Business, Financial & Legal - Page 138

There is currently a summit going on Dubai, The World Conference on International Telecommunications, to be specific, that is discussing how the internet should move forward. The details of the talks are whether or not governments should take more control over the internet, or if the UN should possibly take it over.

The United States Congress has done at least one thing correctly by passing a resolution opposing both of the options being considered. The House, today, passed the Senate resolution that calls on the US government to oppose UN control. "The 193 member countries of the United Nations are gathered to consider whether to apply to the Internet a regulatory regime that the International Telecommunications Union created in the 1980s for old-fashioned telephone service," Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said on the House floor.

"I think that we are all very, very proud that there is not only bipartisan, but bicameral support underlying this resolution, and there is complete support across the Executive Branch of our government," Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) said. "In other words, the United States of America is totally unified on this issue of an open structure, a multi-stakeholder approach that has guided the Internet over the last two decades."

It seems as though Apple's stock just isn't catching a break, and that's caused one trader to get into some hot water. David Miller, a previous trader for Rochdale Securities, Stamford, was just arrested today over claims that he committed wire fraud back in October.

The FBI say that Miller purchased 1.625 million shares of Apple stock, worth roughly $1 billion, on October 25, the day Apple was due to report its quarterly earnings. Now, that's all perfectly legal, except for the fact that he used the brokerage's money. He expected stock prices to increase and was planning to pocket the profit.

As we all know, Apple stock hasn't been doing the best lately, and October 25 was no different. Stock prices decreased and his employer lost roughly $5 million over the trade. He explained it away as an honest mistake, saying he meant to purchase 1,625 shares, not the 1,625,000 shares that were purchased.

Australia's leading telco, Telstra, have just announced that they have a new way that customers can purchase Google Play store content on their Android-based devices, including apps, games, movies, magazines and books.

Starting today, Telstra customers can now purchase Google Play content and charge it to their mobile phone bills at a value of up to $20 per transaction, with a monthly limit of $100. This $100 monthly limit can be changed, so you're not locked in - it just requires a quick phone call to Telstra. The new way of purchasing content is also available to pre-paid customers, too - they just need the credit on their accounts.

Telstra have teamed up with Google for the launch of this new service, where they've offered a heap of games and apps at half price! This promotion runs until December 25 and includes:

The police have asked that Congress consider adding a requirement that wireless service providers keep copies of text messages for two years. Because, after all, you never know when you may need to data mine them during a future criminal investigation. There are a few problems with a requirement of this length, however.

Consider, for a moment, the sheer number of text messages sent every single day. Got a number? 6 billion. Last year more than 2 TRILLION messages were sent, so storing that many text messages would take up a huge amount of storage. Carriers would be required to save text messages for two years, so they would be storing upwards of 4 trillion text messages.

That would be roughly 500 terabytes of data storage. Not an unheard of amount, but certainly a burden on a company. The police would like this new requirement to be added into an update of a 1986 privacy law that is currently being discussed. A new draft of the bill sees it being updated for the cloud computing era with a requirement that police obtain a warrant to read e-mails.

Normally this is reserved for the "only in Japan" type of posts - but here we are. I could pretty much just leave it as a title and blank news piece, but let's continue. Tom Nardone of MakerLove wants to be one of the first in to use 3D printing for the adult sex toys business.

Yes - 3D printers and adult sex toys - all in the same sentence. Nardone is an engineer who moved into the sex toy business, and doesn't want to make any generic sex toys - for this salesman, his 3D printed sex toys are a mix of art and science, with a dash of technology and pleasure.

The porn business has been a huge mover in technology in the years gone by, with VCRs, DVDs and now the Internet all being molded and guided by the needs, and requirements of the porn industry. 3D printing is just another factor of this - and where there's money to be made, there will always be someone there to make it.

There was a time when the iPhone and iPad were the absolute undeniable champions of the industry - breaking records on quarterly shipments, and market share in their respective fields - smartphones and tablets. The iPad pretty much created the tablet market on its own, and has enjoyed complete dominance since its launch.

Well, Apple may still lead the tablet market in terms of their share of the pie - but this number has dropped to its lowest point since the original, first-generation iPad launched in 2010. In ABI's latest estimate report, Apple's share of the worldwide tablet market dropped to just 55% in Q3 2012 - a 14% sequential decline.

Google's Android-based tablets are the main cause of this, which comes as a surprise to no one. Apple did just introduce the 7.85-inch iPad mini, but is it too late for them to claw back some of that lost market share? A quarter or so from now should tell, and we should have even more proof in the next few quarters as Apple start shipping, and selling more of their smaller slates. ABI analyst, Jeff Orr, isn't too sure on whether the iPad mini will help their market share numbers:

We all knew this was coming, but it looks like there's now more movement in the news department from DigiTimes' latest report. Industry sources are now claiming that Apple could move from Samsung to TSMC for their A-series production.

