Monthly Archives: August 2015

Etsy, irish, Law & Disorder, Ministry of Innovation, overseas, tax

Despite transparency claims, Etsy ups secrecy and shifts profits overseas

Turns out that messing around with legal (but questionable) Irish tax laws isn’t just for the big corporate types anymore: it even applies to hand-crafted, crunchy-granola online retailers like Etsy.

In a little-noticed change to the company’s Terms of Use that took effect last month, the online craft retailer has now restructured itself such that it now has an Irish subsidiary, Etsy Ireland, an unlimited liability corporation. The move allows Etsy to now take advantage of a tool that has become all-too-common among major tech companies, including Apple, Google, IBM, and others, as a way to both conceal financial disclosures and drastically reduce global tax obligations. (Bloomberg was the first to report on this change.)

Etsy’s move is particularly eyebrow-raising given that it has a “B Lab certification,” under which it agrees to use business “as a force for good,” and “be the change we seek in the world.” That designation means while Etsy remains a for-profit company as organized under Delaware state law, it is supposed to adhere to certain self-imposed ethical principles.

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experience, Opposable Thumbs, PlayStation, Playstation 4, ps4, San Francisco, Sony

PlayStation Experience fan festival moves to San Francisco for 2015

Following a successful Las Vegas debut in 2014, Sony announced today that it is moving the PlayStation Experience fan convention to San Francisco’s Moscone Center on December 5 and 6.

Tickets are on sale now for $60 for a two-day pass, a price that will increase to $75 after September 20 (when one-day tickets will also be available). That’s a reduction from the $90 Sony charged for two-day passes last year, perhaps owing to the larger space for this year’s show.

Sony is recommending attendees register with their PSN IDs, perhaps suggesting that a downloadable surprise will be awaiting those who purchase tickets. Attendees will also get access to the finals of the Capcom Cup, where 32 finalists from the Capcom Pro Tour will compete on the company’s fighting games for a $250,000 prize pool.

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exploits, Law & Disorder, malvertising, malware, Risk Assessment, Technology Lab, vulnerabilities

My browser visited Weather.com and all I got was this lousy malware (Updated)

Millions of people visiting weather.com, drudgereport.com, wunderground.com, and other popular websites were exposed to attacks that can surreptitiously hijack their computers, thanks to maliciously manipulated ads that exploit vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and other browsing software, researchers said.

The malvertising campaign worked by inserting malicious code into ads distributed by AdSpirit.de, a network that delivers ads to Drudge, Wunderground, and other third-party websites, according to a post published Thursday by researchers from security firm Malwarebytes. The ads, in turn, exploited security vulnerabilities in widely used browsers and browser plugins that install malware on end-user computers. The criminals behind the campaign previously carried out a similar attack on Yahoo’s ad network, exposing millions more people to the same drive-by attacks.

Update: A few hours after Ars published this article, Malwarebytes updated the blog post to say the campaign had moved to yet another ad network, which happens to be associated with AOL. Visitors to eBay were among those who were exposed to the malicious ads distributed through the newly discovered network.

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diversity, Intel, McAfee, Ministry of Innovation

Intel, Apple report “doubled” diversity hiring in 2015

In January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich addressed the well-publicized issue of hiring diversity within major tech companies by saying that his company would broaden its hiring practices. His announcement largely hinged on a campaign to invest $300 million over the next five years to broaden the applicant pool—particularly by donating at the university level, where the money would go toward teaching and empowering a new generation of minority engineers and tech workers.

A “diversity in technology fund” may very well pay off in future years, but it can only go so far in changing short-term hiring numbers—which makes this week’s diversity reports from both Intel and Apple all the more interesting. According to Intel’s lengthy report, based on first-half 2015 stats, Intel is “tracking” to having 43.3 percent of its 2015 hires comprising women and “underrepresented minorities,” meaning African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

In a USA Today interview, Krzanich confirmed an additional detail not included in the company’s own diversity report—namely, that such hiring numbers double Intel’s underrepresented hiring from 2014, which amounted to roughly 20 percent of its hires last year. That news was followed by Apple’s 2015 diversity report, which claimed that so far this year, Apple had hired “more than double” the number of women, Hispanics, and African Americans hired last year.

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Comcast, data caps, Ministry of Innovation

Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity

Why does Comcast Internet service have a 300GB monthly data cap?

When asked that question today, Comcast’s vice president of Internet services, Jason Livingood, said that he doesn’t know, because setting the monthly data limit is a business decision, not one driven by technical necessity.

“Cable Cares,” a parody account on Twitter, asked Livingood, “Serious question, why are Comcast’s caps set so low compared to the speeds they’re being sold at? 100mbps can hit 300GB in 6hr~.”

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Cars Technica, wireless charging

UK to test roads that recharge cars as they drive

Electric vehicles (EVs) have a lot going for them, but long charging times are still a barrier to adoption for many consumers. This is understandable—society has been conditioned for the last 100 years to think of a car as something that you can refuel in a few minutes. Even the fastest DC fast chargers still take almost half an hour to recharge an EV. What’s more, the laws of physics get involved at some point, limiting the rate at which you can charge a battery before things start to get messy. The answer to impatient drivers needing a recharge may well be special roads that can power up a car on the move, F-Zero style. This week, the UK government announced that it wants to begin testing this tech, and soon.

