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Apple bracing for the “mother of all tax bills” from the European Commission
The European Commission has been investigating Apple’s tax policies, and Matt Larson of Bloomberg Intelligence said that it could demand Apple pay back $8 billion. Apple of course will drag things out with a long legal battle because it insists that as the rules stand its method of not paying tax in the country where it makes its profits is perfectly legal.
Since 2014, the European Commission thinks that Apple’s corporate arrangement in Ireland allows it to calculate profits using more favorable accounting methods. Apple calculates its tax bill using low operating costs, a move that dramatically decreases what the company pays to the Irish government. While Apple generates about 55 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., its foreign tax rate is about 1.8 percent.
Larson said that if the Commission decides to enforce a tougher accounting standard, Apple may owe taxes at a 12.5 percent rate, on $64.1 … Read more
Stealing passwords from the cloud. Scary stuff from Las Vegas …
7 October 2015 – Thousands of cloud fanatics have descended on Las Vegas this week for Amazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference. One item that grabbed our attention was the announcement of a group of researchers from Massachussets who published a concept test which uses a failure in the AWS virtual machines to steal their RSA cryptographic passes. Nowadays the failure is already patched, but according to the researchers we really need to think more seriously about the security on the cloud.
The group of professors … at Worcester Polytechnic Institute … demonstrated in a recently published paper named “Seriously, get off my cloud! Cross-VM RSA Key Recovery in a Public Cloud,” a proof of concept hack of secret cryptography keys used in an AWS virtual machine. The now-patched flaw – which was not specific to AWS — showed that a hacker could theoretically gain a user’s secret keys that are used to encrypt sensitive data.
Security experts say the risk of this specific attack being used is quite low because the vulnerable encryption library has been patched. … Read more
Light-based memory chip is first to permanently store data
8 September 2015 – Scientists have developed the first ever memory chip that’s entirely light-based and can store data permanently. Sciencemag reports:
“Today’s electronic computer chips work at blazing speeds. But an alternate version that stores, manipulates, and moves data with photons of light instead of electrons would make today’s chips look like proverbial horses and buggies. Now, one team of researchers reports that it has created the first permanent optical memory on a chip, a critical step in that direction. If a more advanced photonic memory can be integrated with photonic logic and interconnections, the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today’s computer processors.”… Read more