October 2012

Despite big fine, Samsung shows assertive stance

Few companies can be slapped with a billion-dollar fine and forge on undaunted. That is seemingly the stance — at least publicly — chosen by Samsung Electronics, the South Korean manufacturing giant whose rivalry with Apple in products and words has boiled over in recent weeks. While accountants in Seoul may be wringing their hands, Samsung has put on a buoyant public face in the U.S. as its new phones packed with innovative features continue to gobble more of the domestic market share.

Europe stands firm on Orange Austria deal

Europe’s top competition authority is to fire a shot across the bows of telecoms executives desperate for consolidation by taking a robust stance in an important merger test case in Austria.

In a move that will dismay industry executives openly critical of EU competition policy, Joaquín Almunia, the bloc’s antitrust enforcer, is pressing Hutchison to selloff spectrum as a condition for clearing its proposed £1.3bn takeover of France Telecom’s Orange Austria. The negotiations over the long-stalled deal, which have reached a critical point, have assumed an unexpected – and, for the companies, unwelcome – significance as a test of whether consolidation will be allowed within national telecoms markets.

Canada to Beef Up Its Cyber Defenses

Canada said it will more than double spending on defense against cyberattacks, amid heightened global worries over cyber warfare.

Vic Toews, Canada's public-safety minister, said his department would spend an additional 155 million Canadian dollars (US$158 million) over five years on cybersecurity, underscoring a recent call to arms among Western allies, from the U.S. to Britain, over the threat. The new Canadian commitment is on top of C$90 million already allocated for cyber security over the same period.

Iran Renews Internet Attacks on U.S. Banks

Iranian hackers renewed a campaign of cyberattacks against U.S. banks this week, targeting Capital One Financial and BB&T Corp. and openly defying U.S. warnings to halt, U.S. officials and others involved in the investigation into the attacks said.

The attacks, which disrupted the banks' websites, showed the ability of the Iranian group to sustain its cyberassault on the nation's largest banks for a fifth week, even as it announced its plans to attack in advance. U.S. officials said the attacks against banks, and others against Middle Eastern energy companies, were sponsored by the Iranian government and approved at high levels as part of a low-grade cyberwar that officials warned could lead to retaliation.

Facebook giving some marketers a peek at their fans' other Likes

Facebook is letting "priority" marketers use a new internal tool that shows them which other pages their own fans Like. For example, companies could use the tool to find out which TV shows their fans watch, which brands they buy and which bands they listen to.

The tool was discovered by AdWeek, which wrote about it earlier this week. AdWeek said only priority clients are getting access to the tool for now, which Facebook confirmed to The Times. "To help marketers build better campaigns, Facebook offers aggregated insights to managed clients that help them understand trends about their fan bases," a spokeswoman for the company told The Times in an email statement. "These tools do not provide marketers with any data about their competitors' fan bases." The tool is only available internally, and Facebook is making marketers come to their offices to access it, according to AdWeek.

How Steve Jobs would have answered the debate question on Apple

"IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China," CNN’s Candy Crowley said. "One of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?" Here’s how Apple’s Steve Jobs would have answered.

It is easy to build a factory in China and it is almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs. The US needs to train more American engineers. A s Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs reports: "Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, [Jobs] said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. 'You can't find that many in America to hire,' he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them. 'If you could educate these engineers,' he said, 'we could move more manufacturing plants here.' The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, 'We've got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.'"

US delegation members for international telecom treaty talks revealed

Representatives from Google, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T will join Obama Administration officials at a December conference in Dubai to negotiate the terms of an international telecommunications treaty. The industry members are part of the 95-person delegation representing the United States as it opposes potential efforts to expand a United Nations agency's authority over the management of the Internet during the upcoming treaty talks.

They will join a group of officials from the State Department, Department of Defense, Federal Communications Commission and other agencies, along with a team of telecommunications attorneys from Wiley Rein and representatives from advocacy groups and trade organizations. Amazon, Intel, Juniper Networks, PayPal, Sony, TMG Telecom, Verizon, Ericsson and Go Daddy also have representatives on the U.S. delegation, while consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge is sending two representatives. Members of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, TechAmerica and National Cable and Telecommunications Association will also be on hand in Dubai. In addition, a representative from dotGAY LLC, a corporation advocating for a "dot gay" domain name on the Web, is part of the U.S. delegation.

White House review finds no evidence of spying by Huawei

Apparently, a White House-ordered review of security risks posed by suppliers to U.S. telecommunications companies found no clear evidence that Huawei Technologies had spied for China. Instead, those leading the 18-month review concluded early this year that relying on Huawei, the world's second-largest maker of networking gear, was risky for other reasons, such as the presence of vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. These previously unreported findings support parts of a landmark U.S. congressional report last week that warned against allowing Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE Corp to supply critical telecom infrastructure. But it may douse speculation that Huawei has been caught spying for China.

Amazon challenges Apple in education with Whispercast

Amazon is rolling out Whispercast, a new service for managing content across a fleet of devices that has particular significance for schools.

Through Whispercast, a teacher or school administrator could purchase and distribute content to students across a class or grade level, as well as restrict additional purchases and web browsing on the device. To start, the service will work across Kindle devices, as well as Kindle apps for iOS and Android, and in the coming months it will expand to the Kindle Fire, Amazon said. The service can also extend to devices students may have owned previously. As schools increasingly bring more technology into the classroom, no doubt Amazon wants to be sure that it captures as much of the market as it can. While Apple’s interactive iPad has made significant headway in schools – in the second quarter of this year alone Apple sold one million iPads to schools – Amazon can now not only offer schools lower-priced devices but an easy way to distribute and control content for students.

Study: More slurs at Barack Obama than Mitt Romney

President Barack Obama bounced back at the presidential debate — and also bore the brunt of nasty commentary online, according to a study.

Impermium, a firm that studies online social content, reports that “comments slurring Obama exceeded those against Romney” fivefold. “What is surprising is that the majority of this commentary is offensive, insulting language distributed by machines spewing spam and a small number of people — notably, 46 percent of comments during the debate were generated by 1 percent of users,” writes Impermium.

Benton

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