Assange Has Health Problems

Ecuador is worried about Julian Assange’s health, because the latter apparently is noticed losing weight and experiencing some vision problems. The WikiLeaks founder is currently hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in the attempt to avoid being deported to Sweden in order to be questioned of sexual abuse. Julian Assange believes that he is too important to the world to just go and deal with the accusations that were invented by the federal authorities with the only purpose to get him extradited to the United States.

Now it turns out that living in the Ecuadorian embassy is bad for his health. In result, the Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patino, had to request a meeting with his UK counterpart – William Hague. Ecuador had to ask the UK government for written assurances that Julian, who has been granted asylum by Quito, wouldn’t be arrested if he has to go to the hospital. However, the experts don’t see a reason why the British government would have to give such assurance to someone who isn’t its citizen and who has played the justice system for over a year now.

Moreover, given his previous behavior, the chances are that Julian Assange might simply sneak off to an airport instead of a hospital and escape to Ecuador. Then, after he arrives to a safe land, he might give a snarky press conference telling how he has defeated a plot of the federal authorities to keep him locked up in an embassy. Indeed, weight loss and eye sight problems can be very easily faked – all you have to do is eat less for a couple months and walk into a wall sometimes. Assange has also complained that he has a bit of a cough as well. By the way, he might also be losing weight because he works out using a running machine now, and also boxing and working out every other day with his personal trainer.

The Foreign Minister claimed he hoped that the UK government would pay some respect to human rights and international legislation. In the meantime, Ecuador’s deputy Foreign Minister confirmed that if WikiLeaks founder gets seriously ill, the government will have to either treat him at the embassy or hospitalize.

However, this is all news to the UK Foreign Office which had never got a request or heard that Julian Assange was under the weather. But they assured the press that they would certainly consider the issue. 

United Nations Urge Online Anti-Terrorism Strategy

A recent report conducted by United Nations is urging governments to discuss and implement surveillance regulations in order to prevent terrorists communicating online.

The United Nations claimed that although everyone recognizes the threat posed by terrorists use of the web, there is still no strategy to address this problem. It is said that the web can be used in many ways to support terrorism, for example to post propaganda, to train, to finance, and to plan. The United Nations even mentioned the platforms used by terrorists to arrange the acts, among which there were Facebook and YouTube.

In the meantime, the Internet should help fight terrorism rather than support it – for instance, to collect intelligence to prevent acts of terrorism, or to build a case for their prosecution. The UN report also acknowledges that too stringent anti-terrorism measures can cause problems with privacy and human rights, like tighter controls on Internet service providers to restrict access to content.

The UN suggests that member states should agree over retention of information by broadband provider, while policies vary across the world. The suggested strategy can involve developing a universal regulatory framework for regulations on all broadband providers.

At the same time, the report calls for greater use of surveillance in order to gather more data about the suspects and recommends for the governments to create clearer guidance on how private sectors ISPs help undertake electronic monitoring and surveillance on public communications.

The privacy and civil liberties campaign outfits agree that the web is a global entity, and such must be the action to address terrorism. Nevertheless, the report of the United Nations conflicts with the approach the UK’s Home Office currently employs. The privacy groups point out that preserving the data once someone is alleged of being involved in crime is a more proportionate measure than retaining data on everyone in the web just in case. In addition, the UN report recognized the role of judicial authorizations which lack from the UK’s policy at all.

The industry experts believe that this report is just a part of a complex debate, and while China is sitting on the security council of the United Nations, it can hardly have balanced civil liberties on the web.

Java Bug Fixed in 30 Minutes

One of the security experts is blaming Oracle for inactivity for Java’s problems. Adam Gowdiak, a security specialist, was angry that the company has been doing nothing to develop fixes for some important software vulnerabilities. For example, one of the flaws, dubbed Issue 50, is only scheduled to be fixed next February.

Adam Gowdiak claimed that the software developer was doing wrong thing by stupidly sticking to a quarterly patch release cycle which wasn’t even understandable. The security expert wrote in Full Disclosure that the response of the software giant was that its Critical Patch Updates usually pass an extensive integration testing with a number of other products like Weblogic Server, JRockit, and E-Business Suite, which takes time, of course. For example, if it fixed the bug in question (Issue 50), this would delay almost 140 fixes for the apps integrating Java SE.

