A huge uproar has resounded throughout the internet the past few days, Apple is now worth more than $620B, the largest cash value in US history (not accounting for inflation both IBM and Microsoft have been worth more given inflation on given days). However, in an era in which most technology companies are experience minor, or stagnant growth, Apple is showing exploding profits and valuation. So without much ado, here is today’s (21 August 2012) Tech Titan list according to their market cap (all valuations are from 10:00 EST).
AdaptiveMobile, the world leader in mobile security, today dispels some of the myths regarding the recent iPhone SMS vulnerability which could allow scammers to 'spoof' the sender of a text message, allowing them to pose as a known friend or contact. Whilst mobile operators have recently come under fire for this exploit, AdaptiveMobile argues that the source of the problem is the handset, not the network.
"Device manufacturers, like all members of the mobile ecosystem should aim to take security seriously and ensure their devices comply with a wide range of standards and technical recommendations," says Cathal McDaid, Security Consultant, AdaptiveMobile. "For SMS to remain a trusted, clean channel, companies need to be vigilant that their products both properly conform to standards and don't inadvertently expose flaws that can compromise their customers.
The exploit was first revealed by a researcher on the pod2g blog and the exploit misuses an optional 'Reply Address' field within the SMS protocol upper-layers. If misused, the iPhone SMS client displays a different address / phone number as the sending address rather than the actual originating address. This could be used to show recipients that text messages are from someone familiar, when they originate from a hacker or external party.
"We know conclusively that this is not a network problem because the 3GPP specification - which outlines how modern mobile phones and networks operate today - discusses the security implications of this field in all phones and give recommendations on how to avoid malicious use of this," continues McDaid. "We have tested this issue on Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian phones and most of them simply ignore the 'reply address' field or display both the 'real' originating address and the reply address as per the specification recommendations. The iPhone, so far, is the only device which does not comply with these security recommendations."
Apple has responded to these claims, acknowledging the weakness, but without any stated intention of remedying the situation.
"Historically, the 'reply-address' field was introduced to allow users to reply to texts which were 'broadcast' from information agencies or marketing firms, for example. These broadcast systems may not be capable of receiving messages, so this system allows for more interaction," continues McDaid. "However, whilst most handsets now ignore this quirk, with the remainder treating the field correctly, Apple has left a significant vulnerability in its handsets which could allow consumers to be fooled and hand over personal details to hackers and criminals. This reinforces the importance of handset manufacturers, operators and security providers collaborating and helping to keep SMS as a secure, reliable and trusted channel."
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About AdaptiveMobile:
AdaptiveMobile is the world leader in mobile security, enabling trusted networks for the world's largest operator groups and protecting one in six subscribers globally. AdaptiveMobile provides Operators with the most comprehensive network-based security solutions enabling them to protect their consumer and enterprise customers against the growing threat of mobile abuse. www.adaptivemobile.com
Press contacts:
Rocket Communications (UK)
Ella Thompson / Sally Brown
Adaptive@rocketcomms.net
+44 8453 707 024
ACSCom PR (USA)
Anne Coyle
anne@acscompr.com
+1 857 222 6363
The jury will hear closing arguments Tuesday after the CEOs of Apple and Samsung failed to resolve their patent dispute in talks Monday. Presiding judge Lucy Koh warned the companies that either or both of them could be at risk if the jury gets the complicated case. She advised the CEOs to try settling again ahead of their deliberations. The jury’s verdict will currently depend on how it answers 700 yes-and-no questions unless Koh simplifies the verdict form ahead of the jury beginning its deliberations. Bloomberg said Monday morning that it heard from “a person familiar with the matter” that Tim Cook and Kwon Oh Hyun would talk. They went through such formalities before the trial started.
District Court Judge William Alsup hit Google upside the head Monday when he told the company that “in the court’s view, Google has failed to comply with the August 7 order” to disclose which bloggers and journalists it paid to write about the Java trial. Google and Oracle were supposed to turn in their separate lists last Friday. Oracle told the court it had a consulting relationship with FOSS Patents author Florian Mueller, a fact that was already well known. Google told the court that “Neither Google nor its counsel has paid an author, journalist, commentator or blogger to report or comment on any issues in this case. And neither Google nor its counsel has been involved in any quid pro quo in exchange for coverage of or articles about the issues in this case,” provoking the judge to retort that “The August 7 order was not limited to authors ‘paid…to report or comment’ or to ‘quid pro quo’ situations. Rather, the order was designed to bring to light authors whose statements about the issues in the case might have been influenced by the receipt of money from Google or Oracle.”
