Tech wrap: Apple reveals child labor at some suppliers
Apple revealed its suppliers in response to harsh criticism that it was turning a blind eye to dismal working conditions at partner factories. Apple’s audit found six active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at some component suppliers. It also found a number of other violations, among them breaches in pay, benefits and environmental practices in plants in China, which figured prominently throughout the 500-page report Apple issued. Other violations found in the audit included dumping wastewater onto a neighboring farm, using machines without safeguards, testing workers for pregnancy and falsifying pay records.
“I would like to totally eliminate every case of underage employment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Reuters in an interview. “We have done that in all of our final assembly. As we go deeper into the supply chain, we found that age verification system isn’t sophisticated enough. This is something we feel very strongly about and we want to eliminate totally.”
Enraged Chinese shoppers pelted Apple’s flagship Beijing store with eggs and shoving matches broke out with police when customers were told the store would not begin sales of the iPhone 4S as scheduled. Apple said later after the fracas at its store in Beijing’s trendy Sanlitun district that it would halt all retail sales of the latest iPhone in China for the time being, but said the phones would be available online. Sales at Apple’s other store in Beijing and three in Shanghai went more smoothly, with stocks quickly selling out.
Apple’s next iPad, expected to be released in March, will feature a high-definition screen, run a quad-core chip that allows for faster switching between apps and will work with next-generation LTE wireless networks, Bloomberg reported, citing three people familiar with the product.
Private equity firm TPG Capital is willing to invest about $1 billion in Olympus in a joint deal with Sony or another suitor circling the scandal-hit firm, a person familiar with TPG’s thinking said. So far, TPG has not received any indication from these strategic suitors that they would be willing to work with the private equity firm on a transaction, the source said.
Republican Representative Lamar Smith, the lawmaker behind the Stop Online Piracy Act, vowed to press ahead in the face of fierce criticism from Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. “It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview. Smith said Internet counterfeiters cost American consumers, businesses, inventors and workers some $100 billion a year, though critics accuse him of exaggerating. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said last month that the bill would “effectively break the Internet” and he compared Smith’s efforts to the same type of censorship that Google has experienced in China.
Telecom operators globally are expected to cut spending on their networks this year, hitting equipment makers that were only just beginning to recover from intense price wars and the last economic downturn. European operators are likely to be more cautious as recession looms and consumers are less willing to splash out on high-end smartphones, while carriers in China and the U.S. slow their frenetic pace of mobile investments. The shift will pressure long-struggling mid-sized gear makers like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks, which are more vulnerable than market leader Ericsson or low-cost Chinese player Huawei. Some smaller equipment vendors such as Juniper Networks and Acme Packet have already issued profit warnings, blaming slower spending at big carriers like Verizon and AT&T.
Tech wrap: AT&T to be allowed to pull T-Mobile application
The Federal Communications Commission will approve AT&T Inc.’s request to pull its application for approval of its $39 billion deal to acquire T-Mobile USA, the Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. computer software company SAS Institute cannot claim copyright protection for the functions performed by its programs, which have been replicated by a rival, an adviser to Europe’s highest court said.
The FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will for the first time host an exhibition to be built entirely by flying robots, reports Gizmag.com. Titled “Flight Assembled Architecture,” the six meter-high tower will be made up of 1,500 prefabricated polystyrene foam modules.
Research In Motion is introducing a software tool giving corporate customers the option of linking employees’ personal iPhones to the BlackBerry network without compromising security.
Does telecommuting make you invisible? IT World’s Eric Bloom tackles the question in his blog, Your IT Career.
from The Great Debate UK:
Heavy traffic on the information superhighway
-- Jeff Smith is Senior Director Infrastructure Services, Global Crossing EMEA. The opinions expressed are his own.--
For many years now, number crunchers have obsessed over the growth of data, marvelling at the way that the computer age has generated enormous amounts of content and IT types have speculated as to how disks, tapes and other storage devices would need to evolve to accommodate this. Now, however, the problem has spread and the new fear is greater: could the digitisation of the world’s information lead to catastrophic communications breakdown?
Consider this head-spinning set of numbers. According to EMC, the data created in 2010 would be 1.2 zettabytes, the equivalent of 75 billion 16GB iPads, filling Wembley Stadium 41 times. And in the age of the Internet a lot of that data doesn’t just reside on physical media but instead gets repeatedly shunted around the globe. On mobile networks alone, 8,000 petabytes will be sent in 2011, says a May 2011 report by ABI Research, and that figure is set to grow by about 50 per cent annually for the next five years. Overall, IP traffic will grow to 767 exabytes in 2014, according to Cisco. A petabyte is over one million gigabytes and an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes.
This data growth is part of a broader picture of non-stop innovation that characterises the technology sector. The situation is exacerbated by the ease with which files can be exchanged using social networks, email, instant messaging and other systems.
However, there’s no need for panic and despair and it’s worth remembering that concerns over the Internets ability to withstand wave after wave of demand are nothing new. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory newsletter reported that in October 1986 the net suffered a “congestion collapse” and “slowed to the pace of the telegraph” with emails taking a day to deliver. This was in spite of the fact that at the time it hosted only about 10,000 users sending data at up to 56 kilobits per second.
Even legends of the industry are not immune to spurious predictions of an apocalyptic meltdown. One of the founders of computer networking, Bob Metcalfe, once predicted in a magazine column that the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse”. Metcalfe had the self-deprecating grace to later blend that article and eat it in front of an audience. The scares have continued with think tank the Internet Innovation Alliance predicting Internet brownouts by 2012.
Certainly it’s true that additional network capacity is taken instantly, as soon as it is available, but there are many causes for optimism. Content delivery networks have proven effective ways to organise the Internets traffic by storing data where it is needed so that it does not have to take the long way around. ‘Fatter pipes’ (faster networks capable of carrying more data, faster) and sub-sea links have given us all more breathing space while compression techniques crunch data more effectively than ever and private networks offer back roads that take the weight off the main information thoroughfares.
Verizon Wireless crunches numbers for you — or tries to
Verizon Wireless customers getting stressed out about whether they’d charge past their 2-gigabyte download limit? The company is here to help, at least in theory.
Tomorrow the company is eliminating its $30/month, unlimited data plans for new smartphone customers (existing users can keep their plans).
But long before the change, Verizon Wireless had offered something called the data calculator on its website, a handy service that estimates how much data you’d use if you send, say, 250 text-only emails a day (the answer is apparently 73.24 megabyes of data). That sounds really helpful — but then it gets a little confusing.
Apparently some of the data on Verizon’s online caculator is actually incorrect, so they’re planning to fix it all tonight before they roll out tiered pricing: starting at a $30/month fee for 2 gigabytes of data use.
Spokeswoman Brenda Raney said the company “found some issues on the back-end so “we’re correcting it and getting it in place for the new usage-based plans.” She added that the company wants its customers to “use the calculator to select the best plan.”
Interestingly, some of the usage numbers will look more palatable tomorrow than today, but some will look a little less so. Take video streaming.
Today, before the fix, the equation looks pretty different in the calculator:
New Verizon users should now consider using an app like DataMan Pro for iPhone, which is already popular with AT&T users, to prevent overage charges. DataMan tracks your cellular data usage every 10 minutes, giving you daily, weekly and monthly usage statistics. Plus, it warns you in real-time when you exceed your custom usage thresholds, geotags your data activities, and works with all carriers.
It’s oh so quiet … Are tech/telecom trade shows done for?
“I remember 1999, there were five-storey booths here and every hall was packed”, Egypt’s communications minister Tarek Kamel complains.
He was speaking at the sidelines of ITU Telecom World, a global conference sponsored by the United Nations’ information and communications agency.
This year the meeting halls are filled with just enough people to not seem empty. But there’s no need to elbow your way through throngs of people eyeballing what’s hot and new in the telecoms world.
ITU 2009 has the feeling of a Sunday afternoon, people are out and about conversing pleasantly with one another but there’s no rush.
Bill Huang, China Mobile research institute chief, says: “Its the quietest ITU show I have ever been to.” Why? He guesses the financial crisis is to blame.
Kamel says the malaise has been going on for longer: “This has nothing to do with the crisis. It started in 2003, the exhibition industry is changing. How? People came here to learn about products, now all this is online. But you still come to see people.”
Hamadoun Toure, ITU’s secretary general, gives a diplomatic statement “We are very pleased with attendance.”
The ITU show was dramatically impacted by the decision of CTIA to hold a competing conference in San Diego, USA the same week as ITU, thus leaving the technocrats to themselves in Geneva whilst the commercial crowds fought over booth babes in a lower cost and friendlier town. This isn’t to say the economy is any good. CTIA does not have record revenues or attendance, and one need only look at the dismal record at GSMA’s events, where Barcelona had a very low turnout – Nokia pulled out for next year – and their Asia Congress has been reduced to a Members-only meeting.