Nevertheless, Adam Gowdiak proved that it wouldn’t take 4 months to fix the bug. The security expert decided to conduct a small bug fix experiment in order to see how hard it will be to fix Issue 50 and how long it will take him. It turned out that he only needed 30 minutes to write the code which would fix the vulnerability. Actually, the code had only 25 characters to be changed and, apparently, the fix didn’t even require to be tested for integration with other Oracle software. The matter is that the code logic suffered no changes, but only minor changes were made to the code itself.

Gowdiak hopes that his quick experiment will challenge Oracle and will result in the verification of the company’s stance, in particular the one relying on a need for 4 months to implement.

Facebook Profits from Mobile Adverts

Wall Street was shocked when Facebook made an outstanding amount of money from its mobile advertising. The social network confirmed that its mobile advertising revenue increased several times within the 3rd quarter. Facebook share values grew 13% following the news.

According to the statistics, Facebook has 14% of its advertising revenue coming from mobile advertisement. Hopefully, these figures will be able to reassure the potential and current investors that Facebook is starting to realize how to make money off smartphone and tablet users.

Nevertheless, the actual cash still remains quite small. As for the mobile advertisement revenues, they totaled to around $150 million, up from an estimated $40 million to $50 million in the 2nd quarter and almost nothing in the first. In other words, it is quite good, but nothing outstanding.

Media reports claim that the statistics disproves the most bearish opinion that the social network wasn’t able to profit from smartphones or tablets. However, it is still unclear if this is really the case. Despite the fact that Facebook already managed to generate impressive profit from their mobile apps, it will still take a lot of time to have mobile advertisement command the same rates as the traditional one.

Many financial experts still argue that Facebook isn’t worth anything when it comes to marketing. However, mobile ads have always been among the key investor concerns about the social networking giant which led to losing over $40 billion off its market value since its IPO 6 months ago. It adds to the fact that Facebook was hugely over valued – even taking the recent gains into account, you could still pick up a Facebook share for less than $22.

Still, the company’s other figures also look promising. For example, advertising revenue grew 36% to $1.09 billion, which is 8% more than in the 2nd quarter. However, the proceeds from Facebook payments and other businesses gained only 13% to reach $176 million.

In other words, the statistics are already better than the experts predicted, but the social network’s share price is still hugely overvalued. This is why it could fall further when shareholders get the permission to sell their shares one day later this year. The most popular estimation of a share price remains $13 to $14 a share.

Android Apps Open System to Malware

According to the researchers from Germany’s Leibniz University of Hannover and Philips University of Marburg, Android apps which the security experts failed to properly test are now opening the OS up to malware. They have found out that over 40 apps in Google’s Play Market leak personal details while travelling between handsets that run Android and webservers for banks and other online services.

When you connect Android devices to a local area network which used a wide range of well-known exploits, some of which are found on the Internet, it is very easy to defeat the security protocols used by the above mentioned applications. All of them are quite popular and have been downloaded from up to 185 million times, which means that there is an outstanding number of vulnerable Android devices out there.

According to the researchers, they managed to collect bank account data, payment credentials for PayPal, American Express and so on. In addition, Facebook, email and cloud storage credentials and messages also easily leaked. Moreover, it took almost no time to access the IP cameras! Another reason for the devices to become vulnerable is the fragility of both the SSL and TLS protocols which built the basis for encryption between websites and users.

Although the technology itself is quite secure, its protection is undermined when certificate authorities fail to secure their infrastructure. In frames of the experiment, the researchers downloaded 13,500 free applications from Google Play in order to find out whether their SSL implementations were vulnerable to the exploits. In result, it turned out that 8% of the sample (more than one thousand applications) contained SSL code and therefore were potentially vulnerable to the attacks. Out of those apps, a hundred was picked by the researchers to crack. 41% of them appeared really vulnerable.

