Peter Sayer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

Fighting ire with hire: Tech firms say immigration boosts employment

U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to channel populist anger to stem immigration, but tech companies want him to know that hiring immigrants is necessary for the country's economy and boosts overall employment.Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet are said to be writing Trump a letter expressing their concern about the order on immigration he signed last Friday, and other changes to immigration policy he may plan.The letter, a draft of which has been published by a number of media outlets, including Recode.net, highlights the companies' dependence on immigrants for their success, and warns that the new policy could affect many visa holders already contributing to the U.S. economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple missed deadline to pay €13 billion in Irish back taxes

Apple is behind with its taxes, but the tax inspector doesn't mind.Last August, the European Commission closed a three-year investigation of Apple's tax affairs with an order to the Irish government that it should recover about €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in taxes that it believed Apple had underpaid over the last decade.Ireland has missed the deadline for recovering the billions, but Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who gave the Irish government four months to collect the taxes, is proving very understanding about the delay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

German consumer groups sue WhatsApp over privacy policy changes

WhatsApp's privacy policy change allowing Facebook to target advertising at its users has landed the company in a German court.The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBZ) has filed suit against WhatsApp in the Berlin regional court, alleging that the company collects and stores data illegally and passes it on to Facebook, the federation said Monday.Facebook acquired WhatsApp in October 2014, but it wasn't until August 2016 that WhatsApp said it would modify its privacy policy to allow it to share lists of users' contacts with Facebook. The move made it possible to match WhatsApp accounts with Facebook ones where users had registered a phone number, giving the parent company more data with which to make new friend suggestions and another way to target advertising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

German consumer groups sue WhatsApp over privacy policy changes

Trump’s executive order won’t destroy Privacy Shield, says EU

Fears that U.S. President Trump has destroyed the Privacy Shield Transatlantic data transfer agreement with one of the many executive orders he has signed this week are unfounded, the European Commission said Friday.On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order entitled "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the U.S.," one of several he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20. Such executive orders are used by U.S presidents to manage the operations of the federal government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s executive order won’t destroy Privacy Shield, says EU

Cloud services accounted for half of revenue growth at SAP in 2016

SAP's revenue from cloud subscriptions and support grew so quickly in 2016, the company has raised its forecasts for 2017 and 2020.Full-year cloud revenue grew 31 percent compared to a year earlier, accounting for over half of the company's revenue growth. Total revenue reached €22.1 billion (US$23.8 billion), up €1.3 billion on 2015, while revenue from cloud subscriptions and support grew €707 million to €3 billion, the company reported Tuesday.Profit after tax rose to €3.6 billion from €3.1 billion in 2015.SAP is keen to see more of its software business move to the cloud because, unlike traditional software licenses that bring a bump in revenue at the moment a deal is signed, it represents a predictable source of revenue. Together with software support, the company says that the growth in cloud services means 61 percent of its revenue now comes from more predictable sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hugo Barra quits Chinese phone maker Xiaomi to return to Silicon Valley

Hugo Barra is returning to Silicon Valley, just over three years after he left Google to help turn Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi into a global company.During Barra's time in Beijing, Xiaomi has grown far beyond its home market with its strategy of selling stylish Android phones on thin profit margins. In January, it made a splash at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, capping a series of international launches that had taken the company into over 20 countries, including India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, Mexico and Poland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook plans new data center in Denmark

Facebook has chosen Odense in Denmark as the site of its third data center outside the U.S.Denmark's moderate climate will allow the company to use outdoor air and indirect evaporative cooling to keep temperatures in the data center down, and servers will be powered entirely with renewable energy, the company said Thursday.Most of Denmark's renewable energy comes from wind power, a highly variable resource. On one day in 2015, it was able to satisfy the nation's entire electricity demand with wind power, and also become a net exporter of electricity. At other times, around a quarter of the country's electricity demand is met by wind power, according to the latest figures from Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook plans new data center in Denmark

Modern warfare: Death-dealing drones and … illegal parking?

A cloud of 3D-printed drones big enough to bring down the latest U.S. stealth fighter, the F35, was just one of the combat scenarios evoked in a discussion of the future of warfare at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.Much of the discussion focused on the changes computers are bringing to the battlefield, including artificial intelligence and autonomous systems -- but also the way the battlefield is coming to computing, with cyberwar, and social media psyops an ever more real prospect.Former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Mary Cummings, now director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University, delivered the first strike."The barrier to entry to drone technology is so low that everyone can have one, and if the Chinese go out and print a million copies of a drone, a very small drone, and put those up against an F35 and they go into the engine, you basically obviate what is a very expensive platform," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Modern warfare: Death-dealing drones and … illegal parking?

