Anonymous hacker group hits Apple, publishes data

SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Jul 4, 2011 1:08pm EDT

(Reuters) – The Internet vigilante hacker group Anonymous claimed to have broken into an Apple Inc server and published a small number of usernames and passwords for one of the U.S. technology company’s websites.

Anonymous said on Sunday via its account on microblogging site Twitter that Apple could be a target for hackers and released the data as part of its Anti Security, or “AntiSec,” campaign.

“Not being so serious, but well … Apple could be target, too. But don’t worry, we are busy elsewhere,” Anonymous said on its Twitter feed, where it shared a link to the data posted on text-sharing website Pastebin.

Anonymous said the data included 27 usernames and passwords for the http://www.abs.apple.com website.

The website, used by Apple for online surveys, on Monday displayed an error message that said the server was temporarily offline.

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment.

Anonymous teamed up with the Lulz Security group of hackers late in June. LulzSec, which gained wide recognition for breaching the websites of Sony Corp, the Central Intelligence Agency and a British police unit among other targets, said it had accomplished its mission to disrupt corporate and government bodies for entertainment.

Security experts who have researched LulzSec’s origins say it emerged from Anonymous, which became famous for attacking companies and institutions that the group considered opponents of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Anonymous earlier this month released scores of private e-mails and other data from an Arizona police website. LulzSec first released dozens of internal documents from the same Arizona police website in June.

(Reporting by Marius Bosch in Johannesburg and Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Gary Crosse)

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Analysis: Deep fiscal pockets are Asia’s ace in the hole

By Emily Kaiser

SINGAPORE | Mon Jul 4, 2011 10:54am EDT

(Reuters) – Reserve-rich Asia can afford to turn on the government spending taps should a recent bout of sluggish economic growth deteriorate into a deeper downturn.

For countries counting on exports for growth — in other words, most of Asia — overseas demand over the next couple of months may look as shaky as it did in May and June.

A series of manufacturing surveys released on Friday showed export orders weakened, particularly from Europe and the United States. As long as those regions struggle with slack consumption, Asia’s trade powerhouses will suffer.

“Clearly, we are in for a rough summer,” said Frederic Neumann, Hong Kong-based co-head of Asian economics for HSBC, which compiles the monthly manufacturing surveys in Asia.

But Neumann saw some promising signs amid the gloom: inflation pressures are ebbing.

That means if growth doesn’t pick up soon, governments will have more leeway to ramp up spending without worrying so much about prices overheating. That in turn takes some of the pressure off central bankers who are struggling to cool inflation without snuffing out growth.

“As inflation fades, Asian officials — and above all Chinese — will be able to crank the stimulus dial one more time, and lift growth into year-end,” Neumann said.

To be sure, Asia’s inflation battle is not yet won. Inflation rates are still running well ahead of government targets in China, India, South Korea and elsewhere, even after a nearly 20 percent drop in oil prices since early May.

“Core” inflation, which strips out volatile prices such as those for food and energy, has been creeping higher.

Low unemployment in the region gives workers more clout when it comes to negotiating wage increases to keep up with rising inflation. But that poses the risk that companies will increase prices to offset higher labor costs, touching off a worrisome wage-price spiral that drives inflation even higher.

That is one reason why economists widely expect further interest rate increases across the region, with India, Malaysia and Thailand among the central banks tipped to hike this month. Taiwan’s central bank raised rates last week.

Jan Loeys, head of asset allocation for J.P. Morgan in New York, said even if overall inflation is peaking, as many economists believe, “at best it implies a temporary pause, and more likely just a slowing in the tightening process.”

Why? Emerging market interest rates are not even halfway back up to the levels seen before the financial crisis exploded in 2008.

Australia is next up with a policy-setting meeting on Tuesday, although economists expect no change in interest rates as growth there shows signs of waning. Retail sales dropped unexpectedly in May, figures on Monday showed.

Malaysia’s rate decision is due on Thursday, and it is also expected to remain on hold after raising rates in May. Central bank governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz told Reuters last week that economic growth was still key to monetary policy.

“We don’t run the economy to the ground just to have price stability,” she said.

ONE HAND GIVETH

With an assist from the government’s coffers, central bankers would have a better shot at targeting inflation without causing too much collateral damage to growth.

Compared with most advanced economies, Asia is in an enviable position. Unlike the United States, Britain and some other “rich” countries that are saddled with trillions of dollars in government debt, Asia’s big economies boast large reserves and small debt burdens.

In China, for example, the government could compensate for tighter credit conditions by boosting investment in housing. With more than $3 trillion in reserves, funding is not an obstacle.

“China’s pursuit of loose fiscal policy should outweigh its tight monetary stance,” Bank of America-Merrill Lynch economists wrote in a recent note to clients.

