Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn

Posted on February 14, 2012 by root

CUPERTINO, California—February 13, 2012—Apple® today announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct special voluntary audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple’s request. A team of labor rights experts led by FLA president Auret van Heerden began the first inspections Monday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City.

“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”

As part of its independent assessment, the FLA will interview thousands of employees about working and living conditions including health and safety, compensation, working hours and communication with management. The FLA’s team will inspect manufacturing areas, dormitories and other facilities, and will conduct an extensive review of documents related to procedures at all stages of employment.

Apple’s suppliers have pledged full cooperation with the FLA, offering unrestricted access to their operations. The FLA’s findings and recommendations from the first assessments will be posted in early March on its website, www.fairlabor.org. Similar inspections will be conducted at Quanta and Pegatron facilities later this Spring, and when completed, the FLA’s assessment will cover facilities where more than 90 percent of Apple products are assembled.

Apple has audited every final assembly factory in its supply chain each year since 2006, including more than 40 audits of Foxconn manufacturing and final assembly facilities. Details of Apple’s supplier responsibility program, including the results of more than 500 factory audits led by Apple throughout its supply chain over the past five years, are available at www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility.

In January, Apple became the first technology company admitted to the Fair Labor Association. The FLA conducts independent monitoring and verification to ensure that the FLA’s Workplace Standards are upheld wherever FLA company products are made.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

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German gov’t endorses Chrome as most secure browser

Posted on February 5, 2012 by root

Germany’s cyber security agency today recommended that Windows 7 users run Google’s Chrome browser, citing the application’s sandbox and auto-update features.

In a security best practices guideline, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, known by its German initials of BSI, said Chrome was the best browser.

“Your internet browser is the key component for the use of services on the Web and thus represents the main target for cyber-attacks,” said BSI in its published advice. “By using Google Chrome in conjunction with the other measures outlined above, you can significantly reduce the risk of a successful IT attack.”

BSI ticked off Chrome’s anti-exploit sandbox technology, which isolates the browser from the operating system and the rest of the computer; its silent update mechanism and Chrome’s habit of bundling Adobe Flash, as its reasons for the recommendation.

“This [sandbox] protection is implemented most consistently in Chrome…[and] similar mechanisms in other browsers are currently either weaker or non-existent,” explained BSI.

BSI, for “Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik,” has a habit of making software recommendations, particularly about browsers, unlike U.S. agencies. Two years ago, for example, BSI urged Germans to stop using Internet Explorer (IE) until Microsoft patched a vulnerability that had allegedly been used by Chinese hackers to break into networks owned by Google and dozens of other Western companies.

Unlike in the U.S., where Windows 7 users are automatically handed IE as the default browser, Germans are shown a browser ballot screen when they first run Windows. The ballot screen lets users choose which browser they want to set as the default, and if necessary, download and install it.

That selection process stems from a settlement Microsoft reached with European Union antitrust regulators in 2009, two years after Opera Software officially complained that IE’s bundling with Windows and the browser’s default status stifled competition.

Not surprisingly, Google was happy about the recommendation. “We’re particularly honored to see several of [Chrome's] security benefits recognized in the report,” wrote Wieland Holfelder, who heads Google’s engineering efforts in Germany, in a Friday post to Chrome’s official blog.

BSI also recommended Adobe Reader X — the version of the popular PDF reader that, like Chrome, relies on a sandbox to protect users from exploits — and urged citizens to use Windows’ Auto Update feature to keep their PCs abreast of all OS security fixes.

To update applications, BSI gave a nod to Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI), a free utility that scan a computer for outdated software and point users to appropriate downloads.

Chrome currently accounts for just 14.3% of all browsers used in Germany, according to Irish Web measurement company StatCounter. Mozilla’s Firefox has 51% of the German market, while IE accounts for 24.8%.

While Mozilla is making progress on silent updates for Firefox, the company won’t wrap up the project until June at the earliest. Nor does Firefox include a Chrome-esque sandbox, although developers have been working on separating each tab’s process, something Chrome also offers, to make its browser more resilient to crashes.

Worldwide, Chrome is more popular: StatCounter’s data shows that Chrome’s 28.4% share put it in second place behind IE’s 37.5% but ahead of Firefox’s 24.8%.

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Hollywood Still Doesn’t Realize That The Internet Drives Popular Culture Now

Posted on February 4, 2012 by root

Stewart Baker, the former DHS official whose warnings about how SOPA would wreak havoc on online security were instrumental in convincing many of our elected officials that SOPA and PIPA were half-baked legislative disasters, now has a fascinating writeup for The Hollywood Reporter, trying to explain why the Republican Party turned strongly against SOPA/PIPA. We’ve pointed out a few times, that the different reactions by the Democrats and Republicans to the online protests threaten to cost the Democrats a generation of voters who had previously looked to them as the party that “got” the internet.

