A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting principles that she considered to be unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn has stated that her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor that she would blow the whistle if ordered to proceed further in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with accounting principles she considered unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn says her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor she would blow the whistle if ordered to continue in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has agreed to transfer some patents to Xiaomi, ahead of plans by the Chinese smartphone maker to enter the U.S. and other advanced markets.The deal with Microsoft also involves Xiaomi bundling Microsoft Office and Skype on its Android smartphones and tablets, according to a statement issued by Microsoft on Tuesday.The smartphone company has agreed to buy about 1,500 patents from Microsoft, according to news reports. Xiaomi is also signing a cross-licensing agreement for some other patents with Microsoft."Expanding the Xiaomi-Microsoft partnership: new deal for Office & Skype pre-install, IP cross-license and patent transfer agreement,” Hugo Barra, vice president for Xiaomi's global division, wrote in a twitter message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Iran has ordered foreign messaging apps to transfer data and activity records of Iranian users to local servers within a year, a move that will give the country a greater ability to monitor and censor the online activity of its people.The country’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace has issued instructions to foreign messaging companies active in the country, requiring them “to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity," news reports said quoting state-run media.Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are already blocked in the country whose government holds a tight control over Internet access by its people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Iran has ordered foreign messaging apps to transfer data and activity records of Iranian users to local servers within a year, a move that will give the country a greater ability to monitor and censor the online activity of its people.The country’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace has issued instructions to foreign messaging companies active in the country, requiring them “to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity," news reports said quoting state-run media.Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are already blocked in the country whose government holds a tight control over Internet access by its people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is visiting India, reflecting the growing importance of the country as a market for multinational technology companies.
Nadella’s visit follows the first trip to India by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who visited the country this month to drum up support for the company’s plans to offer refurbished iPhones in the price-sensitive market as well as to get permission to set up its wholly-owned stores in the country. Both deals appear to have been blocked by regulators, according to reports.
While Apple was largely seen as lacking focus on India until recently, when its China revenue fell 11 percent, while iPhone sales in India grew 56 percent year-on-year in the last quarter, Microsoft has been a long-time player in the Indian market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Continuing his bid to woo Indian customers and developers, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook on Thursday said the company was setting up a new development center for its Maps product in Hyderabad in south India.Apple earlier on Wednesday announced it would set up by early next year a facility in Bangalore to focus on helping developers on best practices and to improve the design, quality and performance of their apps on the iOS platform.Cook is on his first visit to India where the company saw a 56 percent year-on-year growth in iPhone sales in the first quarter even as its global iPhone sales and overall revenue dropped.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple CEO Tim Cook is on his first visit to India, a market where the company's revenue has grown but whose market share is still small because of price-sensitive consumers. The trip is important as Apple looks for markets where it can expand. In April, the company reported its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years as iPhone sales dropped year over year. Meanwhile, India is the world's third-biggest smartphone market, after China and the U.S. Here are five things Cook will be aiming for in India. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a bid to win over more Indian developers, Apple on Wednesday announced it would set up by early next year a facility to help developers on best practices and to improve the design, quality and performance of their apps on the iOS platform.The facility in Bangalore, called a Design and Development Accelerator, aims to provide specialized support for the “tens of thousands” of developers in the country, who develop applications for the iOS operating system.Bangalore has a large base of developers, working for the research and development centers of multinational companies or in startups, besides others who work independently. Apple estimates that over 1 million people in the city work in the tech sector, with over 40 percent of graduates from local universities specializing in engineering or IT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. has warned of fragmentation of the Internet if China goes ahead with proposed rules that would require compulsory registration of Internet domain names in China through government-licensed providers.The regulations for the administration of Internet domain names would also forbid the registration of websites containing any one of nine categories of broadly and vaguely defined prohibited content, and create a blacklist of ‘forbidden characters’ in the registration of domain names, “adding an extra layer of control to China’s Great Firewall,” two top U.S. officials in charge of Internet policy and administration, wrote in a statement Monday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. has warned of fragmentation of the Internet if China goes ahead with proposed rules that would require compulsory registration of Internet domain names in China through government-licensed providers.The regulations for the administration of Internet domain names would also