Month: January 2020

A federal jury Wednesday decided that Apple Inc. and Broadcom Inc. must pay $1.1 billion to the California Institute of Technology for infringing on patents.Apple was on the hook for nearly $838 million of the damages awarded in a lawsuit that said Broadcom used its patented Wi-Fi data transmission technology in computer chips that went into iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other Apple devices.Caltech, the superstar tech school based in Pasadena, said it was pleased by the verdict of the Los Angeles jury.“As a nonprofit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education,” a school statement said.Emails seeking comment from Cupertino-based Apple and Broadcom weren’t immediately returned Wednesday night but they are expected to appeal.Last week, San Jose-based Broadcom announced it had reached agreements to supply components to Apple devices released for the next three years.It wasn’t immediately clear what impact the lawsuit award would have on those deals, which Broadcom said could generate $15 billion in revenues.
 
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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that the United States will only pass information across what he termed “trusted networks” and criticized close ally Britain over its decision to allow the Chinese firm Huawei to build parts of the country’s 5G mobile network.  Speaking to reporters Wednesday en route to London, where he is due to meet Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, Pompeo said putting Huawei into the British system “creates a real risk.”The top U.S. diplomat described Huawei as an extension of China’s communist party that is obligated to hand over information to the party, adding that the Trump administration will evaluate Britain’s decision. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to reporters aboard his plane en route to London, Jan. 29, 2020.”We will make sure that when American information passes across a network, we are confident that that network is a trusted one. We’ll work with the United Kingdom. We were urging them to make a decision that was different than the one they made and we’ll have a conversation about how to proceed,” Pompeo said.Britain had been agonizing over whether to allow Huawei to be part of its 5G rollout, twice postponing the decision since July last year. In the end, the government said it would allow the Chinese firm restricted access to a 35 percent market share of the periphery of the network, rather than the core elements.  Johnson told lawmakers Wednesday the decision offered the best of both worlds.Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly session of Prime Ministers Questions in Parliament in London, Jan. 29, 2020.”I think it is absolutely vital that people in this country do have access to the best technology available. But that we also do absolutely nothing to imperil our relationship with the United States, to do anything to compromise our critical national security infrastructure,” Johnson said at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament.The announcement comes just days before Britain is set to formally leave the European Union on Jan. 31. Some lawmakers fear the Huawei decision could compromise the transatlantic relationship just as Britain seeks to build on its links beyond Europe after Brexit, with a group of Conservative MPs threatening to vote against the government’s 5G plans.”Certainly, U.S. politicians have made some bold threats over the last couple of weeks, but I think this storm will blow over,” said James Sullivan, head of cybersecurity at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. “From the UK’s perspective, this has been a risk-management decision based on technical assessments.”However, in Washington, Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner says there is bipartisan agreement that Britain has made the wrong choice.FILE – Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., talks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 28, 2020.”Huawei has been and will continue to be a national security threat,” Warner said. “The Brits are our strongest allies. We’ve got to find a way to work through this. I do recognize as well that in Huawei we’ve got an equipment vendor that while as a national security threat is also a lot cheaper than any of the other Western alternatives.”Those Western alternatives are lagging behind, notes cyber industry expert Mark Skilton of Britain’s Warwick Business School.”The issue just in a nutshell is whether you want to continue the economic growth 5G can create because of the speed and power of it, versus the national interests of the U.S., particularly over the Chinese dominating the market,” Skilton said. “5G networks promise to transform our lives through the so-called ‘internet of things.’ Everything from domestic refrigerators to critical national infrastructure will be connected through near-instantaneous networks. That presents many more ‘attack points.'”There is a threat of potentially embedding ‘Trojans’ or malware into these devices,” he added. “Now, if Huawei is the choice of hardware, then they could embed — and I’m not saying they are, but they could — embed this kind of surveillance technology or stealth technology.”  The European Union on Wednesday adopted similar guidelines to Britain, stopping short of banning Huawei but imposing strict security rules.For its part, Huawei welcomed the British decision Wednesday and insisted it does not “take orders” from the Chinese government.
 
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Barbara Birungi Mutabazi has a vision: Train Ugandan women to code and do other technology work.”The beauty of this is that even if there are not enough jobs in Uganda, if you have the right skills, you can work for any organization around the world,” said Mutabazi, who runs Women in Technology, a skills-training organization in Uganda.Mutabazi recently attended the African Diaspora Investment Symposium to find investors and possible employers for the young women she trains. The event brought together entrepreneurs, investors and businesses to talk about the future of Africa business.”The African Diaspora Network is trying to bring Africans and friends of Africa together to collaborate, create and to imagine possibilities for the continent,” said Almaz Negash, the founder and executive director of the African Diaspora Network and the event’s organizer.One theme of the symposium was money — how to tap into the African diaspora to fund small, medium and large companies on the continent.’Scaling’ remittancesRemittances — money sent by people living in the U.S. to family in Africa — has long been a key way to support people. More than $40 billion in remittances goes to sub-Sahara Africa, mostly to Nigeria, Negash said. This is a powerful source of support for families, but some speakers wondered if there are other ways to help spur growth.”How do we scale remittances so that it can also be invested in other people than our family,” Negash said. “Supporting startups.”Another area of support could be to create a fund to help African entrepreneurs and businesses protect their intellectual property, said Joseph Mucheru, Google’s first sub-Sahara Africa lead and now a minister in the Kenyan government.An IP fundAfrican leaders need to find ways to attract investors and businesses “to invest and come in and work with our startups, protect our startups, ensure that the intellectual property that they build can be retained in the continent,” he said.   For the roughly 50 African entrepreneurs attending the event, this was an opportunity to pitch their businesses. The kinds of businesses varied widely.Aboubacar Komara, an architect from Guinea, is working on a housing startup.
“We’re implicating people in the process of actually building their homes. You know, we want to change the concept of what is architecture, because architecture has a lot to do with your identity,” he said.
 
