Sony Share Price Falls Below 1,000 Yen For 1st Time Since 1980
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TOKYO - Sony's stock price fell below 1,000 yen Monday for the first time since 1980 as global markets slide but also a symptom of its decline since huge success with the Walkman three decades ago.
Battered by competition from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Sony has lost money for four straight years — and for eight years in its core television business.
A strong yen, which erodes overseas income, and natural disasters at home and in Thailand, a key manufacturing hub, have added to its woes.
Sony's shares dipped to 990 yen before recovering slightly in trading Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Nikkei 225 stock average was down 2 per cent after U.S. hiring slowed sharply in May.
The company said it was first time that its stock price had traded below 1,000 yen since August 1980 — the year after it introduced the iconic Walkman portable cassette player to the world in 1979.
The stock had peaked at 16,950 yen in March 2000.
Sony, whose businesses run from digital cameras and personal computers to PlayStation game consoles and movies such as "Bad Teacher," last month reported a record annual loss of 457 billion yen ($5.7 billion) for the year through March 2012.
The company is aiming for a comeback under Kazuo Hirai, appointed president earlier this year, who has headed the gaming division and built his career in the U.S. Sony forecast a return to profit for the fiscal year through March 2013 at 30 billion yen ($375 million), banking on the growing smartphone and tablet businesses.
Sony also plans to cut 10,000 jobs, or about 6 per cent of its global work force.
Widely admired in the 1980s as an innovative power, Sony fell behind when digital music players and flat TVs became hits. Its gadgets have lost popularity as consumers flock to products from Apple such as the iPhone and iPod.
It's also lost out in the TV market to South Korea's Samsung and other Asian competitors. Despite losses in that division, Hirai remains committed to TVs, and promised to cut costs to turn a profit in the division in the next two years.
Sony also plans to seek new growth in emerging markets such as India and Mexico.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Starbucks newest aquisition
Starbucks to Buy Bay Bread
Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), the world’s largest coffee-shop operator, agreed to buy Bay Bread LLC for $100 million in cash, adding to its expanding portfolio of non-coffee businesses.
The acquisition of San Francisco-based Bay Bread and its La Boulange brand will decrease full-year profit by 2 cents a share, the Seattle-based company said in a statement today. The French-themed bakery sells homemade granola, flank steak sandwiches and organic bread, according to its website.
“We are deeply committed to building a national brand” with bakery items, Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said during a conference call. Starbucks may also sell La Boulange products in grocery stores where it already sells coffee and tea, he said.
Since returning as CEO in 2008, Schultz has introduced Via instant coffee, wrested control of packaged goods distribution from Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) and bought a juicemaker to cash in on the health and wellness trend. The purchase of a bakery extends the company’s reach further beyond its coffee-shop roots.
“It will be higher quality food,” said Peter Saleh, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group in New York. Starbucks customers “care about the quality of the item” and are “definitely brand-conscious people.”
Starbucks fell 2.2 percent to $52.74 in extended trading. The stock rose 3.4 percent to $53.90 at the close in New York. The shares have gained 17 percent this year.
‘Critical Component’
La Boulange bakery operates 19 retail stores in the San Francisco area and sells its products in restaurants, hotels and grocery stores, according to the statement. Besides selling the bakery’s food in Starbucks cafes, Starbucks will expand La Boulange locations nationwide.
“Food is a critical component of the core Starbucks business,” Chief Financial Officer Troy Alstead said in a telephone interview. Food, including fruit salads, chicken lettuce wraps and blueberry scones, makes up about 19 percent of sales at Starbucks U.S. stores, he said.
The transaction is expected to close in Starbucks’ fiscal fourth quarter, Alstead said. Pascal Rigo, who opened the first La Boulange store in 1999, will become senior vice president and general manager of La Boulange bakery at Starbucks when the deal is finalized.
The coffee-chain operator will need to explain how much more capital it will deploy as it rolls out Bay Bread products in its stores and expands La Boulange’s network, Saleh said.
