Cuba’s new President Raul Castro is to lift a ban on a wide range of consumer electrical appliances.
Cubans will be allowed for the first time to own DVD players and computers, according to an internal government memo leaked to Reuters news agency. Curbs may also be lifted on video machines, electric pressure and rice cookers, microwaves and car alarms, as well as 19-inch and 24-inch TV sets. A top government official confirmed to the BBC such plans were being adopted. But it is thought air conditioners will not be available until 2009 and toasters until the year after due to limited power supplies.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Sharp Corp (6753.T) said on Friday it would start selling cell phones in China ahead of the Beijing Olympics, heading into a market where a rival has just pulled out in the face of fierce competition.
Sharp will be the only Japanese firm selling handsets in China after Kyocera Corp (6971.T) withdraws this month, hurt by lower-priced phones from companies like Nokia (NOK1V.HE) and Motorola Inc (MOT.N).
“There are a growing number of consumers in China who want to buy high-tech handsets, such as those equipped with cameras almost as good as digital cameras, even if they are expensive,” said Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama.
“People want a nice screen especially for the Olympics.”
Sharp is known for its strength in high-tech mobile phone parts such as mid- to small-sized liquid crystal display (LCD) panels and small cameras.
Sales may start from around June, she said.
Nakayama also said Sharp aims for a global market share of 30 percent in LCD panels in 2010 or 2011, when a new plant is at full production capacity.
Shares of Sharp were up 1.5 percent at 1,763 yen as of 0053 GMT, outperforming a 0.6 percent rise in the benchmark Nikkei average (.N225).
(Reporting by Aiko Hayashi, editing by Edwina Gibbs)
“Yahoo! Europe has begun a programme to relocate its European headquarters to Switzerland,” the company said in a statement.
“This decision is part of our ongoing international business strategy to increase competitiveness, deliver financial results, performance and efficiencies.”
The statement said that the relocation would take about 18 months and would involve five percent of the company's work force in Europe.
It added: “Yahoo! Europe remains committed to maintaining a strong presence in all of its key markets in Europe.”
It did not give any further details.
Although the 802.1x access protocol is a must for wireless network security, companies rarely use it and thus leave the door open for hackers, according to Robert Lamprecht, IT advisory supervisor at KPMG.
The protocol lets users on either wireless or wired local networks set up a connection and prevent others from accessing the port they are trying to use if authentication fails.
“With 802.1x unauthorized users can't get access to your network; without it you are vulnerable to people who can come in and steal information,” said Lamprecht, who spoke at the European Computer Audit Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.
But so far that argument hasn't convinced many companies.
When Lamprecht asked an audience during a session on wireless security if they used 802.1x, only a few out of about a hundred participants raised their hands.
Part of the problem is awareness, according to Lamprecht. Many people still see internal networks as secure.
Complexity an Issue
But a bigger problem is complexity.
“Implementing 802.1x requires a lot of work, companies often have to change their whole architecture,” said Lamprecht.
It also requires a lot of management resources, he said. Management software is getting better and easier to use, but companies still have to use different tools for hardware, software and identity, which creates a lot of overhead. On top of Lamprecht's wish list is a tool that can do all three, and lower management costs.
“It is and will continue to be a hot topic, so we will probably see [such a tool] in three years,” Lamprecht said.
San Francisco - Google Apps users now have a more secure way to log on to the online groupware service.
Arcot Systems announced on Wednesday that it was making its A-OK On-Demand authentication service available to Google Apps Premier Edition users to add another layer of security to the logon process.
Typically Google Apps users enter a username and password to get access to the Web-based mail, calendar, and groupware software, but with the A-OK product, they also use an encrypted file that is stored on their computer to add a second factor of authentication. As with online banking products, if the user tries to log on from a different computer, A-OK will ask predetermined questions, such as “What high school did you attend,” before granting the user access to Google Apps.
This is the first time that Google has partnered with someone to provide two-factor authentication for Google Apps, according to Eran Feigenbaum, senior security manager with Google Enterprise. “Google has the tools to show you how to pick a good password,” he said, “But to the companies that are concerned about users losing their passwords, I think the Arcot two-factor authentication product is perfect.”
Since launching more than a year ago, Google Apps has added more than 500,000 customers, but some of them are looking for a higher level of security when it comes to signing on to the service, Feigenbaum said.
Feigenbaum hopes that Arcot's two-factor product will make Google Apps more appealing in markets where this kind of strong authentication is a common requirement, such as the financial services and defense industries.
The A-OK On-Demand service is available now for Google Apps. It costs $1 per user per year and is available only to users of the Premier Edition of Google Apps.
NEW YORK (AFP) - America Online, the Internet arm of media giant Time Warner, said Thursday it was buying Bebo for 850 million dollars to stake a premier position in the flourishing social-networking arena.
