Steve Jobs has resigned as chief executive officer of Apple (AAPL). The company has promoted chief operating officer Tim Cook to the position of CEO and said that Cook will join the company’s board of directors. Jobs will become Apple’s chairman.

Here is a copy of Jobs’ resignation letter:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple”s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple”s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Apple board member Art Levinson, chairman of Genentech, issued the following statement on behalf of the Apple board:

“Steve’s extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world’s most innovative and valuable technology company. Steve has made countless contributions to Apple’s success, and he has attracted and inspired Apple’s immensely creative employees and world class executive team. In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Steve will continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration.”

We have no additional details yet on why Jobs is leaving, although the spot assumption is that it’s related to the pancreatic cancer for which he received a liver transplant in 2009 (during which time Cook was in charge). The fact that Jobs is taking over as board chairman, rather than resigning that seat too, would seem to indicate that his condition isn’t imminently debilitating — but there also is a strong possibility that the chairmanship is more symbolic than operational.

Apple shares today traded up $2.58 to close at $376.18 per share. As of 6:53pm, it already had lost $22.18 per share, or 5.9% of its value.

In 2008, Fortune took a close look at Jobs’ successor Tim Cook, ‘The genius behind Steve.’

The most influential promoter of Steve Jobs’ indispensability, of course, is Steve Jobs. But another person who is very much with that program is the one executive who has actually filled in for Jobs as CEO. That would be Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer and its interim chief executive for two months in 2004, when Jobs was recovering from cancer surgery.

Source

 

HP’s TouchPad liquidation sale this weekend was telling on multiple fronts as techies drooled over a good deal, servers blew up and the tablet market pricing structure was upended. However, the fallout may go well beyond those areas.

It’s a bit stunning how a liquidation sale–16GB TouchPad for $99 and 32GB for $149–can be so revealing.

Here’s a look at the fallout:

HP‘s TouchPad liquidation fiasco hurts its reputation with consumers and businesses. HP’s Web site couldn’t handle the load as the masses tried to land a TouchPad for $99. On Saturday, HP had a cart glitch that where the company’s systems wouldn’t recognize the liquidation prices. By time, HP fixed that issue Saturday afternoon, the company’s e-commerce site served up a series of errors that looked like this:

Meanwhile, HP’s call center blew up Saturday afternoon. The reps did the best they could–and I had a good experience–but they were outgunned by orders. On Sunday morning HP made progress with its shopping cart–the site delivered 404 errors, which are a step up from database outages. HP spun this as a case of overwhelming demand. That’s fair enough, but HP also sells IT infrastructure–adaptive infrastructure to be specific. Why didn’t HP throw more servers at the problem? How about a few database admins? How about some cloud capacity to handle the demand spike?

In the big picture, HP could have turned this TouchPad liquidation lemon into lemonade. HP could have used its internal cloud to handle the spikes. If HP handled the traffic well, it could have spun a whitepaper out of it to pitch its wares. In the end, HP could have highlighted how its data centers saved the day even amid TouchPad adversity. Also: HP TouchPad insult to injury: Cart glitch hampers SMB fire sale

The reality: If I’m an SMB, say one of those self-serve yogurt joints popping up all around my house, I’m a bit skeptical about HP in the future. If I couldn’t complete a TouchPad sale on HP.com how will the company run my infrastructure?

HP looks willy nilly. We’ve heard through the grapevine that Todd Bradley, the guy who runs HP’s PC business, didn’t find out that the company was going to spin off the unit until a Wednesday night dinner at CEO Leo Apotheker’s house. It’s no wonder that the news of HP’s PC unit spin-off looked rushed. The inability to handle the e-commerce load for the TouchPad liquidation also highlighted a lack of planning. And the $10 billion purchase of Autonomy also looked a bit jittery and leaves the company vulnerable. Don’t be surprised if Oracle launches a hostile bid for HP within a year. Now we’re sure that Apotheker and HP’s board has a well thought out master plan, but it’s hard to argue for an IBM moment for the company right now. The problem: HP appears to be winging it. In business, perception can become reality in a hurry. The TouchPad liquidation is another data point for HP critics to use.

