It appears that Apple is planning to land another "spaceship" on Silicon Valley. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the tech giant has secured a deal for an already-approved development in Sunnyvale, California. Assuming the report is accurate and all goes to plan, the project will provide Apple with a sustainable campus that boasts space for over 3,000 employees.
Microsoft is working on an advanced version of its competitor to Apple's Siri, using research from an artificial intelligence project called "Einstein."
Microsoft has been running its "personal assistant" Cortana on its Windows phones for a year, and will put the new version on the desktop with the arrival of Windows 10 this autumn. Later, Cortana will be available as a standalone app, usable on phones and tablets powered by Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iOS and Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Android, people familiar with the project said.
"This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research and a part of the Einstein project, in an interview at the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Horvitz and Microsoft declined comment on any plan to take Cortana beyond Windows.
Apple Inc., which has been working secretly on a car, is pushing its team to begin production of an electric vehicle as early as 2020, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The timeframe -- automakers typically spend five to seven years developing a car -- underscores the project’s aggressive goals and could set the stage for a battle for customers with Tesla Motors Inc. and General Motors Co., both of which are targeting a 2017 release of an electric vehicle that can go more than 200 miles on a single charge and cost less than $40,000.
“That’s the inflection point -- the proving ground -- that brings on the electric age,” Steve LeVine, author of “The Powerhouse,” a book about the automotive battery industry, said on Bloomberg TV Thursday. “Now you have Apple coming in and this is critical mass. Was GM really going to be able to match Tesla? Apple can.”
Apple, which posted record profit of $18 billion during the past quarter, has $178 billion in cash with few avenues to spend it. The Cupertino, California-based company’s research and development costs were $6.04 billion in the past year, and Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is facing increased pressure to return cash to shareholders. The CEO has been pushing the iPhone maker to enter new categories to further envelop users’ digital lives with Apple’s products and services.
Apple’s possible foray into cars follows a similar path it’s taken to break into other industries. The company wasn’t the first to make a digital-music player or smartphone, and only entered those markets once it had a product that redefined those categories.
After previous attacks on Github, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the Chinese authorities are now staging a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on Apple’s iCloud.
We have posted previously about MITM attacks on Google and Github and broke the news about the recent attack on Yahoo. Refer to the appendix at the end of this post to see technical evidence of the attack.
This case is different, however, for a few of reasons.
Wikipedia defines a man-in-the-middle-attack in the following way:
The man-in-the-middle attack...is a form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker.
This is clearly a malicious attack on Apple in an effort to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, etc. Unlike the recent attack on Google, this attack is nationwide and coincides with the launch today in China of the newest iPhone. While the attacks on Google and Yahoo enabled the authorities to snoop on what information Chinese were accessing on those two platforms, the Apple attack is different. If users ignored the security warning and clicked through to the Apple site and entered their username and password, this information has now been compromised by the Chinese authorities. Many Apple customers use iCloud to store their personal information, including iMessages, photos and contacts. This may also somehow be related again to images and videos of the Hong Kong protests being shared on the mainland.
With Apple Pay, the tech juggernaut has begun its assault on antiquated payment networks. The launch could not have come at a better time, as consumers have been inundated with security breaches and are likely ready to make a change.
The concept of a "tokenization" or a one-time card number that does not transmit personal data is a similar concept to the Bitcoin blockchain. Certainly technology purists will argue that the blockchain technology at the heart of Bitcoin is superior, but to the consumer, the difference is indistinguishable.
Even if the consumer demands a superior technology, Apple's ability to partner with Visa, MasterCard and American Express in addition to retailers like McDonalds, Whole Foods and Disney provides a formidable barrier to entry. Moreover, Apple can crowdsource the next "killer app" with its development ecosystem. But does this mean Bitcoin is dead?
Over the weekend, Apple approved the first bitcoin wallet app since it announced, earlier this month, that it was going to change policy and permit bitcoin wallets in its App Store. Before then, it had been a rocky ride for folks who wanted to send and receive bitcoins on their iPhones. Over the past year, Apple dropped popular wallet apps such as Blockchain and Coinbase from the App Store–without explaining why.