Energy Drinks
Starbucks revenue rose 6.3 percent to $8.04 billion in the U.S. in the year ended Oct. 2. The company’s domestic segment made up 69 percent of revenue last year.
Last year, Starbucks paid $30 million for Evolution Fresh Inc. and has since opened one cafe to sell the flash-pasteurized juice, which it also plans to put in grocery stores. In March, Starbucks said it would sell 60-calorie, green-coffee extract energy drinks called Refreshers. It also owns the Tazo tea and Ethos water brands.
The cloud flare hack and what it entailed
The Four Critical Security Flaws that Resulted in Last Friday's Hack
A core value CloudFlare is that security information should be shared between organizations to make the entire Internet safer. That is how CloudFlare's systems work: if one site is attacked, data about that attack is immediately shared with the rest of the network so other sites can be safe. We believe that same core value should apply when we are the victim of the attack. That is why we immediately posted an incident report and have continue to update it as we learn more.
Writing that report wasn't fun, but I believe it is important to share the details of the event so others who may be affected can learn from the events that transpired last Friday. This is not the usual way for the security industry, but we believe it's the way the security industry should be. To that end, here's what we know about the hack.
The Four Key Security Flaws
There were four key security flaws that allowed the hack to happen:
AT&T was tricked into redirecting my voicemail to a fraudulent voicemail box;
Google's account recovery process was tricked by the fraudulent voicemail box and left an account recovery PIN code that allowed my personal Gmail account to be reset;
A flaw in Google's Enterprise Apps account recovery process allowed the hacker to bypass two-factor authentication on my CloudFlare.com address; and
CloudFlare BCCing transactional emails to some administrative accounts allowed the hacker to reset the password of a customer once the hacker had gained access to the administrative email account.
Patching the Holes
We are following up with AT&T to understand more about how the voicemail was redirected. That remains unsettling, but it is not surprising that a phone company's voicemail security procedures are lax. It is also unsettling that Gmail's account recovery process appears to still be vulnerable to the voicemail hack. That is troubling since it means if a hacker knows your phone number then your Gmail account may, at best, only be as secure as your voicemail PIN.
You can mitigate these risk if you are a user by enabling two-factor authentication, ideally relying on Google's Authenticator App rather than anything that passes through the phone company's network. While Google is advising otherwise, I have removed my phone number from all my Google accounts.
Google has publicly stated that the flaw in the Google Enterprise App account recovery process has been patched and you can no longer use it get around two-factor authentication. Again, since any security system is only as strong as its weakest link, we would recommend using an out-of-band authentication that doesn't rely on the phone company's network (e.g., Google Authenticator App, not SMS or voice verification).
Finally, CloudFlare has stopped BCCing password reset and other transactional messages to administrative accounts, closing that attack vector if an administrator's email account is compromised in the future. If you're doing that at your company, and a troubling number of companies do use email as a poor man's logs, you should stop. This incident is why.
Timeline
The event, from start to finish, lasted less than 2 hours. The hackers were in my personal Gmail account for about 1 hour 35 minutes. They were in CloudFlare's email accounts for about 28 minutes, although likely interrupted several times as our ops team reset passwords and sessions. To better understand the hack, we put together the visual timeline (full size image here) below which is our best understanding of the events as they transpired. As we learn more, we'll update the information here and on the official incident report.
A core value CloudFlare is that security information should be shared between organizations to make the entire Internet safer. That is how CloudFlare's systems work: if one site is attacked, data about that attack is immediately shared with the rest of the network so other sites can be safe. We believe that same core value should apply when we are the victim of the attack. That is why we immediately posted an incident report and have continue to update it as we learn more.
Writing that report wasn't fun, but I believe it is important to share the details of the event so others who may be affected can learn from the events that transpired last Friday. This is not the usual way for the security industry, but we believe it's the way the security industry should be. To that end, here's what we know about the hack.