forbid the registration of websites containing any one of nine categories of broadly and vaguely defined prohibited content, and create a blacklist of ‘forbidden characters’ in the registration of domain names, “adding an extra layer of control to China’s Great Firewall,” two top U.S. officials in charge of Internet policy and administration, wrote in a statement Monday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted on Monday from Beijing a photograph of himself and Didi Chuxing’s President Jean Lui catching a cab, showing off the company’s spanking new relationship with China’s largest ride-hailing firm.A US$1 billion investment in Didi, announced last week, could be the harbinger of a long-term relationship that some analysts speculate could lead to the U.S. company partnering with the ride-hailing company not only in providing software and services, but also down the line in jointly developing self-driving cars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google aims to make HTML5 the primary experience in Chrome by the fourth quarter of this year, except for a white-list of 10 sites that will run Adobe’s Flash Player.Under the plan revealed by Google, called “HTML5 by Default,” the Chrome browser will continue to ship with Adobe’s Flash Player, but its presence will not be advertised by default.If a website offers HTML5, that will be the default experience. For those sites that need Flash, a prompt will show up at the top of the page when the user first visits the site.The prompt will give users the option of running or declining to run Flash on the site. “If the user accepts, Chrome will advertise the presence of Flash Player and refresh the page,” Google said. On subsequent visits to the domain, the user's initial choice is likely to hold good, though Google is still working on the options for future prompts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google aims to make HTML5 the primary experience in Chrome by the fourth quarter of this year, except for a white-list of 10 sites that will run Adobe’s Flash Player.Under the plan revealed by Google, called “HTML5 by Default,” the Chrome browser will continue to ship with Adobe’s Flash Player, but its presence will not be advertised by default.If a website offers HTML5, that will be the default experience. For those sites that need Flash, a prompt will show up at the top of the page when the user first visits the site.The prompt will give users the option of running or declining to run Flash on the site. “If the user accepts, Chrome will advertise the presence of Flash Player and refresh the page,” Google said. On subsequent visits to the domain, the user's initial choice is likely to hold good, though Google is still working on the options for future prompts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla has asked a court that it should be provided information on a vulnerability in the Tor browser ahead of it being provided to a defendant in a lawsuit, as the browser is based in part on Firefox browser code.“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, in a blog post Wednesday.Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the interest of Firefox users to ensure that the government must disclose the vulnerability to it before it is revealed to any other party, as any disclosure without advance notice to Mozilla will increase the likelihood that the exploit will become public before Mozilla can fix any associated vulnerability in Firefox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla has asked a court that it should be provided information on a vulnerability in the Tor browser ahead of it being provided to a defendant in a lawsuit, as the browser is based in part on Firefox browser code.“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, in a blog post Wednesday.Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the interest of Firefox users to ensure that the government must disclose the vulnerability to it before it is revealed to any other party, as any disclosure without advance notice to Mozilla will increase the likelihood that the exploit will become public before Mozilla can fix any associated vulnerability in Firefox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker with alleged connections to members of the Syrian Electronic Army appeared in a Virginia court Tuesday to face charges of participating in an extortion scheme that threatened victims to delete or sell data from compromised computers. Peter Romar, who was detained by German authorities on a provisional arrest warrant on behalf of the U.S., had been earlier charged by a criminal complaint unsealed on March 22. The Syrian national, also known as Pierre Romar, was residing in Waltershausen in Germany.He is alleged to have worked with Firas Dardar from Homs, Syria, on the extortion scheme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker with alleged connections to members of the Syrian Electronic Army appeared in a Virginia court Tuesday to face charges of participating in an extortion scheme that threatened victims to delete or sell data from compromised computers. Peter Romar, who was detained by German authorities on a provisional arrest warrant on behalf of the U.S., had been earlier charged by a criminal complaint unsealed on March 22. The Syrian national, also known as Pierre Romar, was residing in Waltershausen in Germany.He is alleged to have worked with Firas Dardar from Homs, Syria, on the extortion scheme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com was having an outage in some locations on Tuesday, prompting the company’s CEO to apologize to users on Twitter.The cloud applications company said on its website that the over 12 hours disruption was the result of a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database.The outage had not been apparently resolved by late evening.Salesforce customers are grouped together in instances, which typically consist of servers and other infrastructure that provide the company's service to a set of the company’s customers.The NA14 instance is in North America by most accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has found evidence that at least one employee of Bangladesh’s central bank was involved in the theft of US$81 million from the bank through a complex hack, according to a newspaper report.The number of employees involved could be higher, with people familiar with the matter suggesting that a handful of others may also have assisted hackers to negotiate Bangladesh Bank’s computer system, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Bangladesh Bank officials could not be reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
John Ribeiro