Microsoft buys Simplygon to simplify rendering VR and AR models

Microsoft is betting that less is more in 3D design, with the acquisition of the Swedish developer of a 3D data optimization system, Simplygon.Simplygon takes 3D models in a number of formats, and reduces the volume of data used to describe them by taking out some of the detail -- somewhat like reducing the size of a JPEG image file by increasing the level of compression while leaving the resolution unchanged.That means the models can be rendered more rapidly or using less powerful hardware, something that will help Microsoft with the "3D for everyone" vision it outlined last October at the launch of Windows 10 Creators Update.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI should enhance, not replace, humans, say CEOs of IBM and Microsoft

Artificial intelligence should enhance human workers, not replace them, at least according to the CEOs of IBM and Microsoft.Ginny Rometty and Satya Nadella made clear their view of the role of AI in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, just a few hours after Rometty circulated IBM's three guiding principles for the development of cognitive technologies to company staff.Less dramatic and snappily expressed than Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, IBM's three principles are nevertheless intended to limit the harm the introduction of AI technologies causes.The first thing to understand is the purpose of these technologies. For IBM, Rometty said, "it will not be man or machine: Our purpose is to augment and be in service of what humans do."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi’s new computer for industrial applications goes on sale

The new Raspberry Pi single-board computer is smaller and cheaper than the last, but its makers aren't expecting the same rush of buyers that previous models have seen.The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 will be more of a "slow burn," than last year's Raspberry Pi 3, its creator Eben Upton predicted.That's because it's designed not for school and home use but for industrial applications. To make use of it, buyers will first need to design a product with a slot on the circuit board to accommodate it and that, he said, will take time.The Compute Module 3 has the same four-core, 64-bit Broadcom BCM2837 processor and 1GB of RAM as the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi 3, but is less than half the size and missing the Ethernet, USB, SD Card and display sockets of its larger cousin. It also has no Wi-Fi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

European legislators debate robot rights for autonomous vehicles

Robots should one day have rights as "electronic persons," members of the European Parliament recommended Thursday -- but not until the machines are all fitted with "kill" switches to shut them down in an emergency.Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee wants the European Commission to propose legislation that will settle a number of ethical and liability issues in the field of robotics -- including who is to blame when an autonomous vehicle is involved in a collision.Granting the more sophisticated autonomous robots some kind of electronic personhood could settle issues of who is responsible for their actions, the committee suggested. More urgent than the question of robot rights, though, is the setting up of an obligatory insurance scheme that would pay out to the victims of a self-driving car if it caused an accident in the European Union.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mayer: not so much leaving Yahoo, as taking it with her?

Marissa Mayer is getting ready to say goodbye to Yahoo's board, but not necessarily to the Yahoo brand.The company said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday that it will shed almost everything that makes it Yahoo, including its name, when its deal with Verizon closes. If you're a Yahoo shareholder, you might notice the difference, but for Yahoo users, the consequences of Monday's filing are minimal. Yahoo the company has two major assets: a worldwide network of internet portals, and a 15 percent stake in Chinese internet giant Alibaba worth many times that. When a plan to sell off the Alibaba stake ran into tax complications, the company pivoted, instead striking a deal to sell its portals, its brand -- almost everything but the Alibaba stake, in fact -- to Verizon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mayer: not so much leaving Yahoo, as taking it with her?

Apple’s profit slump means a pay cut for Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook's total compensation took a dive for 2016, as the company missed its financial targets for the year.The company's earnings for the year to Sept. 24 dropped 14 percent compared to a year earlier.As a result, Cook's total compensation dropped 15 percent -- despite a 50 percent rise in base salary.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Tech's biggest CEO raises and pay cuts +He certainly won't have to start eating ramen noodles -- he made US$8,747,719, after all -- but he and fellow senior executives lost out on a few million each because of the poor performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Outgoing presidential IT advisors offer Trump 10 tips to succeed

There'll be a to-do list from the IT department in the president's "in" tray when Donald Trump enters the White House later this month.In a cabinet exit memo published Thursday, the Office of Science and Technology Director John P Holdren and U.S. CTO Megan Smith review President Barack Obama's technology achievements, and set 10 technology priorities for his successor.Twitter doesn't get a mention.At the top of Holdren's and Smith's list is to invest in fundamental research, and to publish the results. Such work may one day lead to profitable products, but the pay-off is too far in the future to motivate most businesses to contribute -- and were they to do so, they would probably keep the results to themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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