Retail partners are going to be wary of HP going forward. Some outlets went with HP’s liquidation pricing right away. Others chose to sit out the sale. Best Buy flip flopped. Amazon pulled out. In any case, HP will have to cover retailers on inventory and costs, but no future product launch from the company will be looked at the same way again. Killing the TouchPad in a mere seven weeks will be remembered for a long time. Also: BestBuy.com is offering the HP TouchPad for $100 until supplies run out

Tablet pricing is shot. If the TouchPad–a flawed device that still managed to have a lot of redeeming qualities–calls for an exit after a few weeks and a $99 to $149 price tag what does that say for all the other Apple iPad rivals? It’s no wonder retailers initially balked at HP’s prices. If the TouchPad is ultimately worth $99, what’s an Android tablet worth? How about $250 max? HP’s TouchPad experiment showed what price matters to consumers and the path to market share gains on Apple. The rub: No tablet maker can make money at HP’s fire sale prices. Something has to give. BetaNews’ Joe Wilcox argued that tablet pricing is ruined after HP’s fire sale. I’m inclined to agree.

The iPhone 5could go on sale on Friday, October 7, with preorders to start on September 30, according to the latest rumors in the ongoing saga of the hotly anticipated next edition of Apple’s smartphone

“The market and consumers proved that no one wanted it,” said Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Lopez Research. “I’m not sure they could even sell it to anyone.”

With a much smaller scale relative to the likes of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, it had a high initial obstacle to clear. Poorly handled by Palm and HP, WebOS may not have ever had a chance to begin with.

Potential savior
Its first incarnation was as the potential savior of smartphone pioneer Palm. The software was the brainchild of Jon Rubinstein, a veteran of Apple and one of the architects of the iPod. With such lofty credentials and an impressive debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2009, the industry eagerly awaited the commercial launch of the first WebOS device, the Pre, for which Palm wasn’t shy in encouraging the term “iPhone-killer.”

What followed was series of strategic miscues by Palm that led to a bungled debut. After showing the device off in January, Palm didn’t release it into stores until June, a long gap that sucked out any hype from the phone. It launched with Sprint Nextel, which at the time was still struggling to stem the tide of customer defections.

LAS VEGAS–Facebook‘s online privacy woes are well-known. But here’s an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you’re walking down the street.

A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students’ Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.

The results: facial recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average, less than three seconds of rapid-fire comparisons.

In a few years, “facial visual searches may become as common as today’s text-based searches,” says Alessandro Acquisti, who presented his work in collaboration with Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman at the Black Hat computer security conference here.

As a proof of concept, the Carnegie Mellon researchers also developed an iPhone app that can take a photograph of someone, pipe it through facial recognition software, and then display on-screen that person’s name and vital statistics.

This has “ominous risks for privacy” says Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. Widespread facial recognition tied to databases with real names will erode the sense of anonymity that we expect in public, he said.

Another test compared 277,978 Facebook profiles (the software found unique faces in about 40 percent) against nearly 6,000 profiles extracted from an unnamed dating Web site.

About 1 in 10 of the dating site’s members–nearly all of whom used pseudonyms–turned out to be identifiable.

Facebook isn’t the only source of profile data, of course. LinkedIn or Google+ might work. But because of its vast database and its wide-open profile photos, Facebook was the obvious choice. (Facebook’s privacy policy says: “Your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings.”)

Facial recognition technology, which has been developing in labs for decades, is finally going mainstream. Face.com opened its doors to developers last year; the technology is built into Apple’s Aperture software and Flickr. Google bought a face-recognition technology in the last few weeks, and Facebook’s automated photo-tagging has drawn privacy scrutiny.

In the hands of law enforcement, however, face recognition can raise novel civil liberties concerns. If university researchers can assemble such an extensive database with just Facebook, police agencies or their contractors could do far more with DMV or passport photographs–something that the FBI has been doing for years. (The U.S. Army partially funded the Carnegie Mellon research.)

Acquisti is the first to admit that the technology isn’t perfect. It works best with frontal face photos, not ones taken at an angle. The larger the database becomes, the more time comparisons take, and the more false-positive errors arise.

On the other hand, face recognition technology is advancing quickly, especially for nonfrontal photos. “What we did on the street with mobile devices today will be accomplished in less intrusive ways tomorrow,” he says. “A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you.”

