Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Best Buy will stop selling Huawei Phones.

Huawei dealt a blow, loses Best Buy as smartphone retailer

c|net – By: Roger Cheng – “It’s going to get harder for Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to sell its smartphones in the US.

Best Buy, the nation’s largest electronics retailer, has ceased ordering new smartphones from Huawei and will stop selling its products over the next few weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation. Best Buy made the decision to end the relationship, the person said.

‘We don’t comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons,’ said a Best Buy spokeswoman.

A Huawei spokeswoman called Best Buy a valued partner. But ‘as a policy, we do not discuss the details of our partner relationships,’ she said.

The move is a critical blow to Huawei, which is the world’s third-largest smartphone vendor behind Apple and Samsung but has struggled to establish any presence in the US. Best Buy was one of Huawei’s biggest retail partners, and one of the rare places you could see its unlocked smartphones in person. Huawei’s Android-powered phones aren’t sold by any US carriers, which is how a majority of Americans typically buy their phones.

Global Data analyst Avi Greengart called it ‘devastating for Huawei.’

Huawei was widely expected to announce a partnership with AT&T in January at CES to carry the Mate 10 Pro smartphone, but the carrier reportedly backed out because of political pressure. A few days later, Verizon reportedly nixed its own plans to sell Huawei phones. Instead, Richard Yu, CEO of the company’s consumer business, spent his time talking about the phones, which were already in the market elsewhere, as well as touting the Porsche Design variant of the smartphone.

While on stage during his CES keynote in January, Yu acknowledged that the lack of a carrier partner hurt, but said that it was ‘a bigger blow to consumers’ who lose out on a strong alternative for an Android phone in the Mate 10 Pro. CNET editor Andrew Hoyle called it ‘a beautiful, big-screen bruiser’ that earns its place among other high-end smartphones. The Mate’s features include a front-facing camera that can shoot portrait mode-style photos and that has a beefy 4,000 mAh battery.

AT&T declined to comment on the reports, but noted it has never publicly committed to selling a Huawei phone. Verizon couldn’t be reached for comment but has previously declined to weigh in on the matter.

Security concerns have long dogged Huawei in the US. In 2012, the House Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Huawei and fellow Chinese vendor ZTE of making telecommunications equipment that posed national security threats, and lawmakers banned US companies from buying the gear. Sprint, for instance, has earlier considered using Huawei to supply equipment to its network, but opted not to work with the company.

Following the report’s release, the committee stressed that the report didn’t refer to its smartphones.

Huawei had spent the last few years slowly building a fan base by selling unlocked phones through retailers like Best Buy, Amazon and Newegg. But most US consumers have still never heard of the company — or even know how to pronounce its name.

The tolerance for its smartphones has changed in the last few months. Following the reports of political pressure exerted in January, the directors of the FBI, CIA and NSA all expressed their concerns about the risks posed by Huawei and ZTE phones during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last month.

Huawei, for its part, has noted that its products — both telecom equipment and phones — are sold elsewhere around the world and with different global companies.

‘Our products and solutions are used by major carriers, Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of millions of consumers in more than 170 countries around the world,’ said a Huawei spokesman. ‘We have earned the trust of our partners across the global value chain.'”

Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes For the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Says He Isn’t Opposed To Regulation

Via SlashDot, from The Verge – “An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge:

Mark Zuckerberg apologized on Wednesday evening for his company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. “This was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry this happened,” he said in an interview on CNN. “Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” Zuckerberg’s comments reflected the first time he apologized following an uproar over how Facebook allowed third-party developers to access user data. Earlier in the day, Zuckerberg wrote a Facebook post in which he said the company had made mistakes in its handling of the Cambridge Analytica data revelations. The company laid out a multipart plan designed to reduce the amount of data shared by users with outside developers, and said it would audit some developers who had access to large troves of data before earlier restrictions were implemented in 2014.

Zuckerberg also told CNN that he is not totally opposed to regulation. ‘I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. “There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see.’

Other highlights of Zuckerberg’s interviews:
-He told multiple outlets that he would be willing to testify before Congress.
-He said the company would notify everyone whose data was improperly used.
-He told the New York Times that Facebook would double its security force this year, adding: ‘We’ll have more than 20,000 people working on security and community operations by the end of the year, I think we have about 15,000 now.’
-He told the Times that Facebook would investigate ‘thousands’ of apps to determine whether they had abused their access to user data.

Regarding moderation, Zuckerberg told Recode: ‘[The] thing is like, ‘Where’s the line on hate speech?’ I mean, who chose me to be the person that did that?’ Zuckerberg said. ‘I guess I have to, because of where we are now, but I’d rather not.'”

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‘Bout time!

Dropbox to add native G Suite integration in new partnership with Google

TechCrunch – By: Ron Miller – “It’s been an eventful week for Dropbox coming off its announcement last Friday that it was finally going public, but that doesn’t mean the business stops. The company announced plans to partner with Google today to bring native G Suite integration to Dropbox storage.

The fact is that more than 50 percent of Dropbox users have a G Suite account — which includes GMail along with Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides. To this point, there hasn’t been a way to store these files in Dropbox. That has required a Google Drive account, but customer requirements can sometimes make for strange bedfellows and Dropbox and Google have been working together to bring this integration to fruition because it’s something both companies’ customers have been asking for, Quentin Clark, SVP of Engineering, Product and Design at Dropbox explained.

‘Dropbox is increasingly building out its content collaboration functionality with the freedom to use whatever tools [customers] want to use on whatever platform that they want to use. This partnership is another step on that journey,’ Clark told TechCrunch.

Clark points out that Dropbox has been in the process of building out these partnership deals for the last couple of years with partnerships with Microsoft, Autodesk and Adobe already on the books. This fills in a major content type that had been previously (conspicuously) missing.

He said that the two companies are in the process of working out the details of how the integration is going to work, but he expects the integration to be completed by the end of the year. When it’s done users should be able store, open and start G Suite documents in Dropbox. ‘The way that integration looks and feels, that’s the stuff we are finding our way together,’ he said.

Clark, who has had past stints at Microsoft and SAP, says that he has learned over time that it’s incumbent upon vendors like Dropbox to focus on the needs of the users over the needs of the company. That’s why two companies that sell online storage services are willing to work together. ‘It is enabling best of breed and recognizing that you are going to hire your product to do a certain job and may be hiring other products to do other jobs, and you have to be at peace with that,’ he said.

While the timing may seem to be close enough to the IPO announcement that it is related, the fact is the partnership has been in the works for some time. Perhaps the company wanted to put it out there to enhance their enterprise street cred prior to the IPO, but if that were the case, they weren’t saying during the legally required quiet period prior to going public.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Google has teamed up with another company to provide third-party storage. In fact, Diane Greene, who is head of Google Cloud, announced a partnership to make Box a third-party storage partner for Google content at the 2016 Boxworks customer conference.”