TechEye |  |
- HP stays in slow decline
- US to make improvements in facial recognition software
- US spooks snoop more than they say
- Manning gets 35 years in clink
- LG signs up for a Firefox phone
| Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:14 AM PDT The troubled maker of expensive printer ink, HP has reported its results, which show that even after its restructuring it is still in a slow death spiral. Shares in HP dropped eight percent in after-hours trading after the company reported a nine percent decline in Enterprise Group revenue. Enterprise is the company's second-largest division and a major part of CEO Meg Whitman's cunning plan to transform HP into a provider of enterprise computing services able to take on IBM and Cisco. The troubled company has been suffering from a morale numbing restructuring for the past two years, and is still stuck with weak IT spending. HP recorded revenue of $27.2 billion in the fiscal third quarter, down from $29.7 billion a year earlier. That missed the $27.3 billion in sales that the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had expected. According to analyst outfit TBR, HP managed to improve its profits but failed to halt revenue declines. HP's plan has been to control expenses and reallocate savings to fund lucrative, unified product, service and solution initiatives that allow HP to grow profit. TBR analyst Jack Narcotta said that the cunning plan by Whitman and team of misery have not so far not worked, "HP has yet to prove it can grow its non-PC and server business to offset staunch declines in those two industries, and a hyper-competitive pricing environment that will persist through 2014 will limit HP's ability to rebound from its downward growth," Narcotta wrote. In the second quarter of 2013, HP Personal Systems Group recorded $7.7 billion in revenue, a year-to-year revenue decline of 11 percent. Notebook and desktop PC product lines, which are a third of HP's corporate revenue were hit hardest with PC unit shipments falling 11 percent following a steep 20.1 percent annual decline last year. Narcotta said that HP is in slow decline even though it makes it cash from lots of different sources. But things are getting slowly worse. Last year HP's revenues were $127 billion. In 2012, full year revenue was $120 billion. TBR expects prolonged lukewarm consumer response to HP's Windows 8 notebook and tablet PCs and things not to improve on that front. Meanwhile HP will suffer from pricing pressure in an increasingly competitive x86 server marketplace. Narcotta thinks this will shrink revenues to $114 billion in the current calendar year, and $109 billion in 2014. The only way forward for HP is to continue to reduce the numbers of works HP hires. So far axing employees has been what Whitman does best, but Narcotta thinks that more people are for the chop. "HP employs more than 300,000, providing it with ample room to cut costs. It can sustain profitability at levels previously attained with higher revenue and not lower expenses," he said. HP's operating income which is one of the highest in the PC and server industries is vulnerable to decline as server revenues shrink due to intense price competition and aggressively-priced rivals Lenovo, Acer and Asus undercut PC unit shipments. The company appears to be trying to re-establish momentum consumer PC markets, which are lower margin, while protecting its more lucrative enterprise customer base. Narcotta praised the addition of Chrome OS and Android devices to its portfolio which he thinks reflects a HP's awareness of the trends that are influencing the PC industry. But growth will be limited through the rest of the year as more low-cost, APAC-based firms obstruct HP's efforts to reclaim market share. Demand for devices such as the Slate 7 tablet and Pavilion Chromebook will be checked by Asus' Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy Tab devices and even Apple's iPad Mini. HP's Chromebook is priced higher than devices from market leader Samsung. Meanwhile weakened PC demand and increasing pricing pressure as a result of fierce competition from Lenovo continue to erode HP's market share. "While HP boasts strong PC margins relative to its Windows peers such as Acer, Asus and Lenovo, HP's hesitation to tolerate lower profit margins will limit its ability to stem attrition of consumers and enterprise PC users to vendors offering lower-price solutions," Narcotta wrote. Revenue of from HP's industry-standard x86 servers declined 7 per cent while its storeage servers fell by 13 percent. Traditional tape and hard-disk based storage dropped a marked 37 percent to $500 million as enterprises continue to move away from hardware heavy legacy data centres. |
| US to make improvements in facial recognition software Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:11 AM PDT The US federal government is closer to making a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces. The New York Times has got its paws on reports relating to the Department of Homeland Security's crowd scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System [BOSS]. The system was not fully baked, but researchers say they are making significant advances. The idea is to have a system that would help match faces in a crowd with names on a watch list. It would allow police to spot suspects at high-profile events like a presidential inaugural parade or find those who have escaped from prison. So far technical specialists say crowd scanning is still too slow and unreliable, but the NSA is still keen on coming up with a workable plan in time for when computer processing power is strong enough. BOSS began as an effort to help the military detect potential suicide bombers and other terrorists overseas at "outdoor polling places in Afghanistan and Iraq". But in 2010, the Department of Homeland Security wanted it to be developed for use by the police in the United States. During a recent test of the system, the department recommended against deploying it until more improvements could be made. However, at this point it is not clear when this may be done. Researchers say they made progress, and independent specialists say it is virtually inevitable that someone will make the broader concept work as camera and compute power continue to improve. The feeling is that it could be in place in five years centred around a two-year, $5.2 million federal contract given to Electronic Warfare Associates. BOSS is handicapped by the fact that taking snaps of crowds from a distance is blighted with lighting problems and faces tend to be partly obscured. Currently BOSS researchers are trying to overcome those challenges by generating far more information for computers to analyse. BOSS consists of two towers bearing "robotic camera structures" with infrared and distance sensors. They take pictures of the same subject from slightly different angles. A computer then processes the images into a "3D signature" built from data like the ratios between various points on someone's face to be compared against database of faces. A more recent test used 30 volunteers whose facial data would be mingled in a database among 1,000 mug shots. The agency set up six tests to determine the technology's overall accuracy. The test worked out that the technology was not ready for police to buy. Currently the belief is that the technology could be ready to deploy within five years. |
