Tag: california

Why Apple added debt to its $145 billion cash hoard

Anton TwAng Apple is making headlines with rumors of a record-sized bond sale. According to reports, Cupertino is likely taking advantage of historically dirt-cheap interest rates on corporate debt by raising about $17 billion from a series of six types of bond papers. It’s not the largest non-bank bond sale in history, but it does rank near the top. Automaker General Motors raised $17.5 billion in bond financing a decade ago, for example. Then again, GM’s financing arm, then known as GMAC, sort of made a bank out of the car builder. Pharma giants Abbott Laboratories and Roche Holdings also issued $14.7 billion and $16 billion in bond debt fairly recently. Record-level or not, Apple’s sale certainly ranks right up there with the big boys. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Apple added debt to its $145 billion cash hoard

Opera claims former employee gave stolen trade secrets to Mozilla

Opera has been busy repositioning itself as a middleware player for the mobile Web recently, but that isn’t stopping the company from defending its investment in browser technology. The company has filed a 20 million Kronor ($3.4 million) lawsuit against a former employee and consultant, claiming that he stole company secrets and incorporated them into a mobile browser for Mozilla. According to a report by Norwegian IT site Digi.no , Opera has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, a Norwegian musician and designer who worked for Opera from 1999 to 2006 as a user interface designer and developer before  leaving to pursue his music career . Hansen also worked for Opera as an outside consultant from 2009 to 2010. Last year, Hansen was involved with the development of the Mozilla prototype “Junior” browser for Apple iOS . Hansen and Alex Limi —former Firefox UI head and now manager of Mozilla’s product design strategy—demonstrated the browser prototype in a video on Air Mozilla last June. Hansen said in the video, “I spent almost seven years trying to simplify Opera and didn’t really succeed. Simplification of something that already exists is really hard. That’s way beyond product design issues—it’s company issues. I feel like we failed in making something really easy.” Limi credited Hansen with the invention of a number of Mozilla UI features, including the browser search—”the source of all our revenue,” Limi said—and the “speed dial” feature that allows users to pick frequently visited pages from a new browser tab. “Pretty much everything he’s invented, they’re now in all browsers,” Limi continued. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Opera claims former employee gave stolen trade secrets to Mozilla

Man accused of placing GPS device on victim’s car before burglarizing her home

A burglary suspect currently on trial in Johnson County, Kansas allegedly put a GPS tracking device on a victim’s car to determine whether anyone was home. The victim, an unnamed Overland Park woman, told her story to the  Kansas City Star on Friday. Overland Park police, Leawood police, and Johnson County prosecutors declined to comment on the GPS allegation to the newspaper. According to the Star , the suspect, Steven Alva Glaze, allegedly burglarized the woman’s home on March 25. The victim owns a jewelry business in the Kansas City suburb. Glaze is now on trial for 14 counts of criminal damage to property, theft, attempted burglary, and burglary for the alleged crimes. The use of GPS tracking devices surreptitiously installed on cars recalls the famous Jones v. United States case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2012 that law enforcement does not have the authority to warrantlessly place a device on a criminal suspect’s vehicle. However, the use of GPS by criminal suspects to track victims still seems to be quite rare. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man accused of placing GPS device on victim’s car before burglarizing her home

FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam

Sorry FBI, you can’t randomly hijack someone’s webcam. Stefano Maffei A federal magistrate judge has denied (PDF) a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.” Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “ Rule 41 search and seizure warrant ” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.” In an unusually-public order published this week , Judge Stephen Smith slapped down the FBI on the grounds that the warrant request was overbroad and too invasive. In it, he gives a unique insight as to the government’s capabilities for sophisticated digital surveillance on potential targets. According to the judge’s description of the spyware, it sounds very similar to the RAT software that many miscreants use to spy on other Internet users without their knowledge. (Ars editor Nate Anderson detailed the practice last month.) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam

Former Hostgator employee arrested, charged with rooting 2,700 servers

Aurich Lawson A former employee of Hostgator has been arrested and charged with installing a backdoor that gave him almost unfettered control over more than 2,700 servers belonging to the widely used Web hosting provider. Eric Gunnar Gisse, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, was charged with felony breach of computer security by the district attorney’s office of Harris County in Texas, according to court documents. He worked as a medium-level administrator from September 2011 until he was terminated on February 15, 2012, according to prosecutors and a company executive. A day after his dismissal, Hostgator officials discovered a backdoor application that allowed Gisse to log in to servers from remote locations, including a computer located at the Hetzner Data Center in Nuremberg, Germany. He took pains to disguise his malware as a widely used Unix administration tool to prevent his superiors from discovering the backdoor process, prosecutors said. “The process was named ‘pcre’, a common system file, in order to disguise the true purpose of the process which would grant an attacker unauthorized access into Hostgator’s computer network,” a Houston Police Department investigator and the document’s “affiant,” Gordon M. Garrett, wrote in an affidavit. “Complainant told affiant he searched Hostgator’s computer network and found the unauthorized ‘pcre’ process installed on 2723 different Hostgator servers within the computer network.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former Hostgator employee arrested, charged with rooting 2,700 servers

ColdFusion hack used to steal hosting provider’s customer data

A vulnerability in the ColdFusion Web server platform, reported by Adobe less than a week ago, has apparently been in the wild for almost a month and has allowed the hacking of at least one company website, exposing customer data. Yesterday, it was revealed that the virtual server hosting company Linode had been the victim of a multi-day breach that allowed hackers to gain access to customer records. The breach was made possible by a vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion server platform that could, according to Adobe, “be exploited to impersonate an authenticated user.” A patch had been issued for the vulnerability on April 9  and was rated as priority “2” and “important.” Those ratings placed it at a step down from the most critical, indicating that there were no known exploits at the time the patch was issued but that data was at risk. Adobe credited “an anonymous security researcher,” with discovering the vulnerability. But according to IRC conversation  including one of the alleged hackers of the site, Linode’s site had been compromised for weeks before its discovery. That revelation leaves open the possibility that other ColdFusion sites have been compromised as hackers sought out targets to use the exploit on. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ColdFusion hack used to steal hosting provider’s customer data

New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

Ratings are important on eBay. Lots of buyers use them to assess the quality and reliability of particular sellers, and lots of sellers will go to great lengths to keep perfect or near-perfect ratings. But an Ohio company named Med Express has shown it’s willing to go further than other sellers: it’s willing to litigate. When Med Express got its first piece of negative feedback, it filed a lawsuit , insisting that the feedback be removed from eBay. Amy Nicholls paid $175 for a microscope light, as well as $12 for shipping. She was annoyed when she had to pay an extra $1.44 in postage due and left feedback complaining about that inconvenience. Med Express asked her to remove the feedback and she refused. The company complained that because it offered to refund her the $1.44, she should have taken down the feedback, which had the potential to hurt its business. (In the past six months, Med Express has 142 pieces of positive feedback and only one negative review.) Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

“Syrian Electronic Army” hacks NPR publishing system, edits articles

NPR’s Web publishing system and several of the news agency’s Twitter accounts were hacked yesterday by a group supportive of the Syrian government that calls itself the “Syrian Electronic Army.” “Late Monday evening, several stories on the NPR website were defaced with headlines and text that said ‘Syrian Electronic Army Was Here,'” an NPR statement published in a NPR.org news story on the incident said. “Some of these stories were distributed to and appeared on NPR Member Station websites. We have made the necessary corrections to those stories on NPR.org and are continuing to work with our Member Stations. Similar statements were posted on several NPR Twitter accounts. Those Twitter accounts have been addressed. We are closely monitoring the situation.” Sophos’s Naked Security blog published a summary of the hack , including a screenshot of a Google search showing some of the headlines edited by the Syrian Electronic Army: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Syrian Electronic Army” hacks NPR publishing system, edits articles

Google Glass specs: 16GB SSD, “full-day” battery, and no 3rd-party ads

Google The Google Glass team yesterday released a list of tech specs for the upcoming augmented reality glasses. They will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity; 16GB of flash memory, with 12GB usable (synced with Google cloud storage); a 5MP camera for photos and 720p for video; a battery providing a full day of typical usage; and an HD display that will be “the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away.” The optimal resolution for photos and video will be 640×360, according to a separate document prepared for developers. Developers using the Google Mirror API to create applications for Glass have also been told not to serve up any advertisements. “You may not serve or include any advertisements in your API Client,” the Mirror API terms of service state. “You may not use user data from your API Client for advertising purposes. You may not sell or transmit any user data received from your API Client(s) to a third-party ad network or service, data broker, or other advertising or marketing provider. For the avoidance of doubt, user data from the API Client(s) may not be used for Third-Party Ad Serving.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass specs: 16GB SSD, “full-day” battery, and no 3rd-party ads