Reuters is reporting that Los Alamos discovered and removed at least two switches which were in the process of being installed at the lab.

The fear is that China’s military — which does have notoriously close relationships with the nation’s top companies — has infiltrated the company and potentially put backdoors into communications equipment, which China can then use to spy on the U.S and its top companies.

That exactly what Congress said just a few months ago, releasing a draft report that stated, in part, that Huawei and other Chinese vendors “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence” and that, therefore, U.S. companies should “seek other vendors.” Australia’s government has similar concerns, having banned Huawei products from its new nationwide high-speed Internet network early last year, and as far back as seven years ago, Huawei was blocked from Indian government telecommunications projects.

So what’s a poor Chinese-based multinational to do?

Well, call in the Chinese government, for one. The Chinese government’s commerce ministry struck back at that Congress report, saying it was “suggestive guesswork” and obliquely warning of trade consequences for the “speculative” claims.

Huawei VP of external affairs William Plummer also struck back, telling Reuters that “there has never been a shred of substantive proof that Huawei gear is any less secure than that of our competitors, all of which rely on common global standards, supply chains, coding and manufacturing.”

A little more of that might help — repeated calls to Huawei’s press contacts in North America were not returned in time to add their comments to this story.

Even better, Huawei might consider allowing trusted third parties — or even government inspectors — review their equipment and code in full detail to prove or disprove their innocence once and for all.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to move the production lines of its Mac Mini computer to the U.S., along with its manufacturing partner Foxconn, according to Digitimes.

While Digitimes has had a rocky history with Apple rumors (mainly because it reports every single thing it hears), this news makes a lot of sense. Mac Mini shipments are on the rise, after climbing more than 40 percent this year to around 1.4 million units. It’s also quickly becoming a powerful little device: This year’s Mac Mini upgrade includes an option for a fast quad-core Intel Core i7 processor running at 2.3 gigahertz.

Apple announced earlier this month that it will spend more than $100 million to bring some Mac production back to the U.S. next year, but it didn’t specify which models would get the special treatment. Previous speculation pointed to the Mac Pro, Apple’s massive desktop, though that model hasn’t received a major design upgrade in some time (and it’s been overshadowed for years by innovations in Apple’s iMac and MacBook lines). It makes more sense for Apple to focus on a device that’s on the rise for its triumphant U.S. return instead of one that’s on the decline.

Digitimes notes that Mac Mini shipments are expected to rise another 30 percent in 2013 to 1.8 million.

While desktops are falling out of fashion, an inexpensive and tiny computer like the Mac Mini could end up being a worthy alternative for many. It’s already packing a fast processor — now all Apple needs to do is give it better graphics capabilities to satisfy gamers and media professionals.

The first census was taken in 1790 with paper and pencil, of course, and was primarily intended to determine the number of military-age men in a country with only 3.9 million people.

Exactly 100 years later in 1890, technology came to the aid of over-worked tabulators as a Census employee, Herman Hollerith, invented a punch-card based calculation system. Interestingly, he later founded the Tabulating Machine Company that 20 years later would become the basis of IBM.

1950 brought Census into the digital age as the Bureau bought the very first UNIVAC I, which weighed 16,000 pounds and used 5000 vacuum tubes. That miracle of modern miniaturization could perform just over 1,900 instructions per second. The CPU alone took up about 12 feet by 6 feet by 6 feet, and ran at a blazing 2.25 MHz speed … 1,300 times slower than the CPU inside a cheap modern computer.

In 1980, Census data became available on electronic files, delivered via CD-ROM, and today, of course, the data is available at census.gov, and the U.S. population is updated every few seconds. (When I checked, it was 313,872,172.)

No data yet, however, on when Census data will be collected via the web.

Here’s the full infographic:

Image credit: Wikipedia

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The anticipated Samsung Galaxy Nexus still isn’t available in the U.S., but the phone’s U.K. users have been troubled by a volume fluctuation bug since its release. Thankfully, a fix has now been found — if you’re willing to install a custom ROM.

The volume bug, which has been closely documented by The Verge, is contained inside the Android Ice Cream Sandwich software and is not a hardware problem. Google says it is working on issuing a fix for the bug, but MoDaCo has released a custom ROM of the phone first that solves the issue. We would recommend you actually know what you’re doing if you decide to install the hack, as tampering with standard software can mess up your phone permanently.

The Galaxy Nexus will be released in the U.S. in December. It was released in the U.K. on Nov. 17 and will reportedly launch in Canada on Dec. 8. Verizon Wireless ran an ad for the Galaxy Nexus during Thanksgiving weekend that said the phone would retail for $199.99, but no date was mentioned. We suspect Verizon, Samsung and Google are trying to get the volume bug fixed before releasing the phone in the U.S., which is a much larger market than the U.K.

U.S. users are excited about the device because the Galaxy Nexus is top of the line for Android in almost all categories. On top of being the first Android phone with beautiful Ice Cream Sandwich software, it has a massive 4.65-inch screen with 1280-by-720 resolution that is capable of 720p HD video playback and Verizon’s blazing 4G LTE data speeds. It also includes a 1.2-GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

A new study from Gild, a service for creating and comparing developers’ skill profiles, asserts that Chinese developers outscore U.S. developers on math and logic by 20 percent.

“Software development remains a bright spot for the U.S., with American programmers the best in the world, but is it sustainable?” ask the Gild researchers.

“To ensure this leadership for more than a generation, we urgently need to improve the quality of math skills in our schools. In fact, America should embrace and support this leadership position and introduce programming into schools.”

Gild’s study took into consideration the skill sets and levels of almost half a million developers. Altogether, the group being studied was put through more than one million tests.

