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BlackBerry to Fire 4,500 Employees as Sales of New Device Plummet

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Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

BlackBerry confirmed it was firing 4,500 of its staff on Friday as the struggling smartphone firm said it expects to lose nearly $1bn in the three months to August on disappointing sales of new phones.

Revenues for the three months were only $1.6bn, the company said, against analysts’ forecasts of $3bn – indicative of a collapse in its business after lacklustre sales of its new Z10 and Q10 phones. In all, it shipped 3.7m smartphones in the quarter, its lowest since summer 2007, when the first iPhone came out.

The company’s shares crashed from $10.20 to $8.03 before recovering to $8.73, a 17% drop on the day, valuing it at $4.5bn. The shares were briefly suspended as rumours of the loss circulated, and it was forced to indicate its quarterly earnings a week ahead of their scheduled date. It said it would announce a loss of between $930m and $955m next week.

That brings its total losses in the past seven quarters to $1.8bn, putting its viability as a going concern into question.

The company announced it was putting itself up for sale at the end of August – which market observers took to indicate it had failed to find a buyer privately. Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia this month effectively left the Ontario-based company in the cold.

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NSA Can Track Smartphone Data by Breaking Through iPhone and Blackberry Security Measures

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The NSA is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users’ data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine cited internal documents from the U.S.’ National Security Agency and its British counterpart GCHQ in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists.

The data obtained this way includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information, Der Spiegel reported.

The documents don’t indicate that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of phone users but rather that these techniques are used to eavesdrop on specific individuals, the magazine said.

The article doesn’t explain how the magazine obtained the documents, which are described as ‘secret.’ But one of its authors is Laura Poitras, an American filmmaker with close contacts to NSA leaker Edward Snowden who has published several articles about the NSA in Der Spiegel in recent weeks.

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Workers’ Rights ‘Flouted’ at Apple iPhone Factory in China

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The new cheaper iPhone that Apple will unveil to a global audience on Tuesday is being produced under illegal and abusive conditions in Chinese factories owned by one of America’s largest manufacturing businesses, investigators have claimed.

Workers are asked to stand for 12-hour shifts with just two 30-minute breaks, six days a week, the non-profit organisation China Labor Watch has claimed. Staff are allegedly working without adequate protective equipment, at risk from chemicals, noise and lasers, for an average of 69 hours a week. Apple has a self-imposed limit of 60 working hours a week.

The problems were uncovered at a plant in Wuxi, near Shanghai, where Apple’s first low-cost handset, dubbed the iPhone 5C, is being produced. The plant is owned by Florida-based Jabil Circuit, a US company with 60 plants in 33 countries including Scotland, and a turnover of $17bn (£11bn) a year. Jabil said it had uncovered problems last month and was taking immediate steps to investigate the allegations. Apple said its experts were “already on site” to look into the claims.

“It is the duty of national governments to regulate the conduct of their companies abroad,” China Labor Watch argued. “The US government also shares in the responsibility for labour abuses committed by US companies manufacturing in China.”

Jabil has 30,000 employees at Wuxi, where cases for the colourful iPhone 5C are being . The majority are hired indirectly through employment agencies, the investigators claim. Local laws set a limit of 30% agency workers in any company’s workforce to prevent the exploitation of staff.

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John McCain Unapologetic After Playing iPhone Poker During Syria Hearing

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Photo Credit: Forbes

Photo Credit: Forbes

The elected members of the U.S. Congress will soon vote on whether the country should send missiles into Syria, intervening in a war that has already claimed the lives of over 100,000.

One would think that the matter before the Congress would at least command their attention. But, as the Senate conducted a hearing today to discuss the details of the strike, and the arguments for and against it, Sen. John McCain took out his iPhone and played poker to pass the time.

An image of McCain’s phone was captured by Washington Post photographer Melina Mara, and posted to the Post’s live blog of the hearing. The photo is blurry, but clearly depicts a game in progress.

