It's been rumored for a while, but a newly released video (on Tuesday) seems to out the device completely. It's the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, and Active means it's designed for use outdoors -- and it's even waterproof.
However, this ruggedized version of Samsung's current and recently released flagship hasn't been officially announced yet. As such, details about the S4 Active's hardware are still unclear.
The video, for one, says that the phone has a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU. However, earlier leaks have pointed to a quad-core Snapdragon CPU. Coming, as it would seem from the language on the settings screen, from Croatia, it's a tad bit disconcerting.
The reason it's disconcerting is because of the recent trend among Samsung's recent flagship phone. U.S. buyers of the Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4 were shortchanged in terms of cores -- the Galaxy S III came with a dual-core processor in the U.S., quad-core almost everywhere else.
The Galaxy S4 comes with eight-cores elsewhere, and quad-cores in the U.S. These changes are the result, though, not of (just) cost-cutting, but because the Qualcomm CPUs have integrated LTE chipsets, which save both cost and battery.
It's doubtful, though, that Samsung would go any lower than dual-core for an S4 device, even if it adds other features while reducing the device's pure processing speed.
The S4 Active isn't just waterproof, it's also dust-proof and adds physical buttons, nice for those who might want to press a few while wearing gloves. Pricing and availability are still unclear.
A New York Times report in April of 2012 said that Apple saves billions in taxes annually, by "taking advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy." That story sat, seemingly unnoticed by Congress, until Monday, when it was reported that Senate investigators have come up with -- basically -- the same conclusion, but with numbers: Using a complex scheme, Apple avoided paying U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore, taxable income between 2009 and 2012.
As reported by the New York Times, Apple isn't the only corporation to use such tactics. It is, in fact, common among multinational corporations with the resources and the foreign offices to pull it off.
Examples of what the NYT reported as Apple's methods include a Reno, Nev., office with just a handful of employees, 200 miles away from its corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The office collects and invests the company’s profits, allowing Apple to avoid state income taxes on at least some of its gains. California's corporate tax is 8.84 percent while Nevada's is zero.
In addition, the Times reported that Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax locales such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. Some of these "subsidiaries" are little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office.
None of these methods are illegal. They do, however, show the differences between John and Jane Q. Public, who cannot hide their incomes, and Apple, who can hide its income.
The bipartisan Senate probe also charges -- for the first time -- that three of Apple’s long-established Irish entities, don’t actually have tax-resident status there -- or anywhere else. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 40-page report on Monday.
One of those subsidiaries, Apple Operations International, has no employees at all. Despite this, it reported $30 billion in income from 2009-2012, but has not filed an income tax return in any country for the past five years, the report said.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the subcommittee and a longtime proponent of tightening U.S. corporate tax laws said:
Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax, offshore tax haven. Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance.
Three Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and its head of tax operations, Phillip Bullock, are scheduled to testify at a Tuesday hearing, regarding the company’s tax practices.
Ahead of that appearance, Apple released a PDF document detailing its expected testimony. In it, Apple made a number of assertions, including claiming that the company was likely the largest income tax payer in the country in 2012, paying "nearly" $6 billion in taxes.
These payments account for $1 in every $40 in corporate income tax the U.S. Treasury collected last year.
It also claimed to be a huge creator of jobs -- in the U.S. -- although most of Apple's employees, or at least those who perform work for the company, may be at Foxconn in China.
Apple added that it does not use "tax gimmicks." The document also contains a brief outline about how the Cupertino, Calif.-based giant believes the U.S. could simplify its corporate tax system, including the elimination of all corporate tax rates and expenditures and the creation of a "reasonable tax on foreign earnings" when companies want to bring that money back to the U.S.
Apple believes such comprehensive reform would stimulate economic growth. Apple supports this plan even though it would likely result in Apple paying more U.S. corporate tax
Although Apple has been highly successful since it rebounded from the brink of bankruptcy (to put it extremely modestly), it's under scrutiny for its huge cash horde of some $145 billion. Most of that money, over $100 billion of it, is held outside the U.S.
If Apple were to bring it back into the U.S., it would face up to a 35 percent corporate tax rate. Rather than tapping that pile of cash, Apple made another tax-saving move recently: It took on debt as part of a $17 billion bond plan that is estimated to save it some $9.2 billion in taxes.
Much of the Times’ earlier report appears to be confirmed by the Senate’s latest findings.
As noted earlier, Apple isn't the only multinational to use such tax-avoidance strategies. Last September the subcommittee spoke with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, castigating them for their own heir own, unique methods to allegedly lower their corporate tax bills.
As expected, on Monday morning Yahoo and Tumblr announced that the Internet giant had acquired the six-year old New York blogging service for “approximately $1.1 billion, substantially all of which will be paid in cash " according to Yahoo's press release.
There is another interesting tidbit from the press release, one that can't be missed by anyone watching the mistakes and miscues in the once high-flying company's past. The press release says it in bright bold letters (all right, not really bright and bold, but it should be): Yahoo promised "not to screw it up."
Tumblr founder David Karp will remain as Tumblr’s CEO. According to the press release, Tumblr will be run as a separate entity, and "the product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators."
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer even took to Tumblr to post about the acquisition. In case you were wondering, it appears to be her only post on a newly created blog. Once again, she promised that Yahoo would "not screw it up."
The post included an animated GIF with the rotating text:
Yahoo!
tumblr.