The CEOs of Apple and Samsung are reportedly taking trial judge Lucy Koh’s advice and will try to resolve their patent dispute before the jury does, putting one or the other or both companies at risk. Bloomberg said Monday morning that it heard from “a person familiar with the matter” that Tim Cook and Kwon Oh Hyun will talk again before the jury starts deliberating. They went through such formalities before the trial started. In what may be an indication of the futility of any further negotiations, the sides told Kohn over the weekend that they had been unable to narrow their claims as she wanted.
http://www.EasyUnlockiPhone.net reveals that its tool can jailbreak and unlock the iPhone 4S, 4, 3Gs and iPad 2 the latest iOS 5.1.1. Once the jailbreak and unlock for iOS 5.1.1 is complete the iPhone/iPad will have the Cydia application installed. Cydia is a software application for iOS that enables a user to find and install software packages (including apps, interface customizations, and system extensions) on a jailbroken iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Cydia is the main independent third-party digital distribution platform for software on iOS. http://www.EasyUnlockiPhone.net was formed in mid 2008 and has successfully jailbroken over 250,000 iPhones worldwide. This is unparalleled by any other service in the industry. They have achieved this by combining a very simple solution with a fantastic customer service department that is available 24/7 through many forms of contact, including telephone.
As the day dawned and stock markets opened, Apple shares went up by $16 to $647 and made it the most valuable company worth $623 billion. It beat its next rival Exxon Mobile. Towards the end of 1999, Microsoft was worth $616B, but its value now is $257B, less than half of Apple’s value. Who could have imagined this ten years ago? Apple was derided as the company that paints PC’s (multiple color workstations) for a living. I have written before on Apple’s rapid growth and success. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple the second time, he revived the sinking ship and then started new categories that became market leaders. The new MacBook Air started a new trend in light-weight, sleek design with its ultra-fast operating system. No longer one has to wait minutes for the system to boot up. Then came the iPod that turned the music business upside down. Then followed the new leader in smartphone – iPhone which saw huge success year after year, contributing almost half of the revenue. Then Jobs introduced the iPad, the first tablet with touch interface. In spite of critics who doubted its success, it defied gravity in terms of sales and profit.
For the past couple of months we have been working on a really exciting project. We are re-creating the Tiggzi app builder in HTML5 and JavaScript. The current version is pretty slick and many people ask us if that’s JavaScript, but all you need to do is to right-click and you will see that Tiggzi uses Flash/Flex.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh, who’s hearing the Apple v Samsung patent infringement case, warned the companies Wednesday of the risks they both face in letting the suit and countersuit go to the jury. The Wall Street Journal says she has urged their CEOs to speak by phone to resolve their differences before the jury starts deliberating.
With the sand draining out of the judge’s hourglass – Apple and Samsung are limited to 25 hours apiece in their patent infringement case in California – Samsung put two expert witnesses on the stand Thursday who testified that Apple could owe Samsung as much as $421.8 million in royalties if it’s found to infringe Samsung’s patents.
The Apple v. Samsung patent trial of the century has cooled off a bit since the hits poured out last week, but a few choice items continue to emerge from San Jose, California. Samsung argued earlier this week that whether or not its Galaxy tablets made use of Apple’s protected technology and designs, that IP [...]
The police caught the burglar who broke into Steve Jobs’ empty house in Palo Alto on July 17 and made off with Macs, Apple gadgets, Tiffany jewelry, champagne, a letter to Jobs, and even Steve’s wallet, which the AP says had his driver’s license and a dollar in it. The thief was reportedly apprehended because he connected a stolen iPad to Apple’s servers and reinstalled the operating system but not before he sold the jewelry to an online dealer in Pennsylvania that he had goggled.
Apple is apparently more reasonable than it lets on. Back in 2010 it offered Samsung a license. Apple estimates that it might have cost Samsung $288 million back then. Now it’s asking $2.5 billion and that’s just in the current case in California. FOSS Patents calls it “the most spectacular revelation of the ongoing trial.”
Eastman Kodak was hoping to garner $2.2 billion-$2.6 billion from its broadly licensed 1,100 patents to repay creditors and reorganize. It reportedly got opening bids of $150 million-$250 million from two consortia involving Google-RPX-Samsung-LG-HTC on the one hand and Apple-Microsoft-Intellectual Ventures on the other according to the Wall Street Journal. The bankruptcy court has thrown a cloak of invisibility over the process until a winner emerges but Kodak is reportedly unlikely to see more than $600 million. Of course there’s no telling where it could wind up although its prized patent was invalidated by the International Trade Commission last month.
Google Ventures has put $8.2 million into electronic signatures vendor DocuSign, bringing the reportedly unprofitable start-up’s juicy $47.5 million D round, announced last month, up to an even juicier $55.7 million and its total funding up over a handsome $112 million. Google is reportedly supposed to help DocuSign lower the cost of customer acquisition and boost the quality of its sales leads by “making sure that organic search goes up and paid search goes down.”