The Four Key Security Flaws
There were four key security flaws that allowed the hack to happen:
AT&T was tricked into redirecting my voicemail to a fraudulent voicemail box;
Google's account recovery process was tricked by the fraudulent voicemail box and left an account recovery PIN code that allowed my personal Gmail account to be reset;
A flaw in Google's Enterprise Apps account recovery process allowed the hacker to bypass two-factor authentication on my CloudFlare.com address; and
CloudFlare BCCing transactional emails to some administrative accounts allowed the hacker to reset the password of a customer once the hacker had gained access to the administrative email account.
Patching the Holes
We are following up with AT&T to understand more about how the voicemail was redirected. That remains unsettling, but it is not surprising that a phone company's voicemail security procedures are lax. It is also unsettling that Gmail's account recovery process appears to still be vulnerable to the voicemail hack. That is troubling since it means if a hacker knows your phone number then your Gmail account may, at best, only be as secure as your voicemail PIN.
You can mitigate these risk if you are a user by enabling two-factor authentication, ideally relying on Google's Authenticator App rather than anything that passes through the phone company's network. While Google is advising otherwise, I have removed my phone number from all my Google accounts.
Google has publicly stated that the flaw in the Google Enterprise App account recovery process has been patched and you can no longer use it get around two-factor authentication. Again, since any security system is only as strong as its weakest link, we would recommend using an out-of-band authentication that doesn't rely on the phone company's network (e.g., Google Authenticator App, not SMS or voice verification).
Finally, CloudFlare has stopped BCCing password reset and other transactional messages to administrative accounts, closing that attack vector if an administrator's email account is compromised in the future. If you're doing that at your company, and a troubling number of companies do use email as a poor man's logs, you should stop. This incident is why.
Timeline
The event, from start to finish, lasted less than 2 hours. The hackers were in my personal Gmail account for about 1 hour 35 minutes. They were in CloudFlare's email accounts for about 28 minutes, although likely interrupted several times as our ops team reset passwords and sessions. To better understand the hack, we put together the visual timeline (full size image here) below which is our best understanding of the events as they transpired. As we learn more, we'll update the information here and on the official incident report.
Internet intervention? Ask the UN...
Several emerging countries are rallying behind a campaign to have the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N.'s global standards body for telecommunications, declare the Internet a global telecommunications system, U.S. officials testified on Thursday before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Led by China, Russia, India and now Egypt, which recently launched its own proposal, such a move would allow state-owned telephone networks to expand into VoIP. It would also give them the opportunity to charge fees for Internet service - and put the Internet at the mercy of international politics.
These countries perceive the Internet as a profit center controlled by private interests, mostly in North America and Europe, according to officials from the U.S. State Department and Federal Communications Commission. They don't yet have the resources to develop Internet technology, but they do control state-owned telephone companies. If the ITU were to make slight alterations in its definitions of certain technologies, U.S. officials told Congress, they may not even have to vote on whether the Internet comes under the ITU's regulatory jurisdiction. They could simply presume that it does - and they may not even need a majority of backers to make that presumption.
Arab Fall
"The Arab States' proposal is very troubling," testified FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, referring to one of the items slated for discussion during the next meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) this December. It's a meeting designed to reconsider the rules of global telecommunications regulation, and it will literally be the first such meeting since the invention of the World Wide Web.
"[It's] a small definitional change, maybe hoping no one would notice," the Commissioner continued, "that all of a sudden swallows the Internet, that expands the ITU's jurisdiction tremendously."
In his opening statement, McDowell laid out a disturbing strategy, one whose roots lie as far back as 1988. At that time, an international treaty insulated the Internet from any governmental body's regulatory authority, both national and international. During his successful presidential campaign, Russia's Vladimir Putin made the case that such treaties were effectively coerced by Western interests. Now, many U.N. member nations are acknowledging the existence of a "phone number crisis" - the notion that the world has more telephone users than there are telephone numbers to serve them. Mr. Putin has proposed that VoIP technologies are the solution to this crisis, but has argued that member states whose phone systems are presently overflowing won't be able to extend their phone services to the Internet - and thus charge their citizens the usual service fees and taxes for using VoIP service, which Internet treaties presently prohibit - unless and until an international body takes what Putin calls "control."