Neile Nkholise is the chief executive of 3DIMO, a sports technology company in South Africa. Sensors are sewn into sports garments, which send data that indicates whether an athlete is at risk of an injury. At the moment, she is focused on football, rugby and basketball.She is raising her seed round of investment but is also looking for investors who can be partners, “people who unlock access to networks” and expertise “that enable us to scale much faster,” she said.For many of the attendees, the event was a welcomed chance to talk about Africa successes. Thelma Ekiyor runs a Nigeria-based business accelerator and an investment fund for women-run businesses.There is no doubt there are problems in Africa, she said, but “for the diaspora, the lens through which you look at these problems must be different. For the diaspora, these problems are opportunities. For the diaspora, they are entry points.”Women in ‘the box’ of micro-lendingShe said one of the challenges has been that the structure of financing women entrepreneurs in Africa and other developing regions has been “micro.””Most of the funds available to women are micro-lending, as if women don’t know what to do with big money,” she told the attendees. “And so the first thing that I knew we had to do was change that and ensure that how we finance women was aspirational. We would start them at them micro-level and support them to grow.”The power of the symposium doesn’t stop after everyone goes home, said Negash of the African Diaspora Network.Over the coming months, connections made may turn into something else — a new business, a customer or partnership — all with a focus on the African continent.
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The United Nations has been hacked.An internal confidential document from the United Nations, leaked to The New Humanitarian and seen by The Associated Press, says that dozens of servers were “compromised” at offices in Geneva and Vienna.Those include the U.N. human rights office, which has often been a lightning rod of criticism from autocratic governments for its calling-out of rights abuses.One U.N. official told the AP that the hack, which was first detected over the summer, appeared “sophisticated” and that the extent of the damage remains unclear, especially in terms of personal, secret or compromising information that may have been stolen. The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the episode, said systems have since been reinforced.The level of sophistication was so high that it was possible a state-backed actor might have been behind it, the official said.There were conflicting accounts about the significance of the incursion.“We were hacked,” U.N. human rights office spokesman Rupert Colville. “We face daily attempts to get into our computer systems. This time, they managed, but it did not get very far. Nothing confidential was compromised.”The breach, at least at the human rights office, appears to have been limited to the so-called active directory – including a staff list and details like e-mail addresses – but not access to passwords. No domain administration’s account was compromised, officials said.The United Nations headquarters in New York as well as the U.N.’s sprawling Palais des Nations compound in Geneva, its European headquarters, did not immediately respond to questions from the AP about the incident.Sensitive information at the human rights office about possible war criminals in the Syrian conflict and perpetrators of Myanmar’s crackdown against Rohingya Muslims were not compromised, because it is held in extremely secure conditions, the official said.The internal document from the U.N. Office of Information and Technology said 42 servers were “compromised” and another 25 were deemed “suspicious,” nearly all at the sprawling United Nations offices in Geneva and Vienna. Three of the “compromised” servers belonged to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is located across town from the main U.N. office in Geneva, and two were used by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe.Technicians at the United Nations office in Geneva, the world body’s European hub, on at least two occasions worked through weekends in recent months to isolate the local U.N. data center from the Internet, re-write passwords and ensure the systems were clean.The hack comes amid rising concerns about computer or mobile phone vulnerabilities, both for large organizations like governments and the U.N. as well as for individuals and businesses.Last week, U.N. human rights experts asked the U.S. government to investigate a suspected Saudi hack that may have siphoned data from the personal smartphone of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, in 2018. On Tuesday, the New York Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, Ben Hubbard, said technology researchers suspected an attempted intrusion into his phone around the same time.The United Nations, and its human rights office, is particularly sensitive, and could be a tempting target. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and her predecessors have called out, denounced and criticized alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and less severe rights violations and abuses in places as diverse as Syria and Saudi Arabia.Dozens of independent human rights experts who work with the U.N. human rights office have greater leeway – and fewer political and financial ties to the governments that fund the United Nations and make up its membership – to denounce alleged rights abuses.Jake Williams, CEO of data firm Rendition Infosec and former U.S. government hacker, said of the U.N. report: “The intrusion definitely looks like espionage.”He noted that accounts from three different domains were compromised. “This, coupled with the relatively small number of infected machines, is highly suggestive of espionage,” he said after viewing the report.“The attackers have a goal in mind and are deploying malware to machines that they believe serve some purpose for them,” he added.The U.N. document highlights a vulnerability in the software program Microsoft Sharepoint, which could have been used for the hack.Matt Suiche, a French entrepreneur based in Dubai who founded cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, said that based on the report from September: “It is impossible to know if it was a targeted attack or just some random internet scan for vulnerable SharePoints.”But the U.N. official, speaking to The Associated Press on Tuesday, said that since then, the intrusion appeared sophisticated.“It’s as if someone were walking in the sand, and swept up their tracks with a broom afterward,” the official said. “There’s not even a trace of a clean-up.”
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