Of course, where it gets even more insightful is Baker’s analysis not just of how the Democratic Party appears to have miscalculated badly the reaction to these bills, but how truly and spectacularly Hollywood has failed to understand what happened — in part because Hollywood still thinks that it drives pop culture. The truth, however, as Baker points out, is that the internet drives popular culture these days… and on the internet, Hollywood is a big bully:
The [entertainment] industry still doesn’t understand its adversary. From the start, studios saw the fight over SOPA as a struggle with a bunch of other companies — Google and Internet service providers among them — that were hoping to profit from the Internet travails of the entertainment industry.

That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the industry is fighting what amounts to a new popular culture.

Unlike the old pop culture Hollywood dominated, this one is largely independent of the music, movie and broadcast industries. In fact, people who spend hours online instead of watching TV or going to movies will probably encounter the entertainment industry only when YouTube videos of their kids dancing to Prince or spoofing Star Wars are pulled down by Hollywood’s bots, or when the RIAA threatens to sue them for their college savings, or when digital rights software makes it hard to move their stuff to a new tablet or phone.

To the entertainment industry, these episodes might seem like collateral damage in the fight to stop piracy. To the new pop culture, though, collateral damage and misuse of enforcement tools are everywhere, and they threaten everyone. The content industry has made itself into the villain. Increasingly, it looks like an occupying power, obeyed at gunpoint, despised for its ham-handed excesses and resisted from every dark corner. Unfortunately for Hollywood, as its customers migrate to the Internet, it is losing not just their money but their hearts and minds as well.
There’s a lot more in Baker’s article about the political implications of all of this, which are worth thinking about as well, but I wanted to focus on this key point. Last week, at the Midem music industry conference, I was amazed at how many people from the legacy music business believe, 100%, that the reason SOPA/PIPA were stopped was because Google stepped up its lobbying efforts. I can’t even begin to count how many conversations I had with people trying to explain to them that Google only played a small role in what happened, really jumping on the bandwagon pretty late in the game. It was a widespread group of internet users who spoke up, and that really has changed the equation. And Hollywood still can’t seem to wrap its mind around that.

That may be because Hollywood was popular culture for so long. It seems to just assume that this is still the case, when there’s an awful lot of evidence suggesting otherwise. And really, that explains both Hollywood’s confusion in how to deal with all of this, as well as one of the reasons it’s lashing out. When Hollywood no longer drives pop culture, it loses its influence, and as it loses its influence, that’s going to spell trouble for its business model. The biggest threat to Hollywood’s dominance isn’t piracy. It’s that people no longer view Hollywood as the main source of pop culture any more. Art forms often lose their popularity over time. A few years back, we pointed to a quote from Paul Oskar Kristeller that seems worth highlighting again:
There were important periods in cultural history when the novel, instrumental music, or canvas painting did not exist or have any importance. On the other hand, the sonnet and the epic poem, stained glass and mosaic, fresco painting and book illumination, vase painting and tapestry, bas relief and pottery have all been “major” arts at various times and in a way they no longer are now. Gardening has lost its standing as a fine art since the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the moving picture is a good example of how new techniques may lead to modes of artistic expression for which the aestheticians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century had no place in their systems. The branches of the arts all have their rise and decline, and even their birth and death.
Perhaps it’s not piracy that Hollywood is fighting here. Maybe it’s the industry’s own cultural relevance.

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Facebook Files for an I.P.O.

Posted on February 2, 2012 by root

It sure pays to have friends.

Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.

In its filing, Facebook, which has more than 845 million users worldwide, said it was seeking to raise $5 billion, according to a figure used to calculate the registration fee. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.

The filing
Tracking Facebook’s Valuation
Goldman Invests in Facebook at a $50 Billion Valuation (Jan. 2, 2011)
But many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that could value it as high as $75 billion to $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Laboratories, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.

“Facebook’s I.P.O. marks another stage of the Internet’s evolution,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology consulting firm. “It’s so valuable, because it’s not just about content, it’s about our connections.”

The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion last year, an 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of its rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion last year, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.

Facebook, unlike any other site, has come to define the social era of the Web. More than a portal, its value lies in its dynamic network of social connections and the enormous amount of information shared by its users. In many ways, Facebook is a data processor, archiving and analyzing every shred of information, including its users’ interests, locations and every article and link that they “like.” The collection of data is a potential goldmine for advertisers, keen to better understand and target consumers.

“Facebook changed the way entrepreneurs thought about platforms and sharing,” said Shervin Pishevar, a Menlo Ventures partner who built games on Facebook as the former chief of the Social Gaming Network.

Indeed, the social network has become something like an economy into itself, fostering businesses like the music service Spotify. The game maker Zynga, which went public late last year, generates more than 90 percent of its sales from Facebook.

“Facebook has become the biggest distribution platform on the Web,” said Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, a service that accepts only Facebook users. “We noticed that users who connected our service to Facebook were three times more likely to become a paying user.”

But for all the promise of Facebook, the company is still trying to figure out how to properly extract and leverage data while keeping its ecosystem intact. For all its billions, Facebook makes a small sum on a per-user basis. Last year, it made a little more than $1 per user.

The Wall Street firms underwriting the I.P.O. are Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Allen & Company.

Facebook has come a long way from its scrappy start-up days.