For most mainstream programming languages, the American developers tested better than did the Chinese developers.

Specifically, for C, U.S. developers scored an average of 22 percent better than did the Chinese developers. For C#, the American group scored 26 percent higher; for C++, 19 percent. In Java and Oracle programming tests, the U.S.-based developers did 24 percent better on the tests than the Chinese developers did.

While it’s good for those of us living in the States that our ladies and gentlemen of a coding persuasion are keeping ahead of China, perhaps the world’s largest national workforce, in programming language knowledge, it’s disturbing to know that we’re falling behind in math and logic, two of the fundamental foundations for truly beautiful code.

“With debate raging around the need for improved focus on math and science in American high schools — a comment most recently from President Obama in his press conference last week — this data seems to support the active challenge to America’s global technology leadership,” wrote a Gild spokesperson in an email to VentureBeat.

At an education level, Americans have long known that our science and math skills are not up to snuff.

In 2003, the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test, showed that 15-year-old students in the U.S. lagged behind students in other nations when it came to math and science. In 2006, the National Academies publicly raised concerns about a marked decline in U.S. students’ knowledge of science, technology, math and engineering. Currently, American students rank low for math and science skills, coming in 25th in math and 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries.

So after a decade of apparently ineffective education, it’s not too surprising that today’s workforce of American engineers still trails international counterparts in subjects like science, math and logic.

“America must invest in education to stay ahead,” said the Gild researchers in a statement. “Developing nations such as China are clearly putting an immense focus on core skills, particularly math. While nothing can replace creativity and ingenuity, the United States cannot afford to ignore the fundamentals.”

Image courtesy of hygienematters.

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In a blog post, Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew said Kundra had “cracked down on wasteful IT spending, saved $3 billion in taxpayer dollars, moved the government to the cloud, [and] strengthened the cybersecurity posture of the nation while making it more open, transparent, and participatory.”

President Obama offered Kundra the CIO position in March 2009 with the intent of creating a more transparent federal government. At that time, Kundra said he wanted to use tools like cloud computing and use the new site www.data.gov to put “vast amounts of government data into the public domain.”

Kundra will be taking a job as a joint fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before serving as federal CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia.

It’s a little curious to see Kundra leave just six months after releasing a 25-point plan to reform and restructure the government’s IT management. But alas, many government officials step down during their tenure, due to behind-the-scenes disputes or simply the opportunity to earn a larger paycheck in the private sector or academia.

Google previously indicated that the hackers were attempting to hijack accounts using “phishing” scams, where users are tricked into giving up their passwords. The attacks were also aimed at Chinese political activists, South Korean officials, and journalists, and aimed to monitor the accounts and change email forwarding settings.

The Obama administration said no official messages were compromised, but Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the allegations at hand were “very serious.” The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are working with Google to investigate the attempted breach, and U.S. officials indicated they would not talk directly to the Chinese government about the incident until more facts are collected.

The attack suggests White House employees are using private email exchanges to conduct official business, even if there are rules against it, according to Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who was quoted in the Wall Street Journal story. “Presumably, the Chinese wouldn’t have done this if they weren’t getting something,” she told the Journal.

“If all White House officials were following rules prohibiting the use of personal email for official business, there would simply be no sensitive information to find,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the Journal.

We reported yesterday that while China is in the spotlight here, the attacks may have came from more than just China. Mila Parkour, the Washington-based IT specialist who first spotted the attacks three months ago, said similar attacks appeared to come from New York and Korea. Google said it based its China findings on security intelligence gathered on its own, but it did not reveal how this was done.

As the case gets bigger and the U.S. government takes a larger role, we’d love to see Google release more information on why exactly it thinks China is the only country of origin in these wide-ranging attacks.

Alibaba.com acquired its second small-scale e-commerce tool in six weeks on Wednesday — Auctiva, a popular service for smaller eBay sellers that helps manage sales and marketing on an individual scale. Alibaba.com acquired a similar service, Vendio, in June.

Alibaba.com offers a wholesale platform on the global site that is geared toward small sellers seeking fast shipment of small quantities of goods. Across all its marketplaces, the company has a community of more than 53 million registered users in more than 240 countries and regions, according to the website.

Now armed with a force of about 250,000 loyal and well-maintained smaller sellers after the acquisitions, Alibaba.com stands to challenge eBay for dominance of the auction marketplace. This comes at a time when eBay begins a shift in its strategy that focuses on its money-transfer service, PayPal.

eBay earlier had problems gaining a strong foothold in the Chinese market when it attempted to enter under the leadership of Meg Whitman in 2005 — and was competing directly with Alibaba.com.

After the spat with eBay, Alibaba.com had few options to enter the U.S. market, leading it to focus on smaller sellers and multiple sales outlets like online retailer Amazon.com and even eBay’s service.

With the turnaround in eBay’s strategy began when John Donahoe took the reigns in 2008, a lot of pressure has fallen on smaller sellers, as the company has focused more on a fixed pricing model with its Buy It Now option and its PayPal platform, said Ina Steiner, founder and editor of auction news site Auctionbytes.com.

The acquisitions also come at a time when eBay has seen decreased traffic, falling soundly behind Amazon.com in the second half of 2009.

Coupled with Alibaba.com’s recent decision to set aside $100 million for e-commerce acquisitions as part of its expansion of AliExpress.com and eBay’s waning support for small sellers, the acquisitions of Vendio and Auctiva shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

“Auctiva and Vendio’s clients have been having problems selling on eBay, so they were more open to being acquired than in previous years when things were going better,” Steiner said.

Technology Investment Banking Group of Morgan Joseph organized the acquisition, though no payment details were disclosed.

[Image credit: Jan Ramroth]