In Part 1, we looked at the completed application, which we’ll start building here. Before we get started with actual development, let’s take a look at the starting application. Open a new browser tab or window with the starting application in JSFiddle. The starting app is as simple as it gets. First, take a look at the HTML code, then read the explanations below the code snippet. Let’s move on to the JavaScript code. While walking through the JavaScript code, we’ll see the power of messaging. One of the key differentiators that sets the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway apart from other WebSocket servers is its extensive support for rich business protocols and messaging APIs on top of the WebSocket standard, including XMPP, JMS, and AMQP. This tutorial focuses on the most widely used messaging API: Java Message Service (JMS).
"We started in the high-performance computing area and have been focusing on Big Data for a while,” stated Michael King, Director of Cloud Content & Media at DataDirect Networks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The latest skinny about Amazon has it assembling an IP team to acquire and license patents as part of its defense against the dark arts practiced by Google and Apple to protect their mobile devices and digital content. Reuters says the mighty retailer is looking for someone who can “identify and evaluate strategic IP acquisition and licensing opportunities” and work with Amazon’s technology teams on future products. It’s already got former RealNetworks general counsel Kelly Jo MacArthur as its VP of IP acquisitions and investments and Matt Gordon out of Intellectual Ventures as general manager of patent acquisitions and investments. Anyway, it’s reportedly got Argos Search working on it.
VMware has struck again. After buying Nicira for $1.26 billion two weeks ago in a threat to Cisco’s networking hegemony, it’s now bought Pattern Insight’s Log Insight analytics and log management platform, team and technology on undisclosed terms. The widgetry can analyze web-scale amounts of machine-generated data in real time and is used for operational analytics in traditional data center and cloud environments.
On any given day, it’s not uncommon for a company to generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, pushing the amount of data that must be processed and managed to unimaginable levels. Because of the requirements for power and low-latency connections that such data growth entails, many companies have become more inclined to outsource their big data needs to colocation data center facilities. In turn, this has created a huge demand for colocation space as additional processing grounds for big data. According to analyst firm Nemertes, colocation providers will not have the available space to capitalize on approximately $869 million of market demand by 2015. This is with good reason, though, as colocation data centers offer huge benefits for big data, including high-density power, opportunities to decrease latency and a community of like-minded companies with which to cross-connect.
First thing Thursday morning a desperate, financially struggling Nokia said it was selling off Qt, the commercial and open source cross-platform development platform it acquired when it bought Trolltech in 2008 for upwards of $150 million. Actually the news came from Digia, the publicly owned Finnish software house that’s taking Qt off Nokia’s hands. It picked up the Qt (say cute) licensing business from Nokia last year and now it’s getting the technology and developers. Terms were not disclosed but it’s assumed Digia is paying nowhere near the $150 million originally spent on Trolltech to defend its own operating systems against the iPhone.
In this CTO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Vineet Tyagi; Head of Impetus Labs at Impetus Technologies; Darryl Brown, CMO at Appcore; Govind Rangasamy, Director of Product Management at Eucalyptus Systems; Frank Martinez, CTO of ServiceMesh; Wayne Ariola, VP of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft; Bob Wicklund, Enterprise Solution Architect for McAfee Cloud and Content Security; and Ken Guiberson, CTO at EffectiveUI discussed such topics as which do you think is the most important cloud computing standard still to tackle and who should and shouldn’t be using a PaaS product today, and why?
First thing Thursday morning a desperate, financially struggling Nokia said it was selling off Qt, the commercial and open source cross-platform development platform it acquired when it bought Trolltech in 2008 for upwards of $150 million. Actually the news came from Digia, the publicly owned Finnish software house that’s taking Qt off Nokia’s hands. It picked up the Qt (say cute) licensing business from Nokia last year and now it’s getting the technology and developers. Terms were not disclosed but it’s assumed Digia is paying nowhere near the $150 million originally spent on Trolltech to defend its own operating systems against the iPhone.
Oracle Java SE 7 Programmer certifications gear up your knowledge in latest API /JSR changes and improves your career potential. The Java SE 7 Programmer (OCAJP & OCPJP) is a professional certification program offered by Oracle. These certifications tests candidates program knowledge Java SE at lighter (in OCA) and deeper (in OCP) levels. The OCA Java 7 is an entry level certification in Java. It helps the programmer who can have the basic knowledge of the essentials of the Java programming language. To handle the looping constructs and variables, and does not cover specific technologies such as GUI creation, Web or network programming. This certification exam tests how well a programmer has understood the language constructs and verify skillset in Java technologies.