Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm leaves Alibaba board to focus on his main job

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has spun out a business called Lingyang Intelligent Service Company that aims to deliver "data-as-a-service."

Lingyang starts its life with assets adapted from tools developed for Alibaba’s own extensive operations, which span e-commerce, a public cloud, logistics, web portals, payments, and plenty more besides.

The Chinese company has over 1.3 billion annual active customers – more than a billion in China. Serving all those customers – and their many transactions – has necessitated development of some pretty slick tools.

A former Canadian government employee has pleaded guilty in a US court to several charges related to his involvement with the NetWalker ransomware gang.

On Tuesday, 34-year-old Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins admitted he conspired to commit computer and wire fraud, intentionally damaged a protected computer, and transmitted a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer. 

He will also forfeit $21.5 million and 21 laptops, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and other devices, according to his plea agreement [PDF], which described Vachon-Desjardins as "one of the most prolific NetWalker Ransomware affiliates" responsible for extorting said millions of dollars from dozens of companies worldwide.

Three people accused of selling pirate software licenses worth more than $88 million have been charged with fraud.

The software in question is built and sold by US-based Avaya, which provides, among other things, a telephone system called IP Office to small and medium-sized businesses. To add phones and enable features such as voicemail, customers buy the necessary software licenses from an Avaya reseller or distributor. These licenses are generated by the vendor, and once installed, the features are activated.

In charges unsealed on Tuesday, it is alleged Brad Pearce, a 46-year-old long-time Avaya customer service worker, used his system administrator access to generate license keys tens of millions of dollars without permission. Each license could sell for $100 to thousands of dollars.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

Alibaba's cloud business and financial services affiliate Ant Group has expanded further out of China this week, by opening a pair of datacenters in Saudia Arabia and a digital wholesale bank in Singapore.

Alibaba Cloud and Saudi Telecom Company (STC) have opened two cloud services in Riyadh which will serve as a regional hub as part of a joint venture called the Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC). STC confirmed the launch on Tuesday and the joint venture, SCCC, shared scenes from the launch.

Other businesses playing a part in SCCC are eWTP Arabia Capital, the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), and the Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE).

Alibaba is being sued in the US by the parents of a man, who bought a 3D printer from the Chinese e-commerce giant, and died in an accident after the device allegedly malfunctioned and caught fire.

Hoi Kwong Yu and Janice Yu, parents of Calvin Yu, claim their son purchased "a defective Tronxy X5SA 24V 3D printer" from Alibaba's website AliExpress.com around 9 November 2019. Disaster struck six months later, on 11 June 2020.

The device was plugged into an electric power strip, and overheated causing a fire to erupt in Calvin's home, it was alleged in court documents filed to San Francisco's Superior Court [PDF]. He died a day later.

US law enforcement has shut down another dark web market, seizing and dismantling SSNDOB, a site dealing in stolen personal information.

Led by the IRS' criminal investigation division, the DOJ, and the FBI, the investigation gained control of four of SSNDOB's domains, hobbling its ability to generate cash. The agents said it raked in more than $19 million since coming online in 2015.

Ever since Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server business in 2014, one thing has proven elusive: profit.

Now the company can point to a pair of consecutive quarters, and a full year, in the black.

The Chinese kit-maker yesterday reported Q4 and FY 2022 results, with quarterly revenue of $16.7 billion representing seven percent year on year growth. Annual revenue reached $71.6 billion, an increase of 18 percent. Annual net income topped $2 billion.

The US Justice Department has directed prosecutors not to charge "good-faith security researchers" with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if their reasons for hacking are ethical — things like bug hunting, responsible vulnerability disclosure, or above-board penetration testing.

Good-faith, according to the policy [PDF], means using a computer "solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability."

Additionally, this activity must be "carried out in a manner designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices, machines, or online services to which the accessed computer belongs, or those who use such devices, machines, or online services."

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has open-sourced a federated learning platform it claims protects privacy by enabling the development of machine learning algorithms without having to share training data.

FederatedScope was developed by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, the global science and technology research outfit it founded in 2017, and the source code for this is now published under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

The platform is described as a comprehensive federated learning platform that provides flexible customization for a variety of machine learning tasks in both academia and industry.