BOSTON (Reuters) – Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one “state actor” behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of its secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.

“Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” McAfee’s vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday.

“What is happening to all this data … is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat.”

McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a “command and control” server that they had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies.

It dubbed the attacks “Operation Shady RAT” and said the earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other intrusions. (RAT stands for “remote access tool,” a type of software that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).

Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest — on the Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation — went on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee.

“Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors,” Alperovitch told Reuters.

“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history,” he said. “The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”

CHINA CONNECTION?

Alperovitch said that McAfee had notified all 72 victims of the attacks, which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies around the world. He declined to give more details.

Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was very likely China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing.

The systems of the IOC and several national Olympic Committees were breached before the 2008 Beijing Games. And China views Taiwan as a renegade province, and political issues between them remain contentious even as economic ties have strengthened in recent years.

“Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia,” Lewis said.

McAfee, acquired by Intel Corp this year, would not comment on whether China was responsible.

There was no comment from China on the report.

In Taiwan, an official of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which has a cyber crime unit, said he had no knowledge of the McAfee report but added there had been no cases in recent years of hacking of government websites.

An official from the Japanese trade ministry’s information security policy team said it was difficult to determine whether a specific government lay behind a cyber attack “although we see which countries the attacks originate from.”

A team put together to investigate hacking was “finalizing some guidelines. We aim to raise the security level as a whole and build a partnership between private sector organizations where information can be shared to prevent such attacks.”

STONE AGE

Vijay Mukhi, a cyber-expert based in India, says some South Asian governments were highly vulnerable to hacking from China.

“I’m not surprised because that’s what China does, they are gradually dominating the cyberworld,” he said. “I would call it child’s play (for a hacker to get access to Indian government data) … I would say we’re in the stone age.”

An Indian telecommunications ministry official declined to say whether he was aware of the hacking on the government.

The U.N. said it was aware of the report, and had started an investigation to ascertain if there was an intrusion.

McAfee released the report to coincide with the start of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, an annual meeting of security professionals who promote security and fight cyber crime.

Source

Wired broadband providers in the U.S. deliver speeds that are close to, and sometimes exceed, the service they promise customers, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

During peak hours, providers of DSL-based service delivered download speeds that were 82 percent of advertised speeds, while cable providers delivered 93 percent of advertised speeds, and fiber-based providers delivered 114 percent of advertised speeds, said the FCC report, based on test results from 6,800 U.S. residents.

Upload speeds during peak hours were 95 percent of the advertised speeds for DSL, 108 percent for cable and 112 percent for fiber.

The tests, of 13 broadband providers serving 86 percent of the U.S. population, are “the most comprehensive and rigorous assessment ever of broadband performance in the United States,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said during a press conference at a Best Buy in Washington, D.C.

The new report represents a “significant improvement” over 2009 tests released in August 2010, Genachowski said. The earlier FCC report said U.S. consumers were getting download speeds that were half of the advertised speeds.

Some critics questioned the results and methodology the FCC used in the earlier study. The new report “corrects” the earlier study and shows the FCC’s commitment to use good data, said Richard Bennett, senior research fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused think tank.

“This report pretty well dispels the myth that many of my colleagues in the public-interest community have been peddling for a while that there’s a huge gap between advertised and actual speeds,” he said.

Genachowski and Parul Desai, communications policy counsel at Consumers Union, called on broadband providers to give customers more easy-to-understand information about broadband speeds provided. About 49 percent of the broadband customers who volunteered for the FCC study could not correctly report the advertised broadband speed their service offered, the report said.

“Consumers have been wandering in the wilderness for a long time, and we hope this information will help people cut through the confusion,” Desai said. “Broadband is becoming so essential for Americans in their daily lives.”

The FCC should also release a similar report on mobile broadband speeds, Desai said.

AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group representing cable broadband providers, applauded the report.

“These results, based on data from monitoring equipment installed in consumer homes and in ISP networks, debunk the conventional mythology that ISPs are delivering far less than the speeds they advertise,” Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post. “Perhaps now we can get past the rhetoric about advertised vs. actual speeds and focus on the important task of ensuring all Americans have access to these broadband services.”

Also on Tuesday, the FCC released a consumer guide to choosing broadband service.

Source