When he learned of the picture, McCain posted a flippant response to Twitter. “Scandal!” he wrote. “Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing – worst of all I lost!”

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Could this Keep NSA From Listening In?

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Americans worried about National Security Agency surveillance are flocking to alternative technology providers and apps that will actually encrypt their phone calls, according to a Fox News report.

“Sales of online apps to encrypt cell calls are soaring,” reports Fox News correspondent David Lee Miller. “For as little as a few dollars a month there are now at least half a dozen companies such as Silent Circle and Seecrypt selling apps, making it difficult if not impossible for the government or anyone else to monitor your private communication.”

Miller notes both the sending and receiving cell phones need the app for the call to remain secure.

Michael Janke, CEO of Silent Circle boasted to Fox News that the encryption service his company runs would take “all of the world’s supercomputers put together 44 years to break the encryption of 1 message.”

Harvey Boulter, chairman of Seecrypt, revealed his company is following another trend: alternative technology providers locating overseas to avoid the reach of the NSA.

Read more from this story HERE.

Why Conservatives (and Everyone Else) Should Abandon the iPhone

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Photo Credit: Yutaka Tsutano

Photo Credit: Yutaka Tsutano

1. You can’t upload Red Phone, the Android program that encrypts and secures all calls against NSA eavesdropping.

2. You can’t shut off Obama’s Presidential Notifications that AT&T has so graciously mandated for all iPhone users.

3. It’s difficult to remove the symbol of the “Apple” on the back of the device, an icon praising Adam and Eve’s decision to rebel against God by tasting the forbidden fruit (it’s also common knowledge that Apple sold its first PC for $666.66).

4. Any time you run out of power, you cannot simply replace the battery with a charged, spare battery because Apple has designed the iPhone without a removable battery.

5. There are far more open source, free programs available on the non-iPhone Android platforms, there are other phones with better displays, and there are many phones now available with better processing power.

Apple Deluged by Federal Demands to Decrypt iPhones

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Apple receives so many police demands to decrypt seized iPhones that it has created a “waiting list” to handle the deluge of requests, CNET has learned.

Court documents show that federal agents were so stymied by the encrypted iPhone 4S of a Kentucky man accused of distributing crack cocaine that they turned to Apple for decryption help last year.

An agent at the ATF, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “contacted Apple to obtain assistance in unlocking the device,” U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell wrote in a recent opinion. But, she wrote, the ATF was “placed on a waiting list by the company.”

A search warrant affidavit prepared by ATF agent Rob Maynard says that, for nearly three months last summer, he “attempted to locate a local, state, or federal law enforcement agency with the forensic capabilities to unlock” an iPhone 4S. But after each police agency responded by saying they “did not have the forensic capability,” Maynard resorted to asking Cupertino.

Because the waiting list had grown so long, there would be at least a 7-week delay, Maynard says he was told by Joann Chang, a legal specialist in Apple’s litigation group. It’s unclear how long the process took, but it appears to have been at least four months.

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Apple Supplier Foxconn Faces Massive Worker Riot in China

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A large-scale incident involving some 2,000 Foxconn Technology Group factory workers has forced the closure of one of the tech supplier’s plants in China, the company confirmed Monday.

The company described the incident as a “personal dispute between several employees” that escalated to include thousands of people. Some 40 people were taken to the hospital, and “a number” of individuals were arrested. According to the statement from Foxconn, local police were in control of the situation by 3 a.m., some four hours after the dispute began.

The incident, which a worker at the scene described as a “riot,” took place in Taiyuan, a city in central China. Foxconn employs 79,000 workers at the facility. Production at the plant has been halted, but Foxconn said in a second statement that the factory will resume activity on Tuesday.

Foxconn, which supplies parts to Apple and other manufacturers, has drawn harsh criticism for its labor policies. A spate of suicides at the company’s factories in 2010 garnered media coverage of alleged harsh working conditions, including unsafe facilities and illegal amounts of overtime.

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