Surprisingly enough, the researchers didn’t compare the results with Apple apps. Instead, the researchers admitted that it was due to the openness of the Google platform that they could perform static analysis of vulnerability, while it’s hard to do the same for Apple software. Anyway, it might appear that the vulnerability to applications is universal for the pocket devices in general. In this case, the companies would have to prohibit do-it-yourself policies on that basis.

Top 10 Hardware Companies By Revenue

A Booz & Company report assessed how well Information Communication Technology (ICT) providers are doing under various categories. Here’s a look at the top hardware and infrastructure companies by revenue that are striving to build more differentiated businesses, while retaining their core.

Source: The Global ICT 50, The Supply Side of Digitization/Booz & Company

Hewlett-Packard, a company founded in a garage in Palo Alto by William Hewlett and Dave Packard tops the list, with a revenue of$127.2 billion. Its major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise, and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software and a diverse range of printers, and other imaging products.

Apple, best-known for its hardware products such as the Mac line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad comes next with a revenue of $108.2 billion. It is the world's third-largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia.

Samsung with a revenue of $99.8 billion is a South Korean company and the group has numerous subsidiaries and businesses. The company also produces around a fifth of South Korea's total exports and has a powerful influence on South Korea's economic development, politics, media and culture

Dell is another American multinational company which features in this list with a revenue of $61.5 billion. The company develops, sells and supports computers and related products and services and is the third largest PC vendor in the world after HP and Lenovo.

Fujitsu, a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, has a revenue of$55.5 billion. The company mainly makes computing products, but its subsidiaries also offer a diversity of products and services in the areas of personal computing, telecommunications and advanced microelectronics.

Cisco Systems designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment and its current portfolio of products and services is focused upon three market segments – Enterprise and Service Provider, Small Business and the Home. Its revenue is $43.2 billion.

NEC, which was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited rebranded itself in 1983. It is a Japanese multinational provider of IT services and products, with its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo. It also sells semiconductors and has a revenue of $38.2 billion.

Sweden’s Ericsson is a provider of telecommunications equipment and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, especially mobile networks. Ericsson was also the inventor of Bluetooth. It has a revenue of$30.4 billion.

Xerox, which is commonly used to substitute as a synonym for photocopy has a revenue of$21.6 billion. It sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies.

A global telecommunications equipment corporation, Alcatel-Lucent is the last on the list with a revenue of $21.4 billion. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services

Another BitTorrent Mass Lawsuit Rejected

Around 1,000 subpoenas within a mass BitTorrent lawsuit have been rejected by the American District Judge Faith S. Hochberg. The case involved a lot of Internet users who were accused of illegal downloading of the latest album Dark Adrenaline by Italian metal band Lacuna Coil.

A few months ago, the label named Nuclear Blast Records, which signed metal band All Shall Perish, was trying to pursue eighty BitTorrent users alleged of having downloaded the latest album of All Shall Perish through BitTorrent websites. Today a similar lawsuit is filed by Century Media Records – the record label of Italian Lacuna Coil.

Faith S. Hochberg, the judge ruling in the lawsuit, decided that the lawsuit wrongly joined too many defendants together. As such, he has voided all of their claims, except one, saying that there must be some kind of a connection between the defendants aside from the shared content and method of distribution. In other words, the judge thinks that the defendants must be simultaneously involved in the same transaction with the same downloader.

The lawsuit in question had been launched by a New Jersey attorney representing Century Media Records. Like in most of the largest file-sharing cases, the attorney chose to hire a law firm which specialized in tracking the IP addresses alleged of being involved in illegal distribution of the content. Then, they would have subpoenas issued for each respective IP address in order to force ISPs to find their subscribers and threaten them with an enormous copyright trial. This is how people are usually forced to settle the case and agree to pay a few thousand dollars to get rid of the problem. However, users who are ready to fight back can hire a lawyer and give it a try.

UK Music Outfit Blacklisted BitTorrent Portals

The British Phonographic Industry is trying to force major British Internet service providers prevent their subscribers from accessing a number of BitTorrent portals, including Kickass Torrents, Fenopy, and H33t.

The list of broadband providers which have received letters with such a request includes TalkTalk, BT, Sky, Virgin Media, and O2 – basically, all major Internet providers of the country. All of them have agreed to enforce this new anti-piracy measure, but only when a new court order is passed.

