Items tagged with NASDAQ:ORCL
Facebook is not the only company whose user data policies have captured the attention of a government agency. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is investigating claims that Google harvests private data from Android users. This investigation could potentially affect over 10 million Australian Android users. The ACCC is particularly concerned that digital platforms like Google and Facebook have tremendous influence on the advertising market. Oracle Australia, a branch of Oracle Corporation, recently met with members of the ACCC and claimed that Google harvests an average of a gigabyte of data a month from individual Android users. This data includes location information...
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Oracle sued Google over its use of Java to build the Android operating system a few years ago, but Google won the case. However, an appeals court has overturned that ruling, finding that “the declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection”. This ruling is a big deal because it could severely limit what software makers can safely do without getting sued and could hamper innovation. Google is of course displeased with the ruling, but others in the industry are none too happy either. Image credit: orangesparrow/Flickr Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent, told Wired that the notion that you can copyright APIs is a perverted...
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Java is a mess; Oracle’s software has become a popular target of cybercriminals, and news about Java exploits is becoming more and more common, even as the solutions Oracle provides offer little comfort. Wait, it gets worse: According to Kaspersky Labs and security company Seculert, the terrifying and massive Red October botnet espionage campaign that swiped sensitive data from governments worldwide used Java exploits to penetrate some systems. Specifically, the exploit in question is CVE-2011-3544, which is present in Java 7 and 6 (update 27) and allows “remote untrusted Java Web Start applications and untrusted Java applets to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability...
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Consider this a PSA: Oracle is going to patch that hole in Java, the one that security pros discovered last week. Cybercriminals were using a zero-day exploit in Oracle’s Java to deliver malware payloads, steal identities, and take over computers to force them to commit nefarious acts. According to Reuters, Oracle said that “A fix will be available shortly”, which of course begs the question of what “shortly” means, exactly. In an hour? A week? A month? In any case, the exploit apparently only affects Java 7, so users with older versions of the software can breathe a sigh of relief. However, everyone should note well that this is the second major security flaw in...
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