through Hangouts.

The company has told potential candidates that all interviews will be done through video calls "for the forseeable future", after it restricted employee travel after a Google employee at its Switzerland office was tested positive for COVID-19. This is a big move by a big company, and with no end in sight for coronavirus / COVID-19 and its spread across the globe, it is worrying.

The Verge reports it has seen an email from Google staff, which read: "In light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and to protect our candidates' and interviewers' health and wellbeing, we will be conducting all Google interviews globally virtually via Google Hangout (or BlueJeans for applicable countries) for the foreseeable future".

Back in 2017, Apple admitted that it slowed down older generation iPhones on purpose, now the company is set to pay out a massive $500 million.

According to a new report by Reuters, Apple is set to pay out $500 million to settle a massive lawsuit regarding how the company decided to intentionally slow down the performance of older generation iPhones. The lawsuit covers US iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, and SE models that were running iOS 10.2.1 or later. The suit also covers iPhone 7 and 7 Plus if those phones were running iOS 11.2 or later before December 12st, 2017.

Consumers can take part in the lawsuit and even get some money back from doing so. It's estimated that consumers could get $25 per phone, and in total, it's estimated that Apple will have to pay back $310 million to consumers. Reuters also mentioned that lawyers are seeking $93 million in legal fees with an additional $1.5 million in expenses. Lawyers also said that settlement for consumers is "fair, reasonable, and adequate" and that payment of $25 per phone is "considerable by any degree".

The COVID-19 virus is hitting numerous markets in the technology industry, and one of those markets is the PC market. Analysts are now stating their expectations for how much it will fall by the end of this year.

According to analyst firm, Canalys, the global PC market is expected to shrink by a whole 3.4% in total by the end of the year if shipments continue to be hindered by the outbreak. The analyst firm also says that if the state of the outbreak worsens over time, the global PC market is expected to take a larger hit of around 8.4%.

The country that suffers the most from this outbreak if obviously China, and in the event of the worst possible scenario, Chinese sales will fall by 12.2%. In the best-case scenario, analysts predict it should only be 3.8%. Here are some numbers that make it a bit easier to understand -- in 2019, around 396 million PC's were sold, and in 2020 Canalys predicts it could be anywhere between 362-382 million units.

A new report by the Department of Defence has revealed that the United States has failed to account for $715.8 million dollars worth of weapons and equipment while in Syria.

Members of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Operations Inherent Resolve (SOJTF-OIR), which is apart of the United States' Combined Joint Task Force in Syria, purportedly "did not maintain comprehensive lists of all equipment purchased and received". These weapons and equipment were supplied to the United States and allies during the years of 2017 and 2018. Not only were weapons and equipment not accounted for, but some of the weapons and equipment that were accounted for suffered rust due to them not being correctly stored.

The report says that this rust happened because of "SOJTF-OIR personnel did not divest or dispose of CTEF-S equipment, which led to overcrowding at the BPC Kuwait warehouse". The Department of Defence report doesn't state if the 'lost' weapons and equipment ended up in the hands of Daesh and Al-Qaeda affiliates, but according to the Military Times some of it did "battlefield losses by partner forces and as a result of Islamic State [Daesh] fighters plundering the armories of U.S.-backed groups in early 2014 as the jihadi group surged across Iraq and Syria".

Seventeen members of a German parliamentary group have nominated whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.

According to the full letter, which was published on the Courage Foundation's website, these seventeen members of the parliamentary group believe that Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning have shown extraordinary efforts towards deserving a Nobel Peace Prize.

The group believes that Assange's efforts to expose "the extent of harm and illegality behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars", Snowden's revealing of "illegal mass surveillance, in defence of the liberties", and Manning's disclosure of 750,000 "classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents" to WikiLeaks represents enormous sacrifice for these individuals. The group also believe that a Nobel Peace Prize would more than honor the actions of these individuals, and represent their own sacrifice of liberties.

NVIDIA shareholders would be smiling right now, with stock reaching a new all-time high for the company -- hitting $314 with a market cap of $192 billion.

The last time NVIDIA was on this trajectory was back in September 2018 as it launched its new Turing GPU architecture and the GeForce RTX brand. NVIDIA stock was hitting close to $280 at the time, but cratered just before Christmas 2018 reaching the lows of around $129.

NVIDIA didn't have quite the success that it expected with the GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards, but the shift down to 7nm and the upcoming Ampere GPU architecture that should be unveiled at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in March will help that. We can expect the launch of the next-gen GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards this year, which will mark for an even more successful year for NVIDIA.

Warren Buffett has just offloaded $800 million worth of his Apple shares in the last quarter, according to SEC filings secured by Business Insider.