Now Panic and Freak Out
Keep Calm and Carry On
Statistically, as Mayer noted:
Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs
It has over 300 million monthly unique visitors
It sees over 120,000 signups daily
Tumblr sees 900 posts per second
Users spend 24 billion minutes onsite monthly
More than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app; those users do an average of seven sessions daily
Yahoo hopes that the Tumblr acquisition will increase its global popularity. While Yahoo sees about 700 million unique visitors per month, the bulk of them, and the revenue from search and display ads, come from the Americas. Mayer said that the combination of Tumblr and Yahoo "could" (the operative word being could) grow Yahoo’s audience "by 50 percent to more than a billion visitors monthly, and could grow traffic by approximately 20 percent."
It's true, in fact, that with Tumblr in the fold, Yahoo has well over a billion users, since there is little overlap between the two sites.
Karp’s blog post on the acquisition was, as Mayer said, a little more irreverent -- in keeping with the site's normal style. That can be seen in his sign-off:
When Sony launched the PlayStation 4 (PS4) in February, the event was missing one thing. There were no PS4s or even images of PS4s around. While Sony says it will not unveil the look of the PlayStation 4 console until their E3 press conference on June 10 (starting at 6 p.m. Pacific Time), on Monday the company teased gamers with a sneak peek teaser video.
The video was, of course, annoyingly vague. It showed pieces of the PS4, but only a extremely blurry overall view of the next-generation Sony gaming console.
We would assert that someone with super-fast vision, like The Flash or Superman -- or maybe even a slower speedster, like QuickSilver -- could piece together the design of the PS4. Really, though, the key points are not how it looks. Many gamers would be fine if it looked like a breadboard as long as it played well.
Oh, and of course, as long as there are enough compelling games, as well.
It's those innards -- and a few game demos -- that Sony outlined in February.
Unlike the PS3, which used its famous "Cell" processor, the PS4 will be powered by a more standard eight-core x86 CPU, similar to Windows PCs. It will sport what Sony called a "standard" -- though customized -- GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. The eight-core processor and GPU are unified on the same die, providing 170GPBS bandwidth. The console will include a Blu-ray drive, as well as USB 3.0, Ethernet, 802.11n wi-fi, and Bluetooth.
In addition, its new DualShock 4 controller features a touchpad, share button, lightbar and headphone jack. The lightbar mates with a camera system on the PS4 that allows the console to track the player's distance from the console.
Using a secondary processor that allows for background work while the main processor is handling gameplay, the PS4 can play digital titles while they are being downloaded. It can also handle a big complaint of the PS3: the console can update game and system items even when the main system power is off. That means that unlike the PS3, folks won't fire up the PS4 only to wait and wait while the console updates.
A finalized date for the PS4's release to retail has yet to be confirmed by Sony, but the company said that it will be available in time for the "2013 holiday season."
It wasn't an extended vacation. A scant three months after evidence was revealed showing that hackers working for a cyber-unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had stolen data from a number of U.S. companies and government agencies, the attacks have resumed, using different techniques, a report said on Sunday.
The hackers appeared to have gone quiescent after the earlier reports, but appear to be operating again, said computer industry security experts and U.S. government officials.
A report by private security company Mandiant revealed that "attacks had resumed." Due to privacy agreements with its clients, Mandiant was unwilling to name the affected parties. However, Mandiant's first became a household name when it was brought in -- by the Grey Lady -- to investigate its earlier hacking. The New York Times also issued the Sunday report.
That could be a clue that the Time was a renewed target, and in fact Mandiant did admit that "the victims were many of the same ones the unit had attacked before." Of course, that list was a large one, including not just the Times but the Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola and Lockheed Martin, among others.
Mandiant's new report was again requested by the New York Times. Although the Chinese hackers both halted their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their underlying hacking tools, over the past two months, Mandiant said, they have begun attacking much the same targets that they did previously.
Now, though, they are using new servers. In addition, the hackers have reinfected their targets with many of the tools they used earlier, and are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of their prior capacity.
The Obama administration said that they were not surprised that the attacked had resumed. That being said, the U.S. government had hoped that “naming and shaming” the attackers might force the Chinese government to halt the attacks, or perhaps, as the Times said in a slightly less optimistic manner, "at least urge them to become more subtle."
It does not appear, however, that China has either intention.
As you might have expected, those moving from Google Talk in their Gmail account to Google's new Hangouts found some gotchas. Among the missing-in-action functionality are SMS messages (both incoming and outgoing), the ability to set your status, and the ability to make outgoing Google Voice calls. There was definitely concern when the features were found missing, but on Monday, Google said they were coming -- though it didn't say when.
The outgoing call functionality was probably the most missed. To change from Google Talk to Hangouts, a user needs to selected the "Try the new Hangouts" option in Google Talk's menu. Fortunately, users can revert to Talk if they wish.
We have confirmed that once you have upgraded Talk to Hangouts it is impossible to place -- or receive calls -- through Gmail. The only option for Hangouts users is to make a call from the Google Voice web app, which will then ring one of their connected phones before routing the call to the receiving party.
The outgoing call feature was added to Gmail back in 2010. It's a popular -- and, for phone numbers in the U.S., free -- way for users to place outgoing calls from their computer. Of course, while Google has offered these free calls since that functionality launched, it could always change that stance.
On Monday, Nikhyl Singhal, product manager for Google's real time communication products (including Hangouts) said users need not be concerned: Changes, including the addition of the missing functionality, are coming.
Thanks for all of your feedback on last week's Hangouts launch. I wanted to quickly talk about 1) making/receiving phone calls in Gmail, and 2) Google Voice support more generally.
1) Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.
2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.
Naturally, there wasn't a date listed.
On another subject that might concern some, it's worth noting that although advanced Hangouts features obviously don't work, users who upgrade to Hangouts are still able to to use other traditional Google Talk chat apps like Trillian, at least with limited support. That being said, suggestions for these clients to add better Hangouts support are definitely hitting emails and forums.