| US spooks snoop more than they say Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:09 AM PDT NSA claims that it is only focused on foreign communications and US citizens are only spied on by accident have been rubbished by new information reported in the Wall Street Journal. The National Security Agency has only limited legal authority to spy on US citizens and yet for some reason it has built a surveillance network that covers more than 75 percent of Americans' web use. The WSJ said that the system has the capacity to reach roughly 75 percent of all US Internet traffic. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the US and also filters domestic phone calls made with internet technology. What is weird about some of these disclosures is that they have been public for years. Whistleblower Mark Klein revealed years ago that the NSA has deals with the major telcos which scoop up a huge amount of internet traffic. These programmes were code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew and they filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Filtering is carried out at more than a dozen locations at major internet junctions in the US. The NSA was not being exactly truthful when it said that the information copied was just metadata either. The NSA has the capability to track almost anything that happens online, although it does still need a broad court order. There is also some measure of NSA doublespeak. It can claim that it's not "accessing" all of this traffic, because it asks the telcos to do some of the filtering for it. But effectively it amounts to the same thing. The WSJ confirms that while most of the requests are targeted towards foreign communications, there are times when it's quite clear that requests are likely to cover domestic communications. Part of this is because there is a broad interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, giving the NSA the power to snoop on people "reasonably believed" to be outside the US. This is a much lower legal standard than requiring "probable cause" that they were "an agent of a foreign power. Some of the "mistakes" listed by the NSA which lead to data being collected on everyone in Washington were probably more deliberate than they appeared. The NSA fessed up to one operator mistake which involved in data being collected on New York instead of Egypt "for three months". However the Journal found that it had three years of illegal collections. |
| Manning gets 35 years in clink Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:06 AM PDT Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified US government information to WikiLeaks. According to the Wall Street Journal, presiding judge, Denise Lind, delivered a sentence that means the former intelligence analyst will likely spend at least eight more years behind bars before he could be freed. Manning downloaded some 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents that he sent to WikiLeaks and admitted doing it. However, his attorneys and anti secrecy advocates have said that it would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers looking to expose government wrongdoing. Manning's sentence was the longest meted out in recent history for a would-be whistleblower, but it was also one of the biggest leaks ever. With Manning's help, WikiLeaks released 250,000 diplomatic cables, nearly 400,000 military reports and an infamous video of a 2007 US airstrike in Baghdad that killed two Reuters employees. There are some who think the punishment is too light, particularly as some of the more right wing types believed he should have been executed for treason. Republican Buck McKeon, who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the sentence was "light" given the vast damage Manning did to US national security. McKeon felt there was a need to send a strong signal to others who may be tempted to disclose classified information. Apparently 35 years in jail is not enough to deter anyone from handing over documents. But McKeon's argument depends on the fact that Manning, 25, was found guilding of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. He wasn't. As it was, the most the prosecution wanted was 60 years, and the defence no more than 25. After he has served his sentence he will be dishonourably discharged, and will forfeit all pay and benefits. Manning is expected to be transferred quickly to Fort Leavenworth to serve his sentence. The case will be immediately appealed, and he could be granted clemency by the Army parole board. David Coombs, Manning's lead attorney, and others, said they would launch a new campaign urging President Barack Obama to pardon Manning although at the moment it is unlikely to see him do that. Obama only lets corporate stars like Apple off the hook. Manning is also an example of Obama's crackdown on leaks. His administration has used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more than twice as many people for mishandling secret government information as all other administrations combined. Central Intelligence Agency officer John Kiriakou is serving a 30 month sentence after being convicted of sharing classified information with a reporter about the agency's controversial waterboarding interrogation technique. |
| LG signs up for a Firefox phone Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:04 AM PDT Mozilla's Firefox based mobile operating system is starting to gain some momentum. LG has announced that it is going join Alcatel, GeeksPhone and ZTE in the Firefox OS market. During an interview with Bulgarian tech press, LG's mobile communications head in Bulgaria, Dimitar Valev, has spilled the beans on the company's plans for the future. He tried to imply that the plans only regard Bulgaria, it's pretty obvious he was talking about LG's global strategy. Not even LG would only try to flog a phone brand only in Bulgaria. Valev said that LG is also looking to come up with a new tablet, phablet and even a smartwatch based around the operating system. There have been a few rumours regarding a Firefox OS smartwatch, but no snaps of prototypes have tipped up. LG's first Firefox OS phone is tipped to arrive in early 2014 with the launch date for the Firefox OS smartphone said to be the first quarter of the next year. This will give LG time to observe how Firefox OS devices are doing. LG announced its support for Mozilla's Firefox OS platform at Mobile World Congress in February and the operating system is being seen as a way for mobile makers to lose their dependence on Google's Android. |
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