Berkshire Hathaway, where Buffett is the CEO, offloaded 3.7 million Apple shares between the months of October and December 2019 when Apple share prices increased by over 30% from $219 to $294. Even with the offloading of 3.7 million shares and securing $800 million, Berkshire Hathaway still holds $72 billion worth of Apple stock -- or around 5.6% of Apple.

In saying that, the $72 billion worth of Apple stock represents over 32% of Berkshire Hathaway's entire portfolio. The investment firm purchased its first loads of Apple stock in 2016, when Apple stock was sitting at around $100 -- Buffett's company spent $1 billion on 9.8 million shares at the time.

Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos has announced via his personal Instagram account the is launching a new fund to battle climate change - the Bezos Earth Fund.

Bezos took to his Instagram to announce what is called the Bezos Earth Fund, and this fund will be dedicated to fighting the effects of climate change. Bezos says that he wants to work alongside others that are fighting climate change, and to kick things off for the Bezos Earth Fund, he will be donating $10 billion that will go towards grants that will be issued out this summer.

Bezos says that the Bezos Earth Fund will fund scientists "scientists, activists, NGOs - any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world". He also says that to save the Earth it will require collective action from "big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals." It should also be noted that the Bezos Earth Fund is separate from Amazon's own initiatives and that the $10 billion came from Bezos' personal account.

The court for Berlin-Brandenburg has officially ordered Tesla to stop all forest clearing and building preparations for their coming gigafactory.

According to a recent report from Reuters, U.S electric car manufacturer, Tesla has been ordered to stop all forms of preparation for their planned construction of a gigafactory. The court has ordered this after it gave Tesla the green light to remove 92 hectares of forest for the construction of the building.

This decision by the court has come after environmental activists (Green League of Brandenburg) have expressed their concerns over the de-forestation being a threat to wildlife and water supplies. It should be noted that Tesla was only three days away from completing the forest clearing, but the court states "It should not be assumed that the motion seeking legal protection brought by the Green League lacks any chance of succeeding." At the moment, Tesla has two gigafactories, one located in the United States and the second in Shanghai, China.

Apple and Nuvia are in the headlines over the weekend, with a former Apple chip executive being sued for 'betraying' Apple by launching a new startup and poaching Apple employees... while Apple is also reportedly trying to poach his new staffers. But the story is a lot juicier than that.

Bloomberg is reporting that Gerard Williams III, who left as the lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded Nuvia, says that Apple is stopping his new company from hiring engineers, all while hiring Nuvia staff from under him. Bloomberg reports that Apple's new lawsuit was made to "suffocate the creation of new technologies and solutions by a new business, and to diminish the freedom of entrepreneurs to seek out more fulfilling work".

But where this gets interesting is that Williams said he is maintaining a distant relationship with Apple and his former colleagues, but AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi -- who left his site to work for Apple, has "sent him numerous texts after Williams left the company, including material marked "Apple Confidential" in an April conversation. Williams said he told Shimpi this was "inappropriate and unwelcome," according to the filing. Apple didn't immediately respond to a query about Shimpi", reports Bloomberg.

Phishing scams are currently one of the most common ways to scam someone, and while you'd probably think that it would never happen to you, it just happened to the Puerto Rico government.

In a new report by the Associated Press, the Puerto Rico government transferred funds equating to over $2.6 million dollars to a phony bank account through a phishing scam. The incident was discovered just this past week, and at the moment, government officials are working with the FBI to recover the stolen funds.

So how did this happen? According to Ruben Rivera, who is the finance director of Puerto Rico's Industrial Development Company, the department received an email that said that a bank account that was tied to government payments needed changing. In response to the email, officials transferred the funds into the changed bank account, which they later discovered was fraudulent.

Amazon is extremely upset over losing a $10 billion dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract to Microsoft. So, as any good business would do, they claim it bias.

According to a new report from CNBC, Microsoft's contract with the Pentagon is has now been paused because Amazon believes that President Trump has a bias towards Microsoft. Amazon's argument is that President Trump personally doesn't like Bezos or Amazon, and through his supposed dislike, he influenced which company would get the contract.

Now, the judge that is ruling the case has put the contract on pause to hear out Amazon's beliefs. Here's Amazon's statement, "The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends." CNBC also says that Amazon has said it would pay out $42 million for any "costs and damages" that are resulted from this contract being put on pause.

A new report has come out from The Wall Street Journal that claims Amazon CEO and founder; Jeff Bezos has bought the most expensive property in Los Angeles.

Amazon founder has reportedly bought the Warner Estate, the most prestigious property in all of Los Angeles from David Geffen for $165 million dollars. Bezos' net worth is currently sitting at around $131.9 billion, which means that if he did purchase the estate from Geffen for $165 million, that's only one-eight hundredth of his net worth.

