China

A pension and relief fund that sued IBM for failing to warn investors of loss of business in China because of its alleged involvement with spying by the U.S. National Security Agency has voluntarily withdrawn the lawsuit in a New York court.

The Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension and Relief Fund has decided to voluntarily dismiss the action after additional investigation into the matters alleged, which included investigations in the U.S. and China and discussions with the defense counsel, John C. Browne, lawyer for the fund, wrote to the court in a letter disclosed Monday.

The Keen, a top hacking team which took down Windows 8.1. Adobe Flash in just 15 seconds and Apple’s Safari Mac OS X Mavericks system in only 20 seconds during a Pwn2Own Vancouver event in March, has divulged the identity of its members, a Chinese newspaper reported on 13 April 2014.

“50 percent of us are the top scoring students in the national college entrance examination. 50 percent are majored in mathematics, and 50 percent are from Microsoft,” said Lv Yiping, key member of the Keen and co-founder and chief operating officer of the team’s Shanghai-based parent company.

For those who don't feel the urgency to install the latest security fixes for their computers, take note: Just a day after Heartbleed was revealed, attacks from a computer in China were launched.

The software bug, which affects a widely used form of encryption called OpenSSL, was announced to the world April 7 at 1:27 p.m. New York time, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. That sent companies scrambling to fix their computer systems -- and for good reason.

Security software maker Cheetah Mobile Inc, a unit of Chinese software company Kingsoft Corp Ltd , filed with U.S. regulators on Wednesday to raise about $300 million in an initial public offering of American Depositary Shares.

Beijing-based Cheetah, formerly known as Kingsoft Internet Software Holdings Ltd, told the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission in a preliminary prospectus that Morgan Stanley, J.P.Morgan, Credit Suisse and Macquarie Capital were underwriting the IPO. (r.reuters.com/dyr28v)

Chinese authorities have detained a total of 1,530 suspects in a crackdown on spam text messages being sent by illegal telecoms equipment, according to Chinese news agency ECNS.

Over 2,600 fake mobile base stations were seized and 24 sites manufacturing illegal telecoms equipment shut down as part of a massive nationwide operation involving nine central government and Communist Party of China departments.

Remember a few days back when we spoke about the high-end Chinese smartphones? Here's one of them. The smartphone in discussion today is the the Oppo Find 7, which is set to be launched on the 19th of this month.

On Monday, Microsoft China made statements on a Chinese social network that have been misinterpreted in reports in the West. Microsoft in Redmond told ZDNet that they are not extending support for Windows XP in China.

Microsoft translates the actual language used in the post as:

    Microsoft China has taken special actions to closely work with leading Chinese internet security and anti-virus companies including Tencent for them to provide security protection for Chinese Windows XP users before they upgrade to modern operating system.

The U.S.-based transportation network company Uber announced its official launch in China on February 13, 2014, said a PingWest report.

During an event held in Shanghai on Thursday, Uber said that, unlike its American model in which individual drivers register as Uber drivers, it will work with Chenghuan car rental company. According to PingWest's report, Chenghuan will also walk its drivers through training sessions to get them prepared to use the Uber app.

The U.S. last week brought charges against two Arkansas men for operating an e-mail hacking website, needapassword.com, which offered to obtain passwords to any e-mail account for a fee. The scheme, operated by Mark Anthony Townsend of Cedarville, Ark., and Joshua Alan Tabor of Prairie Grove, affected some 6,000 accounts, according to a Jan. 24 press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Cedarville and Prairie Grove have a combined population of less than 6,000 people. Yet the investigation into the website stretched around the globe.

China, wary of operating systems from the Western world, has built a new smartphone OS that it believes will be more secure than the likes of Android and the iPhone. While China claims it as its own, the OS looks like it's based on Android.