Mr. Zuckerberg, a freckle-faced computer prodigy from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., started the service, then known as Thefacebook, in his Harvard dorm room in February of 2004. He rolled out the site carefully, first opening it up to other Ivy League schools to keep the community intimate.

Some of Mr. Zuckerberg’s classmates sent e-mails to old high school friends, cajoling them to join the site. By the end of 2004, the site reached one million users.

“That’s the kind of stuff I do — small little projects, and eventually they all fit together,” a young Mr. Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson.

Like Google, Facebook was not the first in its category. Start-ups like Six Degrees.com, Myspace, LinkedIn, Friendster and others predated the service. But Facebook quickly eclipsed the competition by drilling down on the mechanics of sharing.

In 2006, Facebook made it easier for users to keep tabs on their connections by introducing news feeds. These data streams made sharing automatic, broadcasting short bursts of information, updates and announcements, from friends in real time. One year later, Mr. Zuckerberg rolled out the Facebook Platform. The move effectively collapsed the walls that separated the service from the rest of the Web by allowing third parties to develop applications on the site. The policy of openness and Facebook’s pursuit of so-called “frictionless sharing” has made it nearly impossible to escape its long shadow online. Over the last four years, its user base has grown to 845 million from roughly 50 million. On average, users spend more than 9.7 billion minutes a day on the site, according to the filing.

Mr. Zuckerberg has been made wealthy by Facebook, and an I.P.O. would make him wealthier. When Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $6.9 billion. At a market value of $100 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg’s 28.4 percent stake in Facebook would be worth $28.4 billion.

Yet his ambitions seem more akin to Alexander Graham Bell than to other Internet billionaires. Mr. Zuckerberg says he wants to “make the world a more open place,” according to his Facebook profile.

In recent months, his team has rolled out more features toward that end, like Timeline, which makes it easy to scroll through a user’s entire history, and new partnerships, with companies like Ticketmaster, that will allow users to pull even more data from outside publishers into Facebook’s platform. The company is also said to be designing its own mobile phone, which will give Facebook an even larger footprint in its users’ digital lives.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s push for openness has not always been embraced by the online community, which, at times, has been leery of his efforts to reset the boundaries of what people should share. Facebook, as the protector and transmitter of personal information, has to maintain a delicate balance between financial interests and the privacy concerns of its users. Major changes to Facebook’s platform have frequently inspired fierce backlashes, including calls to boycott, lawsuits and the ire of lawmakers.

As Facebook’s influence grows, so too does scrutiny from Washington. In November, Facebook reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, after the regulators accused the social network of misleading customers on privacy issues.

With sharing at the center of Facebook, and the new Web, analysts also wonder whether the constant chatter will create too much white noise. As psychological barriers to sharing fall and companies become more deft at leveraging social media, there’s a legitimate concern that platforms, like Facebook, will be less valuable without the proper filters.

And user growth has slowed in some mature markets. In the United States and Canada, the company added three million users — for a total of 179 million — in the fourth quarter of 2011. In the previous quarter, Facebook had added seven million users.

“What are the limits of sharing?” Ms. Li, of the Altimeter Group, said. “At what point does the presence of all these partners on Facebook, all this sharing, begin to degrade the quality of the site overall?”

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The Tech Industry Has Already Given Hollywood The Answer To Piracy; If Only It Would Listen

Posted on January 26, 2012 by root

While many in the press have really enjoyed claiming that the SOPA/PIPA fight has been about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, we’ve been pointing out for a while just how silly that is. Months ago, we pointed out that it’s a strange “fight” when one side (Silicon Valley) appears to give the other side all the weapons it needs to succeed (only to watch Hollywood then aim those weapons at its own feet). It’s been pointed out time and time again that Hollywood has a habit of looking a gift horse in the mouth… and accusing it of piracy, when it later turns out to be the answer to Hollywood’s prayers.

When the White House came out against the general approach in SOPA and PIPA, it still said that a legislative response was necessary… and asked for the “best ideas” from the tech community and people online:
Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.
But, here’s the thing: as many of us have been saying for quite some time, the “best ideas” have nothing to do with legislation, because legislation is tackling the wrong problem. No amount of legislation or enforcement stops piracy. That’s been shown over and over again. What does help deal with infringement is offering a better service that gives consumers more of what they want in a reasonable and convenient manner.

And thus, I can’t recommend enough Nat Torkington’s brilliant response to “the President’s challenge” above by likening it to this old joke:

Heavy rains start and a neighbour pulls up in his truck. “Hey Bob, I’m leaving for high ground. Want a lift?” Bob says, “No, I’m putting my faith in God.” Well, waters rise and pretty soon the bottom floor of his house is under water. Bob looks out the second story window as a boat comes by and offers him a lift. “No, I’m putting my faith in God.” The rain intensifies and floodwaters rise and Bob’s forced onto the roof. A helicopter comes, lowers a line, and Bob yells “No, I’m putting my faith in God.”

God says, “I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?”

How does that apply to this situation? Same thing. The tech industry keeps sending Hollywood the tools it needs to save itself… and Hollywood keeps “waiting” for some miraculous savior, while missing all of the tools it’s been offered to save itself:
All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

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