The Warner Estate was built in the 1930s for Jack Warner, who was the former president and driving force behind the now-massive Warner Bros. Studios. The estate took around a decade to be built and features everything you could dream of; terraces, guest houses, golf courses, pools, tennis courts, and a lot more.

Can you believe we're in 2020, where you'll be able to major in weed at Colorado State University-Pueblo? It's true, with Denver Post reporting that the university just received approval for the Denver's first degree program focused on cannabis.

The program is called "Cannabis, Biology and Chemistry" and will see the course similar to double-majoring in biology and chemistry, while focusing on the science required to work in the world of cannabis, according to David Lehmpuhl, dean of CSU-Pueblo's College of Science and Mathematics.

Lehmpuhl said: "It's a rigorous degree geared toward the increasing demand coming about because of the cannabis industry. Hemp and marijuana has really come to the forefront in a lot of economic sectors in the country. We're not pro-cannabis or anti-cannabis. What we're about will be the science and training students to look at that science".

Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to ask the public their thoughts on whether or not he should build a new gigafactory in Texas.

Musk posted a poll to his Twitter account with the simple, yet effective caption "Giga Texas?". At the time of writing this, 80.1% of people voted "Hell yeah," and only 19.9% of people voted "no." If this plan goes ahead, this will mark Musk's fourth gigafactory, the first being near Reno, Nevada, the second in Buffalo, New York, third in China, Shanghai, and fourth near Berlin, Germany.

At the moment, Musk is on a roll with his electric vehicle and clean energy company Tesla, as the company's stock price recently hit an all-time high. This all-time high pushed the company's total market value over Bitcoin's market value, quite an achievement if you ask me. In other news about Musk's ventures, SpaceX recently launched 60 more Starlink satellites into the atmosphere in an effort to bring a global internet connection to everyone.

It has been a question for quite some time - how much does Google make from hardware sales? Until now, no one has ever really known, but we have just been thrown a bone (pardon the rhyme).

Alphabet, Google's parent company recently conducted its Q4 earnings call, and according to that report, Google's hardware division is a "multi-billion dollar" hardware business. There were no specific numbers released on what device/s are Google's most profitable, but since Alphabet stated "multi," we can accurately assume that hardware sales exceed $2 billion.

Google as a slew of hardware products; examples include Pixel phones, laptops, Nest doorbells, cameras, speakers, routers, and Chromecasts. Which of these is the top-selling is still a mystery, but we do know from Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh (last May) that the company's hardware numbers are "good, but not where we want to be at the end of five years".

Tesla has shaken up the financial market with the company's stock price skyrocketing in comparison to where it was sitting a year ago. Now, the market cap of Tesla has exceeded Bitcoin's.

According to CNBC, Tesla opened at nearly $883 per share, then it hit an all-time high of $968.99 per share, bringing the company's total market cap to above $170 billion. For a helpful comparison to just how big that is, other car companies such as GM and Ford closed out Tuesday with a combined market cap of $85 billion. Tesla is more than double that.

Now a new metric has been thrown into the mix. Tesla's market cap is now larger than Bitcoin's. Yes, Tesla, the automotive and energy company, was worth more than a digital currency (at that period in time). At the time of writing this, Bitcoin's market cap is currently sitting at around $166 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. This means that during Tuesday's high, Tesla's market cap was larger than Bitcoin's, quite an achievement for Mr. Musk and Tesla as a whole.

Super Bowl 2020 is now over and done, and while the game was undoubtedly amazing to watch, so were the extremely expensive ads.

Millions of eyes were glued to Super Bowl 2020, which means it was extremely expensive for companies to get a slot at the half-time-show commercial break. But for the companies that did get a slot, they didn't waste it as many of the commercials that were seen contained celebrities to peak potential customers' interests.

A full list has been provided in the entirety of this article of all of the technology-related Super Bowl ads. We have commercials from companies such as Amazon, Audi, Dashlane, Facebook, Google, Hyundai Microsoft, Pringles (Rick and Morty), SodaStream, Squarespace, and T-Mobile.

Just this past Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a fine to a man who did 6,000 robocalls that were both politically and racially charged.

In a filing by the FCC, it's explained that a single man conducted an astonishing 6,000 robocalls in six different states (California, Flordia, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Virginia). These phone calls used an online tool that can mask the caller's voice and number. According to the FCC, the intention behind the calls was for the man to acquire "notoriety/ publicity" for his website and brand.

It seems that wasn't his only intention either as the FCC details that 827 calls were made to people in Brooklyn, Iowa "following the murder of a local college student and the arrest of an illegal alien from Mexico for the crime". The calls made racist remarks to people on the other end, such as "brown horde" and "kill them all". The robocaller even called the parents of the victim. It's unclear whether the FCC will be able to acquire the full amount from the man, but it's unfortunately doubtful.