Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks about the new Apple headquarters during a media event in Cupertino, California on September 12, 2017. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)

According to newly-leaked documents, in recent years, Apple used a Bermuda-based law firm to take advantage of highly-advantageous (though legal) tax arrangements in Jersey to mitigate its tax burden as much as possible.

The so-called Paradise Papers, which were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, show that as the so-called "Double Irish" tax loophole began to close, Apple began shopping for a new place to park its hundreds of billions in offshore cash.

As one of the world’s largest corporations, Apple's tax practices have been scrutinized in recent years. Under American law, companies must pay a 35-percent corporate tax rate on global profits when that money is brought home—so there is an incentive to keep as much of that money overseas as possible. Also, due to various tax law exemptions or loopholes, large multinational companies typically do not pay the full 35 percent.

Enlarge / Elon Musk of SpaceX, left, and Scott Pace, right, of George Washington University, testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Defense under the Committee on Appropriations in 2014. (credit: George Washington University)

In recent months, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, has worked assiduously behind the scenes to develop a formal space policy for the Trump administration. In a rare interview, published Monday in Scientific American, Pace elaborated on some of the policy decisions he has been helping to make.

In the interview, Pace explained why the Trump administration has chosen to focus on the Moon first for human exploration while relegating Mars to becoming a "horizon goal," effectively putting human missions to the Red Planet decades into the future. Mars was too ambitious, Pace said, and such a goal would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners. Specific plans for how NASA will return to the Moon should become more concrete within the next year, he added.

In response to a question about privately developed, heavy-lift boosters, the executive secretary also reiterated his skepticism that such "commercial" rockets developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX could compete with the government's Space Launch System rocket, which is likely to make its maiden flight in 2020.

Enlarge (credit: Sci-Hub)

First came the $15 million fine a New York federal judge imposed on Sci-Hub, a scientific research piracy site that has freed tens of thousands of research papers from behind paywalls. That was in June, and the site's overseas operator, Alexandra Elbakyan, said she'd never pay plaintiff Elsevier or stop the infringing behavior.

Elbakyan

Now on Friday, a Virginia federal judge dinged the site for another $4.8 million for the same infringing behavior, this time from a lawsuit brought by the American Chemical Society.

The latest Friday order (PDF), like the previous order (PDF), demands that domain providers stop servicing Sci-Hub. The site has been playing a game of domain Whac-a-Mole for years in a bid to skirt US judicial orders.

Enlarge / A digital identity card issued by the Republic of Estonia. (credit: Republic of Estonia, Interior Department)

A crippling flaw affecting millions—and possibly hundreds of millions—of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly canceled 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents.

The critical weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any vulnerable key using nothing more than the corresponding public portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners, decrypt sensitive data, sneak malicious code into digitally signed software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering with stolen PCs. When researchers first disclosed the flaw three weeks ago, they estimated it would cost an attacker renting time on a commercial cloud service an average of $38 and 25 minutes to break a vulnerable 1024-bit key and $20,000 and nine days for a 2048-bit key.

Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to ROCA—named for the Return of the Coppersmith Attack the factorization method is based on—have largely downplayed the severity of the weakness. Estonian officials initially said the attack was "complicated and not cheap" and went on to say: "Large-scale vote fraud is not conceivable due to the considerable cost and computing power necessary of generating a private key." Switzerland-based smartcard maker Gemalto, meanwhile, has said only that its IDPrime.NET—a card it has sold for more than a decade as, among other things, a way to provide two-factor authentication to employees of Microsoft and other companies—"may be affected" without providing any public guidance to customers.

THE COSBY SHOW—"Where's Rudy?" Episode 10—Pictured: (l-r) Malcolm-Jamal Warner as Theodore 'Theo' Huxtable, Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff 'Cliff' Huxtable, Keshia Knight Pulliam as Rudy Huxtable, Tempestt Bledsoe as Vanessa Huxtable. (credit: NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

The production company that made The Cosby Show has sued the BBC (.pdf) over a documentary the British network aired about the rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Carsey-Werner, the production company that is the plaintiff in the case, says that the documentary is infringing its copyright because it uses eight audiovisual clips and two musical cues from The Cosby Show.

The documentary, titled Bill Cosby—Fall of an American Icon, was broadcast on a BBC channel in the United Kingdom on June 5 of this year. That was the same day that Cosby's prosecution for one assault began in Pennsylvania. (The trial ended in a hung jury.) The UK production company that made the documentary, Sugar Films, is also named as a defendant in the case.

The complaint lists eight video clips that are used in the documentary. All are between seven and 23 seconds long, except for one clip that lasts 51 seconds.