Technology

Presented without comment...

Source: Ben Garrison

Ahead of this week's AAPL earnings, investors were looking forward to more clues what the company with the quarter-trillion cash war chest would do with the funds that are now greater than the GDP of Greece, and aside from the token increase in shareholder distributions, they got little else, which has once again prompted speculation who Apple will acquire once the company decides to shift away from corporate bond holdings (recall that as of this quarter Apple now has more corporate debt on its books than the biggest bond mutual fund) to acquisitions.

In its seventh CIA leak since March 23rd, WikiLeaks has just revealed the user manual of a CIA hacking tool known as ‘Archimedes’ which is purportedly used to attack computers inside a Local Area Network (LAN).  The CIA tool works by redirecting a target's webpage search to a CIA server which serves up a webpage that looks exactly like the original page they were expecting to be served, but which contains malware. It’s only possible to detect the attack by examining the page source.  Per WikiLeaks:

Update: If it was still a question in anyone's mind whether Facebook was really going to slow down ad revenue growth, it's not anymore. CFO Wehner was very clear in his comments.

Wehner is doubling down on the comments from last quarter that ad growth will come down "meaningfully.'' He's also maintaining the forecast of new spending of $7 billion to $7.5 billion this year, 50 percent more than last year.

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Authored by Antonio Garcia-Martinez (former Facebook product manager), author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, originally posted at The Guardian,

For two years I was charged with turning Facebook data into money, by any legal means. If you browse the internet or buy items in physical stores, and then see ads related to those purchases on Facebook, blame me. I helped create the first versions of that, way back in 2012.