McAfee Lost Key Employees

McAfee, the worldwide-known insecurity outfit, which was purchased by chip giant Intel, has just lost a couple of key employees. Meanwhile, the company is expected to introduce a new generation of security products in the nearest future.

George Kurtz, the worldwide chief technology officer, known for helping lead the McAfee’s product strategy, is going to leave the company by the end of October. However, he isn’t the first key staff member leaving the company: vice president Dmitri Alperovitch, a highly regarded threat researcher known for his work at McAfee that helped give the outfit a reputation for conducting cutting-edge research on hacking, has already slipped out the back door. Surprisingly enough, few noticed his move, as the media didn’t observe the event at all.

Dmitri Alperovitch was leading a research team which released a number of high-profile studies on alleged Chinese-government backed hackers. He is also known worldwide for coining the term “Operation Aurora” to describe hacker attacks suspected by Chinese intruders on the largest search engine Google and many other organizations.

Alperovitch was last mentioned in the press when his team discovered so-called “Operation ShadyRAT” – one of the largest cyber attacks throughout the globe, which caused the infiltration of the networks of seventy-two outfits, including the UN and numerous governments and companies all over the globe. However, the papers say Alperovitch will be doing a bit of work for McAfee as a consultant.

The industry observers only noticed the lack of the two key figures of the company when they were not found on the speakers list at the McAfee’s annual security conference. The rumors are that the two left because they weren’t happy about Intel’s involvement with China. The insecurity outfit has operations in China, but Intel features a much bigger manufacturing and marketing presence there. Operation ShadyRAT pointing the finger at that country must have caused some problems for the company. So, it seems that since Alperovitch has never openly pointed at China for some cyber espionage cases, it might have more to do with Intel than Alperovitch really wanted to say.

The company announced that the two key positions have been filled internally. Alperovitch was replaced by David Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, and George Kurtz’s place is filled by Stuart McClure. 

Entertainment Industry Should Understand Economy

Another research confirms that file-sharing is generally limited in both North America and Europe, but is still on the rise across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East. Industry observers called piracy “progressive taxation”, which can be considered a great theory reproducing the nowadays situation.

In this particular research it is said that the problem is actually not piracy but pricing. In other words, pricing can’t put any discernment into the strategies of the music industry, because it makes no difference between West and its less-wealthy neighbors. However, these weren’t problems that concerned the Recording Industry Association of America, because the outfit was too busy suing people and organizations within the United States. Back in 2008, the outfit took a decision to drop its strategy of mass lawsuits and switched to pushing Internet service providers into spying their own subscribers to stop piracy.

Yet, the actions of the music industry were of little success thus far, as well as based on the assumption that its targets were faulty. Meanwhile, the recent research showed that around 10% of North Americans appeared to use file-sharing services in the last three months, but the figure was approximately 20% at the European Union.

Nevertheless, on-the-rise economies of developing countries (Latin America - 45%, Asia-Pacific - 42%, and Middle East and Africa - 41%) constitute a larger piece of pie in the file-sharing community. The question is whether the world can be comprised of thieves according to these numbers, or the attention should be drawn to the economic and technological differences between developed and developing countries?

Major part of those who really infringe copyright respond to little more than a letter demanding to take the content offline. The servers that ignore the entertainment industry’s requests are generally located in countries where the books are unavailable for sale or are too expensive for ordinary people to buy. For example, in Russia the average salary is $500 a month, while the books cost sometimes more expensive than in the US – each good textbook is around $30, which the part-working students or their parents can hardly afford. As for the elderly people, their pension is $200 a month – and you have to take your time and calculate it out how to survive on this money, not what books to buy. These are official numbers, you can goggle them and the prices in shops of developing countries (and better visit them) before taking a final decision on which side to take. That’s what the industry should de as well before blaming China and Russia for all its woes. At the same time, the industry stubbornly refuses to understand that the simplest way to make customers stop sharing illegal content is to offer them a legitimate alternative, at a fair price.

Apple App Store Was Selling Pirate Books

Apple is accused of selling pirated Chinese translations of the books written by famous Japanese writers. The books were sold online through the company’s App store. A statement, recently sent to Apple by a consortium of Japanese book publishers, accuses the company of failing to do enough to make sure it doesn’t sell copyright infringing content on the Internet.

A whole consortium of Japanese publishers, including The Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, The Japan Book Publishers Association, The Japan Magazine Publishers Association and the Digital Comic Association, has recently issued a press release to accuse App Store operator of violating their members’ copyrights.

As per Asahi.com, the company has been selling illegal copies of books written by best-selling Japanese writers like Keigo Higashino and Haruki Marakami. Besides, unauthorized works by Nobel Literature Prize winner, Kenzaburo Oe, have also been found available from App Store.

It is supposed that the pirates have scanned printed Chinese translations of the books, including “1Q84“ by Haruki Murakami, to later convert them into eBooks. The illegal copies of the works were accepted by the company into the App Store and are claimed to have been selling since the mid-summer. For example, the unauthorized version of Murakami’s “1Q84” appeared to be identical to a Chinese translation published in Taiwan last year.

The publishers stated in press release that while some of the books have been deleted by requests from their authors and publishers, most part of them is still being illegally sold. Nevertheless, the consortium of publishers said that they wanted to cooperate with Apple in order to find effective ways to keep illegal books off their store. In other words, they called for Apple to “operate responsibly.” Meanwhile, the Japanese publishers rejected the company’s claims that it can’t check for copyrighted content during the approval process.

As for Apple, the company said that it would be quite difficult and time-consuming to find out who owns the copyright to submitted works during the approval process. Still, the company admitted that it takes copyright violation issues very seriously and is going to respond to the Japanese consortium’s accusations in due course.