At first, you would think this only effects Samsung - as they'd lose Apple's huge business, but TSMC would also benefit, greatly. But remember, TSMC have some gigantic clients in NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Broadcom and more, and this move would effect every single one of them, considerably. At the moment, Samsung is the only source of production for Apple's A-series of processors, which include the A5, A6 and A6X processors.

These chips are baked into the latest and greatest iDevices, such as the iPhone 5 and iPad (new, new one - the fourth-gen, yes it's confusing). Rewinding back to the A4 and A5 processors, which were designed by Intrinsity, but had input from Samsung in terms of their design. Apple acquired Intrinsity in 2010 - but they may have had some interesting intellectual property that Apple couldn't take over to share with TSMC, forcing them to make a custom-designed processor which materialized into the A6.

Apple aren't the only ones that get mixed up in the news over work practices, as Samsung have come under fire from a rights group on Tuesday over illegal work practices at its Chinese suppliers. The company admitted just 24 hours previous, that excessive overtime and fines for employees in China.

The New York-based China Labor Watch have said that employees working at Samsung's suppliers sometime work a crazy 16 hours per day, with just a single day off per month. Samsung said on Monday, after a review of 105 of its Chinese suppliers, which involved more than 65,000 employees, that illegal work practices were found. But the South Korean company said that the companies involved would be given two more years to change their ways. Two more years! Samsung said in a statement:

China Labor Watch said on Tuesday that a follow-up investigation took place, revealing that workers usually work from three to six times the legal overtime limit. CLW added in a statement:

If you ever thought that Google just waved their fingers and had magical algorithms working their search results, you'd be flat out wrong. The Register has opened up the Google 160-page guidebook, which is a reference manual for human "raters".

This has revealed that there's a big human involvement in the results provided by Google when a user runs a search. Google actually outsource to a few different crowdsourcing agencies - Lionbridge and Leapforce, where they use real people and their real-life opinions on search results. The Register refers to one Leapforce job ad, where they employ around 1500 search assessors which is a great work-from-home job.

Before landing this glorious work-from-home job, a potential employee must first pass an initial examination. After this, search assessors will receive periodic Google evaluations to ensure they're doing a standup job on grading search results. The 160-page manual also informs raters about how to rank search results basic on multiple metrics, such as quality, relevance and spamminess. Google's search assessors will judge the results for various queries and choose from different tiered grades, including "Not Spam", "Maybe Spam", "Porn", "Off-Topic", "Unratable", "Vital" and more.

Samsung just can't seem to escape being sued lately. After losing to Apple to the tune of $1 billion, Ericsson has now filed a lawsuit against the South Korean electronics giant claiming that they have refused to sign licensing agreements for some of Ericsson's patents, even after two years of negotiations.

Ericsson issued the following statement on their website:

Chief Intellectual Property officer at Ericsson, Kasim Alfalahi, has said that this is the last resort and that the company did their best to try and settle the matter with Samsung without having to involve the courts. The lawsuit has been filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

Google has settled with Immersion just nine months after it was sued by Immersion, a company that develops touch feedback systems. The deal sees Google licensing the patents for use in future Motorola devices, along with compensating the company for using the technology in prior Motorola devices.

The lawsuit was filed against Motorola before Google officially acquired them in May 2012. The original lawsuit alleged that Motorola infringed upon six of Immersions patents and was filed with the US ITC, which has the power to block imports should a device be found to be infringing. CEO Victor Viegas:

Immersion has outstanding lawsuits over similar technology against HTC. Google's licensing agreement does not cover Android devices made by other manufacturers, at least not yet, so that lawsuit is unaffected by Google's settlement.

Amazon is touting that Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the best days for the Kindle family in terms of sales. They say that Cyber Monday more than doubled last year's numbers for the Kindle family, which puts this at the single best day. These sales were certainly helped by the fact Amazon put the Kindle Fire on sale.

Amazon provided the following as the milestones for the holiday shopping weekend:

"Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fires have held the top 4 spots on the Amazon worldwide best sellers list since launch, and that was before the busiest shopping weekend of the year," said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "We're excited that customers made this Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best ever for Kindle worldwide-Cyber Monday was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales, and we're looking forward to millions of customers opening a new Kindle this holiday season."

A collection of adult movie companies aren't happy with Verizon. They say that the ISP defends BitTorrent pirates by systematically rejecting court-ordered subpoenas for information and they claim that these objections are in bad faith due to Verizon supposedly getting profit from users who are BitTorrenting.

A court has previously ruled that an IP address is not enough to hold someone responsible for pirating, but that hasn't stopped companies from trying. Adult movie companies are still filing the mass lawsuits using IPs as the identification of the users. They then ask the court to subpoena the ISP for subscriber information.

Verizon currently rejects these requests systematically as the subscriber isn't necessarily the one who did the illegal sharing. Verizon argues that "[The subpoena] seeks information that is protected from disclosure by third parties' rights of privacy and protections guaranteed by the first amendment."