"The Russian Federation has proposed that the ITU be given jurisdiction over IP addresses, to remedy the phone number shortage. What is left unsaid, however, is that potential ITU jurisdiction over IP addresses would enable it to regulate Internet services and devices with abandon," McDowell continued. "IP addresses are a fundamental and essential component to the inner workings of the Net. Taking their administration away from the bottom-up, non-governmental, multi-stakeholder model and placing it into the hands of international bureaucrats would be a grave mistake."
"Information Security"
Ambassador Philip Verveer, a U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, has more experience with telecommunications law than anyone alive, having served as the Justice Department's lead counsel in the antitrust case that led to the breakup of the Bell System, beginning in 1973. Probably America's most respected expert on international telecommunications law, Verveer warned representatives on Thursday that, should the Internet be subject to an international regulatory body, any one of that body's members could designate itself, shall we say, solely responsible for its content.
"[Russia and China] have a concept that they call 'information security,' the ambassador told Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass.). "Their concept of information security is both what we would call 'cybersecurity' - the physical protection of their networks - but it goes beyond that to address content that they regard as unwanted. I think as much as anything else, the base motivations that Russia and China have involve regime stability, regime preservation, which for them involves preventing unwanted content from being made widely available in their countries."
While these new superpowers look out for our information security, McDowell outlined the possibility - if not the likelihood - that a newly promoted ITU would institute something called an international universal service fund.
In response to a question from Rep. Bob Latta (R - Ohio), McDowell pointed out that the companies responsible for attracting the most traffic could end up with the most liability for contributions to that fund - companies like Google (YouTube) and Netflix. "There might be an international mandate for some sort of regulatory regime to impose these charges, and that is a concern. If companies want to enter into a contract in a competitive market, I'm all for that. But we don't need an international regulatory body distorting the marketplace to anyone's disadvantage."
"Precatory Regulation"
According to the Constitution, treaties made between the U.S. and other countries are treated as law of the land. The treaties that make the U.S. a member of the ITU have been treated as law, including current international regulations that protect the state of the Internet today. Rep. Doris Matsui (D - Calif.) asked Verveer to project a worst-case scenario. "What would happen here in this country? Would those resolutions immediately become law? What steps could the U.S. take to limit its participation in the treaty?"
"First, it is conventional, and we certainly will take a very broad reservation from whatever is agreed at the conference," responded Verveer. "Virtually every other country will do the same thing. So you will have countries agreeing that they will abide by the provisions of the treaty unless, for some reason, they won't. When I say 'typically,' the reasons will be extraordinarily broad. That's one thing. The second thing that's very important to understand is, there's no enforcement mechanism associated with this. These are precatory, as are many, many other aspects of international law. So it is not reasonable to assume that, if something really ruinous, for some reason, was to be adopted as a particular regulation, you would see countries against their interests enforcing that regulation, as only the countries would be able to enforce - there's no other way for it to be done.
"So this conference, and all of these activities, are extraordinarily important in terms of establishing norms, in terms of establishing expectations," the ambassador continued, "and in terms of trying to help with respect to both commercial activities and the free flow of information. But they're very, very different from a law that the Congress, for example, might adopt that would be subject to all the juridical enforcement mechanisms that are available."
Speaking as part of a second panel featuring stakeholders outside the U.S. government, Internet Society Senior Public Policy Manager Sally Wentworth repeated her position from last month's ReadWriteWeb interview that the treaty process is inadequate for rule making with respect to a system whose stakeholders are comprised of more than countries.
"It is not simply that the treaty negotiation process excludes non-governmental stakeholders from decision making," said Wentworth, "but that it dramatically limits the extent to which participants from industry and civil society can even be meaningfully heard. In the United States, in contrast, the administrative process contains a wide range of checks and balances, including comment periods and public meetings that collect, record and, in many cases, incorporate public opinion in the rule-making process. The WCIT lacks any similar structure to bring in expert advice, which makes it prone to making closed-door decisions without the benefit of the widest possible range of external input."