The Executive Director for the Open Rights Group, Jim Killock, has claimed that going against unauthorized file-sharing like this is not the most efficient and beneficial strategy to fight piracy. Killock added that such blocking orders are usually indefinite and open ended, which often results in blocking legitimate portals as well. Both the British Phonographic Industry and the courts are recommended to slow down and reconsider the methods of fighting piracy. At least, this approach must be used very carefully, because in this case censorship is not the best idea. It will only lead to more censorship instead of solving the problem it is supposed to address.

The Open Rights Group also stressed that the flourishing of the digital music industry is ensured by its efforts towards innovation, which is definitely more effective approach than copyright lawsuits or blocking measures.

In the meantime, the results of the study conducted by the IFPI (the outfit that represents the world recording industry) have made digital piracy look less awful than it had long been portrayed by the music industry. It revealed that digital album sales in the United Kingdom have actually increased by 27% in 2011.

Amazon Stealing Cash from UK Citizens

Online seller Amazon has been making profits from its UK customers by making them pay 20% VAT on electronic book sales, while the seller has to pay only 3% VAT. The difference is simply pocketed by Amazon.

Newspapers claim that the Luxembourg-based bookseller is making money from a European tax anomaly, trousering the difference between what it forces customers to pay and what it really pays itself.

Although the publishers know about this, they are too afraid of doing anything, because the service might stop selling their products. Entities like Amazon are supposed to collect the VAT levy from their consumers before passing it on to the government. In our case, Amazon only has to pass 3% from ebook sales to Luxembourg government, but if it was based in the United Kingdom it would have to pass 20%.

The online book seller is starting negotiations with its publishers on the basis that the British VAT rate of 20% must be knocked off the cost price, which gives it profit of 13.8% from ebook price in the rip-off UK. The company is negotiating further discounts on top of the VAT subsidy. However, these might result in publishers receiving less than 10% of what the online customer actually paid.

Of course, the publishers are not happy about that. One of the senior publishing executives admitted that the online service was not nice to deal with. The matter is that Amazon could easily shut down the buy button on their portal on titles of any publisher who would step out of line.

Actually, in one case the company went as far as to seek a deal which would have resulted in a 92% discount. The addressed publisher refused the terms, because they would have received only 80p on an ebook selling for £10 on the seller’s British website. Of those 80p, the author would have received only 3p per each sold copy at that rate. In the meantime, Amazon bars the publisher from offering a more profitable deal to another retailer if they don’t provide the same discount to Amazon.

According to Security and Exchange Commission, the statistics say that within the past 3 years, the online retailer has generated sales of over £7.6 billion in the United Kingdom, but didn’t attract any corporation tax on these profits. This, as you can understand, is just another source of profit for the company.

Windows 7 Becoming More Infected

According to official Microsoft statistics, Windows 7’s malware infection rate has increased by no less than 182% in 2012, but the operating system is still recognized to be 3 times safer than its predecessor Windows XP. 

Although the figure of 182% is obviously staggering, it is still 3 times better than that of XP, which is blamed to be as insecure as letting the Anonymous hacker group look after a Greek government portal dedicated to the visit of Germany’s Angela Merkel.

According to the company’s 6 most recent monthly security reports, in the 2nd quarter of this year, Windows 7 was between 33% and 182% more likely to be infected by viruses compared to the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The latter, shipped in February 2011, saw the following infection increases: 172% for x86, 182% for x64.

Microsoft insecurity specialists explained that the reason for such a considerable increase was a boost in successful hacker attacks. In addition, the statistics says that the Internet users tend to become less savvy and therefore their machines are more vulnerable to malware infection. In the meantime, when a new version of operating system enters the market, it is normally technology enthusiasts who purchase it. Only a few months later the software is bought by those users who can eagerly click on any link promising a free green card.

Media reports also suggest that this increase in malware infection rate is also due to the fact that Windows 7 is more popular than other operating systems. Indeed, this piece of Microsoft software was the first to be adopted by both corporations and individual users, with its usage being reported to grow 45%.