Apple probably won’t start building iPhones and iPads in the United States any time soon , but CEO Tim Cook is happy to help other companies keep their manufacturing businesses stateside. Apple will pour $1 billion into a fund aimed at promoting advanced manufacturing jobs in the US, Cook announced on Mad Money today. “By doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond, ” Cook said. “Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them.” Apple will announce the first beneficiary of its fund later in May. Cook touched on other areas of interest for Apple, including its intention to support programs that help train developers and get more people coding. Apple will announce details about this endeavor in the summer. “We’re really looking at this thing deeply, ” Cook said. “How do we grow our employee base? How do we grow the developer base? How do we grow manufacturing? You will see us bring things to market in all of those areas across this year.” One of President Donald Trump’s rallying cries during the campaign was the idea that he would bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. In early 2016, Trump said he’d force Apple to “build their damn computers in this country, ” though in reality there’s no teeth to such a threat and the company still assembles its gadgets abroad . Source: Mad Money
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Apple pledges $1 billion to support manufacturing jobs in the US
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon’s advertising business has loomed quietly in the digital media space for some time but the online behemoth has given the clearest indication yet that it will now come to the fore. Advertisers and agencies have been hearing Amazon-sized footsteps for some time but until now the business has erred away from revealing too much. However, on its latest earnings call Amazon was asked by one analyst as to whether advertising could become a more “meaningful part of the business” over the near to mid-term. “It’s pretty early in the days with advertising but we’re very pleased with the team we have and the results, ” said Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky in response to another analyst query. “Our goal is to be helpful to consumers and enhance their shopping or their viewing experience with targeted recommendations, and we think a lot of the information we have and preferences of customers and recommendations help us do that for customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
From a report on Axios: Cyence, an economic modeling platform, shared some data with Axios that show the ramifications: Losses of $150 million for S&P 500 companies. Losses of $160 million for U.S. financial services companies using the infrastructure. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: Necurs, the world’s largest spam botnet with nearly five million infected bots, of which one million are active each day, has added a new module that can be used for launching DDoS attacks. The sheer size of the Necurs botnet, even in its worst days, dwarfs all of today’s IoT botnets. The largest IoT botnet ever observed was Mirai Botnet #14 that managed to rack up around 400, 000 bots towards the end of 2016 (albeit the owner of that botnet has now been arrested). If this new feature were to ever be used, a Necurs DDoS attack would easily break every DDoS record there is. Fortunately, no such attack has been seen until now. Until now, the Necurs botnet has been seen spreading the Dridex banking trojan and the Locky ransomware. According to industry experts, there’s a low chance we’d see the Necurs botnet engage in DDoS attacks because the criminal group behind the botnet is already making too much money to risk exposing their full infrastructure in DDoS attacks. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Libraries in St Louis have been bought to a standstill after computers in all the city’s libraries were infected with ransomware, a particularly virulent form of computer virus used to extort money from victims. Hackers are demanding $35, 000 (£28, 000) to restore the system after the cyberattack, which affected 700 computers across the Missouri city’s 16 public libraries. The hackers demanded the money in electronic currency bitcoin, but, as CNN reports, the authority has refused to pay for a code that would unlock the machines. As a result, the library authority has said it will wipe its entire computer system and rebuild it from scratch, a solution that may take weeks. On Friday, St Louis public library announced it had managed to regain control of its servers, with tech staff continuing to work to restore borrowing services. The 16 libraries have all remained open, but computers continue to be off limits to the public. Spokeswoman Jen Hatton told CNN that the attack had hit the city’s schoolchildren and its poor worst, as many do not have access to the internet at home. “For many we’re their only access to the internet, ” she said. “Some of them have a smartphone, but they don’t have a data plan. They come in and use the wifi.” As well as causing the loans system to seize up, preventing borrowers from checking out or returning books, the attack froze all computers, leaving no one able to access the four million items that should be available through the service. The system is believed to have been infected through a centralized computer server, and staff emails have also been frozen by the virus. The FBI has been called in to investigate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.