Wireless recharging isn’t that outlandish a concept, as anyone with an electric toothbrush may well know. Plenty of smartphones also use wireless charging, and we’ve covered Qualcomm’s Halo tech that the company has been demonstrating with a BMW i8 hybrid that travels with the FIA Formula E Championship. The Halo system is designed to charge a car when it’s stationary, but Qualcomm’s Graeme Davison told us that it should be adaptable to low-speed recharging relatively easily.

Meanwhile, South Korea has already been testing a wireless road charging system in the town of Gumi on a special 7.5 mile (12km) stretch of road that powers up special buses. The UK announcement is for off-road trials for now (as in, not on public roads as opposed to dirt tracks) and is looking for bids from contractors wanting to develop the test infrastructure. In a press release, UK Transport Minister Andrew Jones said, “The government is already committing £500 million over the next five years to keep Britain at the forefront of this technology, which will help boost jobs and growth in the sector. As this study shows, we continue to explore options on how to improve journeys and make low-emission vehicles accessible to families and businesses.”

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Ministry of Innovation, Risk Assessment

Report claims Kaspersky faked malware to trip up competitors’ products

Two former employees of Kaspersky Lab have accused the malware protection software company of seeding competitors’ products with fake malware signatures intended to make them erroneously label benign files on customers’ computers as malicious. The allegations, made in a report published by Reuters Friday morning, have been strongly denied by a Kaspersky Lab spokesperson.

According to Reuters, the “junk” files were tailored to have the same signature as legitimate files, based on the fingerprinting mechanisms of competitors’ products. To do this, the two former employees alleged, Kaspersky assigned employees to reverse-engineer competitors’ products to see how they identified malware and then tailored samples that would match the signatures of common, harmless files.

The report does not include many specifics about the alleged faked signatures, such as which files were targeted for identification as false positives.

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Scientific Method

People in rough neighborhoods trade HIV meds instead of taking them

The social environment of an area, including factors such as poverty, stress, and living conditions, contributes to the disease burden. A recent study published in AJPH shows that patients from a disordered environment don’t stick to their medication schedule, even for a potentially lethal condition like HIV. As the researchers found, residents of highly disordered neighborhoods will sell or trade their antiviral medication rather than taking it and adhering to their drug plans.

Poverty, a condition often associated with specific geographic regions or neighborhoods, is linked to many poor health outcomes. People living in poverty often lack access to nutritious food, good healthcare, strong social support, and other structural advantages that can ensure better health. Neighborhood disorder theory focuses on the role of economic disadvantage as a driver of adverse health outcomes among residents of poor neighborhoods. In previous studies, neighborhood disorder has been linked to increased HIV risk-taking behavior, which helps explain why HIV infections tend to cluster in areas with higher poverty and other forms of risk taking.

For this study, researchers interviewed 503 socioeconomically disadvantaged HIV-positive substance users, approximately half of whom were selling or trading their antiviral medication to other HIV positive individuals who didn’t have access to regular antiviral medication. Participants were from neighborhoods in urban Miami that have high and persistent levels of both HIV infections and poverty. Additionally, environmental risk factors were examined for these neighborhoods, such as prevalence of HIV and poverty levels.

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amazon cloud, data centers, Netflix, Technology Lab

Netflix shuts down its last data center, but it still runs a big IT operation

Netflix has been shifting technology from in-house data centers to third-party facilities for years now, and it says that the process is coming to its logical conclusion—the company is shutting down the last of its data centers.

Netflix still operates a huge IT infrastructure, but it’s located in Amazon’s cloud data centers, the facilities of Internet service providers, and Internet exchange points where many companies exchange traffic.

In an article titled “Netflix to pull plug on final data center,” The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal blog reported yesterday:

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beer, Genetics, Genome, Genomics, Scientific Method, yeast

Lager-brewing yeast was probably born twice

Guinness stout and Bud Lite differ in, to be conservative, several ways, but one is that they’re brewed with very different types of yeast. Lager isn’t just a beer style, it’s a yeast lifestyle. Humans have been brewing with ale yeast—Saccharomyces cerevisiae—for thousands of years. But it was less than 600 years ago that European brewers stumbled on lager yeast, which behaves very differently and produces that distinctive lager flavor.

Lager yeast is a cross of ale yeast with another species, but it took until 2011 for that other species to finally be identified in Patagonian forests. A new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers EmilyClare Baker and Bing Wang presents the genome of this recently discovered parent, Saccharomyces eubayanus.

By comparing the genome with the two strains of lager yeast around today, the researchers may have settled a dispute about the biological origins of lager yeast. Looking at the two strains, there are many more differences between the ale yeast portions of their genomes than have accumulated in the Saccharomyces eubayanus portions. This points to independent hybridization events starting with different ale yeast parents rather than a single hybrid that has since split into two strains.

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