Could
better security have saved Home Depot $34 million?
Home
Depot profit beats estimates as U.S. job market improves
Home Depot Inc, the world's No.1 home improvement chain, reported a
better-than-expected quarterly profit as an improving job market
encouraged Americans to spend more on renovations.
… That includes about $34 million of net costs related to a data
breach between April and September.
The company said it may face other breach-related costs, including
legal action, that could have a material impact on results for the
fourth quarter and future periods.
The retailer is facing at least 44 civil lawsuits related to the
breach in the United States and Canada.
… Home Depot's net income rose to $1.54 billion, or $1.15 per
share, in the third quarter ended Nov. 2, from $1.35 billion, or 95
cents per share, a year earlier.
Are
you connected in ways you don't know? Perhaps there will be a market
for a “Internet connection detection” service?
Internet-Connected
Devices Soar
A
report from Ericsson released Tuesday (Nov. 18) shows some startling
growth of Internet-connected devices in the U.S., with 90 percent of
U.S. households having three or more such devices, while almost half
have five or more such devices and almost 25 percent have seven or
more such devices. The report, as
reported by Recode, said the
average number of Internet devices per household was 5.2.
Some
other goodies that the
report itself opted to highlight:
- By 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population over 6 years old will have a mobile phone, and smartphone subscriptions are expected to top 6.1 billion, compared with 2.7 billion smartphone subscriptions today.
- India and China show fastest growth for new mobile subscriptions with 18 million and 12 million net additions in Q3 2014
- 800 million new smartphone subscriptions in 2014 brings total to 2.7 billion worldwide
- Mobile video traffic to increase tenfold and constitute 55 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2020
If
these folks are a dim-witted as we believe, perhaps someone should
collect a “Best Example of Stupid” from their Social Media so we
can all have a good laugh.
For
Hate Groups Like The KKK, Social Media Is A Double-Edged Sword
Spreading
hate speech just isn’t as easy as it used to be as a Missouri
chapter of the Ku Klux Klan found out when, after threatening
Ferguson protesters with violence, its website was knocked offline.
For that the Klan can thank the Anonymous hacking collective, which
also took control of the KKK’s social media presence and claimed to
leak personal information about members of the white supremacist
group.
…
“The Internet gives these groups more of a voice, there’s no
question about that,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the
Southern Poverty Law Center and the editor of the award-winning
Intelligence Report journal. “Whether it actually gives them more
influence is highly debatable. The vast majority of people, as they
learn about these groups, are turned off by them.”
…
Still, the Anonymous
hacking collective was angry enough with the
Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK’s letter threatening
“lethal force” against Ferguson protesters to un-hood alleged
members of the group, posting names, addresses and phone numbers
online while also knocking multiple sites offline and taking control
of the @KuKluxKlanUSA Twitter feed.
(Related)
Now that's a headline!
According
to a new US
court ruling made in San Francisco, Google can list its search
results in whatever order it pleases—and it has the First Amendment
behind it, too.
That's
according
to a hearing which saw a site called CoastNews file a
lawsuit against Google, saying that it was knowingly lowering its
rankings in search results. It argued that it appeared at the top of
results created by Bing and Yahoo, and was being actively relegated
by Google.
But
Judge Ernest Goldsmith has
said that Google was merely undertaking a "constitutionally
protected activity." In other words, it was exercising its
right to free speech.
If
you have 300 million users, some of them will be way to the right on
the litigious scale.
Karina
Basso reports:
On Nov. 13, a federal judge refused to toss an email harvesting class
action lawsuit filed against the internet company LinkedIn Corp.,
ruling the popular social media business could not claim immunity
under the Communications Decency Act (CDA). The proposed LinkedIn
class action lawsuit alleges the company broke
into LinkedIn users’ personal accounts in order to send
emails on the users’ behalf.
In addition to denying immunity to LinkedIn, U.S. District Judge Lucy
H. Koh also disagreed with the company’s argument that the alleged
email harvesting was protected under the First Amendment.
[...]
While Judge Koh has dismissed most of the claims in the LinkedIn
email harvesting class action lawsuit, the social media internet
service has prevailed on one count. The judge did dismiss
plaintiffs’ claims under California’s statutory right of
publicity, however, the plaintiffs have been granted permission to
amend their complaints under this statute.
Read
more on Top
Class Actions.
(Related)
Peter
S. Vogel writes:
LinkedIn has been a wildly successful social media business site for
many years. It provides a free platform for millions of members to
share professional experiences and for businesses to promote
themselves. However, LinkedIn’s financial success also makes it a
target for lawsuits — even suits that don’t seem to make much
sense.
LinkedIn Sued for Making Employment History Available
LinkedIn currently
claims that it “operates the world’s largest professional
network on the Internet with more than 313 million members in over
200 countries and territories.”
Its members voluntarily post their employment history (whether true,
embellished, or fabricated) as an online biography or resume. This
information is available both to LinkedIn members and Internet users
(depending on members’ LinkedIn settings).
A lawsuit was filed on Oct. 4, on behalf of a potential class in the
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming
that LinkedIn violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act
(FCRA).
The basis of the suit is that “any potential employer can
anonymously dig into the employment history of any LinkedIn member,
and make hiring and firing decisions based upon the information they
gather, without the knowledge of the member, and without any
safeguards in place as to the accuracy of the information that the
potential employer has obtained.”
Read
more on TechNewsWorld.
Interesting
idea. Think what this might mean for a business leasing computers to
grandpa and grandma – all they need is an access device.
Cloud
computing's not-so-secret mission
There
is no denying that the cloud and cloud computing have changed the way
many of us are doing business. You only had to attend last week’s
sold out AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to see the cloud out
in force.
But
as the cloud matures, we are seeing another layer of cloud computing
that promises to shake the foundation of our IT infrastructure to its
core – the advent of IT-as-a-Service, which will be perhaps the
cloud’s highest calling.
Could
be interesting... Registration required.
McKinsey
Quarterly’s 50th anniversary edition
“In
this unique anniversary
edition of the Quarterly, leading management
thinkers tackle the management challenges of tomorrow. Leaders
including author Tom Peters, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, eBay head
of HR Beth Axelrod, and The Second Machine Age authors Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explore topics such as leadership, the
future of the organization, machine learning, long-term capitalism,
and global productivity.”
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