That said, Wentworth later told Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R - Ore.) that the next WCIT conference is only the beginning of a wave of international efforts. "I do think it's important that we put the WCIT in context. The WCIT is an extremely important event in 2012. It is a treaty-making conference. But the discussion of Internet governance will not stop there. There are ongoing discussions within the United Nations framework, in the Commission for Science and Technology for Development, within the International Telecommunications Union, and within the U.N. General Assembly that seek to take on these issues of Internet governance with a great deal of specificity. All of these discussions are things that we at the Internet Society are following carefully, and we think that multi-stakeholder engagement and discussion of these issues over the next several years is going to be extremely important."
ICANN Vice President and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Congress he's concerned about any number of efforts by international bodies - the ITU being just one of several - to seize control of the world's Internet policy agenda.
"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."
Hybrid racer testing debut
Hybrid Toyota TS030 Makes Successful Le Mans Test Debut
By Antony Ingram, Contributing Writer 06/04/2012
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Resplendent in its new 'hybrid-blue' color scheme, Toyota's hybrid entry into this year's Le Mans 24 Hours has made a successful debut in testing.
Toyota tested a pair of its TS030 Le Mans Prototypes at the Le Mans circuit. The #7 car of Alex Wurz, Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima completed the most laps with 83, while the #8 car of Anthony Davidson and Sébastien Buemi had its first run, managing 73 laps.
The TS030's hybrid system pairs a 3.4-liter V-8 gasoline engine with a capacitor-based hybrid drivetrain, both sending power to, and recovering energy via the rear wheels.
The hybrid capability also allows the TS030 to run entirely on electricity in some scenarios, just like the firm's 4-million hybrid road cars. At lower speeds, such as driving in the pit lane, the car will produce little noise and zero emissions.
Toyota has worked particularly hard to develop a system that works well in a racing scenario. Hisatake Murata, Hybrid Project Leader, described the improvements made in a Toyota press release.
"We are continuously adjusting and improving the system, so each test day brings a step forward and that was true again today. The combination of downshifting, braking and charging is really working in harmony; it’s like an elaborate dance."
While the 73 and 83-lap stints completed by the drivers don't represent the huge distances driven in the full 24 hours, all the drivers were positive after the car's first run on the historic circuit.
Toyota's main rival at Le Mans this year is likely to be multiple winners Audi, also fielding a hybrid vehicle, albeit one mainly powered by diesel.
By Antony Ingram, Contributing Writer 06/04/2012
Share This:
Resplendent in its new 'hybrid-blue' color scheme, Toyota's hybrid entry into this year's Le Mans 24 Hours has made a successful debut in testing.
Toyota tested a pair of its TS030 Le Mans Prototypes at the Le Mans circuit. The #7 car of Alex Wurz, Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima completed the most laps with 83, while the #8 car of Anthony Davidson and Sébastien Buemi had its first run, managing 73 laps.
The TS030's hybrid system pairs a 3.4-liter V-8 gasoline engine with a capacitor-based hybrid drivetrain, both sending power to, and recovering energy via the rear wheels.
The hybrid capability also allows the TS030 to run entirely on electricity in some scenarios, just like the firm's 4-million hybrid road cars. At lower speeds, such as driving in the pit lane, the car will produce little noise and zero emissions.
Toyota has worked particularly hard to develop a system that works well in a racing scenario. Hisatake Murata, Hybrid Project Leader, described the improvements made in a Toyota press release.
"We are continuously adjusting and improving the system, so each test day brings a step forward and that was true again today. The combination of downshifting, braking and charging is really working in harmony; it’s like an elaborate dance."
While the 73 and 83-lap stints completed by the drivers don't represent the huge distances driven in the full 24 hours, all the drivers were positive after the car's first run on the historic circuit.
Toyota's main rival at Le Mans this year is likely to be multiple winners Audi, also fielding a hybrid vehicle, albeit one mainly powered by diesel.
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