AOL's acquisition of Bebo, a leading social networking website in Britain and top ranked in New Zealand and Ireland, appears to all but eliminate the possibility AOL will rescue Yahoo from a hostile takeover bid by Microsoft.
Yahoo had reportedly been courting AOL as a “white knight” to rescue it from Microsoft's quest to acquire the California firm in a stock and cash deal originally valued at 44.6 billion dollars.
AOL is counting on Bebo to help it regain the prestige it held in the pioneering days of the Internet.
“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” AOL chief executive Randy Falco said in a written release.
AOL was attracted by Bebo's roster of more than 40 million members worldwide and its rapid growth, according to Falco.
“This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers,” Falco said of the potential to generate ad revenue from Bebo's members.
Bebo bills itself as a social media network that lets community members create and share video, music, written works and other digitized content.
Bebo describes its users as “heavily engaged,” viewing an average of 78 online pages daily. Bebo has 100 employees in Britain and the United States.
“AOL has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks,” said Bebo president Joanna Shields.
“With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL.”
The deal comes a week after AOL opened its platform so outside software developers could customize fun or functional applications.
AOL also recently made a version of its AIM messaging service available for Apple's hot iPhones, which combine Internet, music, video, and mobile telephone capabilities.
“This acquisition supports our key objectives — accelerating the growth, engagement and monetization of one of the world's most engaged online communities,” AOL chief operating officer Ron Grant said of the Bebo buy.
Advertising at social-networking websites is expected to surge 75 percent to 2.1 billion dollars this year, and climb to 4.1 billion dollars annually worldwide by 2011, according to industry tracker eMarketer.
AOL says it launched 17 international websites in the past year and plans to expand to 30 countries outside the United States by the end of 2008.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game hardware and software hit $1.33 billion in February, up 34 percent from a year earlier, with Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 topping Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 for the second month in a row.
Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii was still the best-selling console, moving 432,000 units and topping 281,000 PlayStation 3s and 255,000 Xbox 360s, according to data from market research firm NPD.
“Call of Duty 4″ from Activision Inc was the top game for a single console, moving 296,000 copies for the Xbox 360, NPD said.
San Francisco - Though many tech vendors are suffering as the widening U.S. financial crisis slows down consumer and business spending, IT mergers and acquisitions including bellwethers like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Electronic Arts, and AOL continue to reshape the technology landscape and provide opportunities for investors.
AOL's announcement on Thursday that it will buy social-networking site Bebo
SEATTLE - The top executive at Microsoft Corp.’s MSN media network is leaving for Los Angeles advertising startup Spot Runner, the software maker said Thursday.
Joanne Bradford’s departure follows a management shake-up in Microsoft’s online business in February, when Bradford’s then-boss Steve Berkowitz left. He had arrived in 2006 and was charged in part with expanding the audience on Microsoft’s disparate MSN and Windows Live sites.
Bradford’s decision also comes six weeks after Microsoft’s unsolicited $40-billion bid for Web portal business Yahoo Inc. The takeover offer is widely seen as an admission that Microsoft’s hope of challenging Google Inc.’s search and advertising dominance with a homegrown solution was gone.
Bradford was to report to Satya Nadella, promoted last month to the role of senior vice president in charge of search, portals and Microsoft’s advertising platform.
“We thank her for her many contributions in helping us build a world-class advertising sales organization, bringing the advertiser point of view closer to Microsoft and evolving the MSN experience through partnerships and branded entertainment,” Nadella said in an e-mailed statement.
Bradford’s last day as a Microsoft corporate vice president is March 19. She will begin as Spot Runner’s executive vice president of national marketing services later in the month.
“I’m thrilled about joining such a visionary and entrepreneurial team,” Bradford said in a Spot Runner press release.
Spot Runner gives local businesses a lower-cost, self-serve way to run ads on television. The company has received funding from Battery Ventures, Index Ventures, CBS Corp. and advertising agencies WPP Group and Interpublic Group, among others.
Greg Nelson, who worked for Bradford as general manager of MSN International, will serve as the interim head of MSN worldwide.
If the proposed Yahoo takeover is completed, Microsoft is expected to make more radical personnel changes as it blends the two companies.
From iPods to navigation systems, some of today’s hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory — pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.
Computer users have been warned for years about virus threats from downloading Internet porn and opening suspicious e-mail attachments. Now they run the risk of picking up a digital infection just by plugging a new gizmo into their PCs.
Recent cases reviewed by The Associated Press include some of the most widely used tech devices: Apple iPods, digital picture frames sold by Target and Best Buy stores and TomTom navigation gear.
In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.
So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control — perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing — rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.
It’s the digital equivalent of the recent series of tainted products traced to China, including toxic toothpaste, poisonous pet food and toy trains coated in lead paint.