The whole debacle with MegaUpload founder, Kim Dotcom, has been pretty bad since day one - but now new evidence has popped up and has Dotcom seeking to have the case against him dismissed.

The new evidence suggests the FBI forced Dotcom to preserve 39 pirated movies from another case unrelated to us, with Dotcom's lawyers saying that the 39 movie files were uploaded after the FBI investigated a website called 'ninjavideo.com', this site used a cloud storage database from megaupload.com to store the movies in 2010. The FBI then made a seizure on megaupload.com.

The 39 files were identified during an investigation into the NinjaVideo site, which used MegaUpload's cloud storage for their pirated movies. The FBI later took down the MegaUpload site, based that seizure on the same files being stored, even though Dotcom says he was cooperating with the FBI as much as possible.

Seriously, Apple - innovate instead of suing. You have one god damn smartphone on the market, the iPhone 5, in a single size - and yet they just continue bashing forward with lawsuits. Their market cap has experienced over $150 billion in drops in the past two months - and it has no signs of slowing.

Well, today Apple have launched yet another suit, adding the Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S III with Android 4.1 and four other products to their latest lawsuit against Samsung. Apple have already added some of those devices, such as the Galaxy S III, but between then and now, they've received software updates - which leads us to another round of requested inclusions, sigh.

The other four devices added are Samsung's Galaxy S III mini, Rugby Pro, Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wi-Fi and the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. With these devices, we could see the lawsuits (plural) dragged out into 2014 - hearings are expected to take place early next year.

It's a constant message repeated by the RIAA, MPAA, and others: Pirating is bad. However, a new study conducted in the UK has shown that UK customers who pirate end up spending way more at the box office than those who don't do any sort of illegal file sharing. It's the type of findings that the RIAA don't like people to hear.

The survey, conducted by OFCOM, interviewed 4,400 Internet users aged 12 and up. The resulting 94-page report shows that 16 percent of respondents had downloaded at least one item illegally and one-quarter of the group consumed only pirated content. The flip-side of this is that 75 percent of the pirates also pay for digital content.

The so-called "hybrid" pirates make up roughly 12 percent of the British population and the report claims that people in this group spend up to three times as much as non-pirates on legal purchases. 48 percent of respondents said they download illegally because it's convenient and 44 percent said they do it because it's quick.

Google updated its Transparency Report last month and it now shows more data than it previously did. The new information includes numbers on government requests to Google for user data. This means Google is reporting how many warrants or other requests for information (subpoena, etc) they get by which governments.

I'm sure you can guess which country makes the most requests of Google, and, no, it isn't Iran or China. In fact, it's the United States and Google says most of the requests are to aid in criminal investigations, however, Google "can't always be sure that a request necessarily relates to a criminal investigation."

Go figure. Following the United States, India, Brazil, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have the next highest number of requests, but they are a good distance behind the good ol' US. The US has requested nearly 8,000 times about more than 16,000 users. 90 percent of these requests have been partially or fully complied with.

What kind of world do we live in where police raid a house and take a 9-year-old's laptop that is adorned with Winnie the Pooh stickers? Well, apparently Finnish police feel this is an acceptable thing to do. According to TorrentFreak, police showed up at the girl's house after her dad didn't pay a fine.

CIAPC, an anti-piracy company, managed to get Finnish ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. They started tracking BitTorrent users and, in particular, this one little girl. They sent a letter, which was received by the father and owner of the internet connection, demanding a cash settlement without any sort of trial.

The father, of course, refused to pay. This prompted police to raid the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscate her laptop, which was decorated with Winne the Pooh stickers, mind you. "It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation," the police advised.

Patrick Gibson posted up an interesting, and rather accurate, portrayal of Google and Apple. The biggest takeaway from the post is that Google is getting better at design, something they've been weak at, quicker than Apple is getting better at web services, something they have been weak at.

Take a look at Apple's web fails:

With each revision of Android, it's UI and polish gets closer and closer to that of Apple and iOS. With the latest version, it's really starting to approach the quality of Apple's design. Apple's mantra that everything "Just Works" is more true for Google's web services, and increasingly, its hardware and Android.

According to comScore's latest estimates, consumers are to spend $43.4 billion on web-based shopping during November and December. This would mark an increase of 17% year-over-year for the same two-month period of 2011.

2011's online spending was around 15% higher than it was in 2010, showing that it has increased year-on-year for a while now. This year's forecast is actually much higher than the industry's overall retail expectation, which expects a 4.1% rise in consumer spending during the 2012 holiday season.

Considering the US going through a huge recession, natural disasters, and a very uncertain economic future, consumers shopping online has actually increased. ComScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni, has said that if the estimates are true, it would be a great finale to a great year for retail e-commerce. Fulgoni has an optimistic outlook on the season based on the strong lead-up to the 32 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.