Month: August 2019

Google co-founder Larry Page is now CEO of Alphabet. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

You've probably heard it before: Apple has more money in the bank than any other corporation on Earth, thanks to huge profit margins on its products and a run over nearly two decades leading in the consumer technology industry. It has been called the richest, most successful company in the history of the world. But one part of that narrative isn't true anymore: Apple no longer has the biggest financial reserves of any company on Earth.

According to a report in Financial Times, that label may now be applied to a different tech giant: Alphabet, Google's parent company. As of this year's second financial quarter, Alphabet now has $117 billion in reserve, compared to $102 billion for Apple. However, Apple has $163 billion in 2017, so this is just as much a story of Apple reducing its reserves as it is one of Google growing its own.

Since then, Apple has worked to reduce its liquidity in response to criticisms from investors that essentially amounted to an accusation that the company was hoarding cash. While there is some room for nuance, investors generally want to discourage companies from hoarding cash. Instead, they prefer that the money either be returned to investors in some way or invested in something that may produce a return later.

Enlarge / Mountain View, Calif.—May 21, 2018: Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos)

Google says it is embarking on new plans to make its hardware greener. Anna Meegan, head of sustainability for consumer hardware at Google, wrote a blog post outlining the company’s goals for improving the environmental impact made by its devices.

Google’s sustainability commitments include making 100% of shipments to or from customers carbon neutral by 2020 and including recycled materials in 100% of Made by Google products starting in 2022. The industry giant also wants to maximize the amount of recycled content wherever possible. The final commitment is a more-general statement that Google “will make technology that puts people first and expands access to the benefits of technology.”

The statement about recycled materials is a positive one, although its language is vague. Using recycled plastic in a smartphone doesn’t necessarily make a huge difference when there’s so little plastic in the device to start with. A broad promise about making an effort “wherever possible” can cover a whole range of outcomes. The specific wording about the carbon neutrality of Google’s shipments makes for a clearer metric of how successful the company is in meeting its goal.

Enlarge / A script used to maintain network persistence. (credit: Microsoft)

Hackers working for the Russian government have been using printers, video decoders, and other so-called Internet-of-things devices as a beachhead to penetrate targeted computer networks, Microsoft officials warned on Monday.

“These devices became points of ingress from which the actor established a presence on the network and continued looking for further access,” officials with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center wrote in a post. “Once the actor had successfully established access to the network, a simple network scan to look for other insecure devices allowed them to discover and move across the network in search of higher-privileged accounts that would grant access to higher-value data.”

The officials continued: