■ Internet fraud
Angling for phishers
Microsoft has filed 117 lawsuits against operators of "phishing" websites that try to trick unsuspecting Internet users into handing over personal financial information, a statement said Friday. The company filed the lawsuits in federal court in Seattle against unnamed defendants in the hopes that they will allow Microsoft to subpoena information about operators of the sites, track e-mail and establish links among worldwide phishing scams, company attorney Aaron Kornblum said. The lawsuits reflected growing concern about the toll of large- scale phishers, who send out millions of e-mails a day purporting to be from trusted banks or other companies and institutions. The e-mails direct recipients to websites that are often indistinguishable from genuine company websites and ask them to fill in personal details, including passwords and credit card information. It only takes a tiny response rate to net the perpetrators millions of dollars, and experts warned that Internet users never should give out personal information in response to an unverified e-mail, however real it might look.
■ Management
VW investigation dropped
Prosecutors said Friday they have dropped an investigation into management at Volkswagen AG in connection with continued payments to former employees elected to public office, because the company broke no laws with the practice. Volkswagen acknowledged in January that it had six top legislators on its payroll and said it would stop the controversial payments. The breach of trust investigation has ended because management at the carmaker did not break any laws or overstep the scope of the board of a public company, said Hans-Juergen Grasemann, a spokesman for prosecutors in Braunschweig. German legislators work full-time and receive salaries. The practice of receiving payments from former employers doesn't violate the rules of German parliament if legislators report their earnings.
■ Auto industry
Nissan's CEO leaves IBM
International Business Machines Corp said Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Nissan Motor Company Ltd., resigned from the IBM board. In a press release Friday, the computer company said Ghosn resigned in light of his broadening responsibilities in May, when he also becomes president and chief executive of French auto maker Renault SA. Ghosn has been credited with boosting results at Nissan, the Japanese affiliate of Renault, and will be leading both companies simultaneously. Ghosn became an IBM director in March 2004. His resignation is effective Friday.
■ Ocean dumping
CEO sentenced
A US federal judge Friday sentenced the chief executive officer of an Iowa shipping company to 33 months in prison for directing the illegal dumping of 440 tonnes of fuel-contaminated wheat from a freighter into the South China Sea. US District Judge Alan Gold also ordered Rick Dean Stickle to pay US$60,000 in fines for dumping the oily grain in 1999. Stickle, chairman and chief executive officer at Sabine Transportation Co of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was permitted to remain free on bond pending an expected appeal. The wheat, intended for distribution by humanitarian group CARE in Bangladesh, was contaminated by diesel fuel leaking into one of the freighter Juneau's main cargo holds. The company asked for permission to dump the grain at sea but was told that doing so violated US law.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to