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Manufacturing sector picks up in June

NEW YORK | Fri Jul 1, 2011 10:34am EDT

(Reuters) – The pace of growth in the manufacturing sector picked up for the first time in four months in June, a sign of optimism for the sputtering economy, according to an industry report released on Friday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its index of national factory activity rose to 55.3 from 53.5 the month before. The reading topped expectations for 51.8, according to a Reuters poll of economists.

A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the manufacturing sector, while a number below 50 means contraction. The report alleviated some fears over the strength of the recovery but analysts said it was not yet a clear sign that the recent weakness in growth was past.

“It’s too soon to say whether the soft patch is over. We had such a big drop last month. We are just seeing some of the retracement. This takes some of the sting out of last month’s drop,” said Robert Brusca, chief economist at Fact and Opinion Economics in New York.

U.S. stocks added to gains immediately following the data, while Treasury prices turned negative and the dollar extended gains against the yen.

The prices paid index fell to its lowest since August 2010 at 68.0 from 76.5, while inventories rose to 54.1 from 48.7. But new orders rose only marginally to 51.6 from 51.0 and analysts noted that the details of the report were not as robust as the main figure.

(Reporting by Leah Schnurr, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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Facebook crashes advertising industry party

By Kate Holton and Leila Abboud

LONDON/PARIS | Fri Jul 1, 2011 5:29am EDT

LONDON/PARIS (Reuters)- While traditional advertising groups jostled for awards at a recent annual industry gathering in Cannes, the year’s biggest star was a newcomer to the beaches: the social network Facebook.

The company has gone from nowhere a few years ago to become the biggest single seller of online display advertising in the United States with more than $2 billion in revenues this year, according to research firm eMarketer.

Online ad sales have boomed in recent years largely because they finely target consumers in a way that print media and TV cannot match. Google and Amazon initially pioneered the trend by analyzing Web surfing and internet searches to target customers’ tastes.

Now Facebook has brought a new level of sophistication to the game: mining data from its social network about users’ likes and dislikes as well as those of friends to better target ads.

The ‘social ad’ approach can be seen in a current Facebook campaign run by tennis racket maker Head. Users who link to Andy Murray’s page get updates from the player himself mixed in with ads for his sponsor and jokey YouTube videos.

However there are risks involved for Facebook and other online ad players as they develop ever more sophisticated ways to track people’s behavior online.

Some regulators see such tracking as a violation of privacy even when it is done anonymously. The Europe Union recently required that web surfers be notified if the sites they visit are collecting information about them, prompting howls from industry.

The stakes are high: industry insiders and analysts say brands are willing to pay more for such ‘social ads’ than they would for traditional online ads since they see them as more effective.

“Brands are willing to invest to learn how consumers interact with their brand,” said Mykim Chikli from Performics, a division of Publicis, which helps big companies with online advertising placement and strategy.

“You can target people who like golf, cars, and watches and you can start to push ads to that profile of person.”

In a demonstration of Facebook’s current advertising power, Google recently launched a social network dubbed Google+ in its boldest attempt yet to crack the medium and tap the advertising dollars it brings.

TARGETING TRANSFORMATION

The move toward social ads shows how the Internet is transforming the whole industry.

Major companies from Nestle to Ford are increasing the proportion of their ad spend on the Internet to the detriment of traditional press ads and big ad agencies are scrambling to evolve.

The changes have given birth to a slew of tech start-ups trying to come up with more sophisticated ways to match ads to consumers, often with sophisticated data mining techniques and algorithms.

Among them is RadiumOne, a venture-backed start-up that tracks people’s social behavior on-line by partnering with niche social networks, blogs, and media-sharing sites and then uses that data to target ads.

“When you share an article or email a Web link to a friend, that’s a very influential connection and we can track that through cookies and then segment users into groups,” Chief Executive Gurbaksh Chahal told Reuters.

“Social data is immense,” he said. “We’ve built some great technology that can understand data and find an audience in the real time and serve an ad that’s relevant to them.”

Martin Sorrell, the CEO of the world’s biggest ad group WPP, says there is room to improve the effectiveness of web ads: “Online advertising is more sophisticated than offline, but it’s not got to where we think it can go yet.”

TENTACLES

Facebook’s influence is also spreading beyond its own site as more webpages allow people to use their login details from Facebook to enter instead of a separate password.

Users can then share content and post messages within those sites as they would do on their social network, which in turn allows the website to access their profile and determine the user’s likes and dislikes. Twitter has a similar system.

California-based start-up Gigya powers the buttons that allow such sharing for about 5,000 sites, such as US broadcaster ABC and sports apparel maker Nike.

“Someone like Nike is getting access to that extremely rich data that it wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise,” Gigya Chief Executive Patrick Salyer said in an interview.

Beyond more sophisticated targeting, Facebook also serves to amplify traditional word of mouth on everything from new movies to the latest smartphone.

“If I have a good experience with a brand I’ll tell a person offline — I might tell my friend — but if I do it on Facebook the average person is telling 130 people,” said Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

“We think that explains the very healthy growth of our advertising business.”

(Editing by Chris Wickham and Sophie Walker)

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