But sloppiness is the simplest explanation, not the only one.
If a virus is introduced at an earlier stage of production, by a corrupt employee or a hacker when software is uploaded to the gadget, then the problems could be far more serious and widespread.
Knowing how many devices have been sold, or tracking the viruses with any precision, is impossible because of the secrecy kept by electronics makers and the companies they hire to build their products.
But given the nature of mass manufacturing, the numbers could be huge.
“It’s like the old cockroach thing — you flip the lights on in the kitchen and they run away,” said Marcus Sachs, a former White House cybersecurity official who now runs the security research group SANS Internet Storm Center. “You think you’ve got just one cockroach? There’s probably thousands more of those little boogers that you can’t see.”
Jerry Askew, a Los Angeles computer consultant, bought a new Uniek digital picture frame to surprise his 81-year-old mother for her birthday. But when he added family photos, it tried to unload a few surprises of its own.
When he plugged the frame into his Windows PC, his antivirus program alerted him to a threat. The $50 frame, built in China and bought at Target, was infested with four viruses, including one that steals passwords.
“You expect quality control coming out of the manufacturers,” said Askew, 42. “You don’t expect that sort of thing to be on there.”
Security experts say the malicious software is apparently being loaded at the final stage of production, when gadgets are pulled from the assembly line and plugged in to a computer to make sure everything works.
If the testing computer is infected — say, by a worker who used it to charge his own infected iPod — the digital germ can spread to anything else that gets plugged in.
The recent infections may be accidental, but security experts say they point out an avenue of attack that could be exploited by hackers.
“We’ll probably see a steady increase over time,” said Zulfikar Ramzan, a computer security researcher at Symantec Corp. “The hackers are still in a bit of a testing period — they’re trying to figure out if it’s really worth it.”
Thousands of people whose antivirus software isn’t up to date may have been infected by new products without even knowing it, experts warn. And even protective software may not be enough.
In one case, digital frames sold at Sam’s Club contained a previously unknown bug that not only steals online gaming passwords but disables antivirus software, according to security researchers at Computer Associates.
“It’s like if you pick up a gun you’ve never seen before — before you pull the trigger you’d probably check the chamber,” said Joe Telafici, vice president of operations of McAfee Avert Labs, the security software maker’s threat-research arm.
“It’s an extreme analogy, but it’s the right idea. It’s best to spend the extra 30 seconds to be sure than be wrong,” he added.
Consumers can protect themselves from most factory-loaded infections by running an antivirus program and keeping it up to date. The software checks for known viruses and suspicious behaviors that indicate an attack by malicious code — whether from a download or a gadget attached to the PC via USB cable.
One information-technology worker wrote to the SANS security group that his new digital picture frame delivered “the nastiest virus that I’ve ever encountered in my 20-plus-year IT career.” Another complained his new external hard drive had malfunctioned because it came loaded with a password-stealing virus.
Monitoring suppliers in China and elsewhere is expensive, and cuts into the savings of outsourcing. But it’s what U.S. companies must do to prevent poisoning on the assembly line, said Yossi Sheffi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in supply chain management.
“It’s exactly the same thing, whether it happened in cyberspace or software or lead paint or toothpaste or dog food — they’re all quality control issues,” Sheffi said.
While manufacturing breakdowns don’t happen often, they have become frequent enough — especially amid intense competition among Chinese suppliers — to warrant more scrutiny by companies that rely on them, Sheffi said.
“Most of the time it works,” he said. “The Chinese suppliers have every reason to be good suppliers because they’re in it for the long run. But it’s a higher risk, and we’ve now seen the results of that higher risk.”
The AP contacted some of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers for details on how they guard against infections — among them Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which is based in Taiwan and has an iPod factory in China; Singapore-based Flextronics International Ltd.; and Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc. All declined comment or did not respond.
The companies whose products were infected in cases reviewed by AP refused to reveal details about the incidents. Of those that confirmed factory infections, all said they had corrected the problems and taken steps to prevent recurrences.
Apple disclosed the most information, saying the virus that infected a small number of video iPods in 2006 came from a PC used to test compatibility with the gadget’s software.
Best Buy, the biggest consumer electronics outlet in the U.S., said it pulled its affected China-made frames from the shelves and took “corrective action” against its vendor. But the company declined repeated requests to provide details.
Sam’s Club and Target say they are investigating complaints but have not been able to verify their frames were contaminated.
Legal experts say manufacturing infections could become a big headache for retailers that sell infected devices and the companies that make them, if customers can demonstrate they were harmed by the viruses.
“The photo situation is really a cautionary tale — they were just lucky that the virus that got installed happened to be one that didn’t do a lot of damage,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But there’s nothing about that situation that means next time the virus won’t be a more serious one.”