If one analysis of hacked data from Ashley Madison is true, the affair-seeker website promoted a lot of talk, but little action.
The news site Gizmodo said its analysis showed little if any activity from the purported 5.5 million female members of Ashley Madison, who were online with an estimated 31 million male subscribers.
The data, which was released on the "dark web" which is not readily accessible to most Internet users, suggests the vast majority of profiles of women on Ashley Madison were fake, or created by automated "bots."
"The more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile," editor Annalee Newitz wrote Wednesday.
The data showed 20 million men had checked messages on Ashley Madison, compared with only 1,492 women. For the chat system, 11 million men logged on but only 2,409 women did so, Gizmodo found.
The Gizmodo team also found that many of the IP addresses for females could be traced back to Ashley Madison itself and that the most popular female last name in the database was "an extremely unusual one, which matched the name of a woman who worked at the company about 10 years ago."
The report said that because women did not pay to join, the only way to get a true sense of the number of active females was to know how many paid to delete their accounts -- a number just over 12,000.
"Paying to delete an account is a sure sign of activity, though of course it's evidence of disengagement rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised," Newitz said.
Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media declined to comment on the report.
But if true, the data would suggest the website facilitated very few extramarital affairs.
Canadian-based Avid Life has offered a reward of nearly half a million dollars for apprehension of the hackers, who leaked the user data last week including payment transactions, email addresses and phone numbers.
Toronto police have said two suicides may be linked to the data breach, and the leak has stirred considerable concern over privacy and the potential for blackmail.
The release of files came a month after the data was stolen by hackers identified as the "Impact Team," who said they were trying to shut down the site which uses the slogan, "Life is short. Have an affair."
Los Angeles City Council voted on Tuesday to let ride-hailing services such as uberX and Lyft pick up passengers at the city's international airport, which will become the largest U.S. air hub to allow the practice.
The 9-6 vote affirmed an action in June by members of the local airport commission, aides to council members said.
Some City Council members had expressed concerns about that decision and opened a review process. But council members who opposed the commission's decision lacked the necessary 10 votes to veto it.
The proposal to allow ride-hailing services to pick up at Los Angeles International Airport has drawn fierce opposition from taxi companies and drivers, who are faced with new competition from the mobile phone-based services and have lobbied against them in many parts of the country.
Taxi drivers say they are required to undergo fingerprinting for their background checks, while drivers with ride-hailing companies are not.
Mayor Eric Garcetti and some officials have described ride-hailing services, which already are allowed to drop off passengers at the airport, as a valuable tool.
As part of the plan, officials have required the creation of a so-called geofence that using GPS technology would prevent ride-hailing service drivers from parking near the airport to more easily receive pickup requests.
Ride-hailing services such as uberX and Lyft will need to demonstrate they can work within the geofence system before they start picking up passengers, said David Graham-Caso, a spokesman for Councilman Mike Bonin. That process could be completed within weeks.
"This agreement is a big win for passengers, by giving them more safe and convenient options to get home from the airport," Bonin, who represents the neighborhoods near the airport, said in a statement.
UberX is a Uber Technologies Inc service that uses everyday drivers using their own vehicles. The council vote does not apply to UberBLACK and UberSUV, which use commercially licensed drivers who can already pick up from LAX.
The council also voted to ask the City Attorney's Office to report on the possibility of requiring drivers with ride-hailing services to undergo fingerprinting.
"My greatest concern (with ride-hailing services) is the lack of a fingerprint background check," said Councilman Paul Koretz, who voted against the pickups at LAX.
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Peter Cooney)
Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday it will begin delivering wine, beer and spirits to U.S. customers for the first time as part of its speedy delivery service, Prime Now.
The online retailer is expanding Prime Now, its one- and two-hour service, to Seattle, where the company is headquartered, and offering alcohol deliveries there.
Amazon Prime, the company's $99 per year shopping membership program, offers free two-day delivery on millions of items. It is a key testing ground for the retailer's new services, ranging from TV and on-demand video to fast delivery.
Amazon has said it has "tens of millions" of Prime subscribers. Analysts estimate the program to have around 40 million users worldwide.
The company has steadily expanded Prime Now since it launched the service in New York City last year. It facilitates integration of the retailer's grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh, which has been slower to expand to new markets.
On-demand grocery delivery is a growing and competitive market in the United States. Instacart, a grocery delivery company, announced on Tuesday that it had expanded to Indianapolis, its 17th city. Other startups, like Postmates, which focuses on meal delivery, also deliver personal care goods and alcohol for customers using a network of couriers.
Prime Now customers can order using an app available on both iOS and Android devices. Orders are shipped from smaller warehouses, or hubs. An Amazon spokeswoman said the company opened two facilities in Seattle and Kirkland, Washington, to handle Prime Now deliveries.
Silicon Valley startups basking in billion-dollar valuations may face a long-overdue reckoning as a result of the global panic set off by roiling Chinese markets, investors and analysts have warned.
The number of technology companies with so-called “unicorn” designations of $1bn or more reached at least 131 on Monday, as healthcare websites, big-data firms and even Buzzfeed joined the kings of a new digital economy like Uber ($51bn) and Fitbit ($3.7bn).
But Silicon Valley watchers examining the ripple effects of a selloff across sectors from Beijing to the Nasdaq, which continued in Asian trading on Tuesday although European markets bounced back , insist those valuations have been too generous for too long – and may have consequences for both the startup scene and the market at large.
Whether the recalibration represents a market adjustment or a bursting tech bubble, investors say this week’s global stock rollercoaster is a sign of weakening confidence in the startup sector’s bigger bets – especially in what one venture capitalist called the increasingly difficult prospects “for some very high-end stuff to go public”.
Venture capitalists tend to lead the way in seed funding for glitzy startups, but they may be left without more risk-averse investors to bankroll the homestretch toward an IPO in a volatile environment.
“I could see mutual funds pulling out of the market, leaving traditional VCs – and the VCs are going to be more aggressive on valuation,” said Maarten Hooft, managing partner at Quest Venture Partners, which focuses on early-stage investment.
Such seed-stage investments and so-called “Series A” funding were likely to continue, VC backers and analysts agreed. But the ability of startups to rapidly snatch millions upon millions – particularly in the absence of profitability – could begin to fade away, with buyouts likely to rise.
Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark, wrote on Twitter that he thought tech investors had become too fond of growth and had failed to pay enough attention to “names” that had failed to turn enough profit. The decline of technology stocks, which he said had been “getting crushed” since mid-July, could represent “an inflection point”.
On Monday, the technology sector of the S&P 500 fared better than the index’s average, but prominent public tech stocks still suffered:
The social network Twitter had a similar collapse last week but rallied; it was back down again on Monday, while Facebook stock plunged 3.45%.
Among more recent IPOs, Box – the online storage provider that reaped huge rewards for risky VC backers earlier this year – was down more than 1%.
“I think this is probably a correction rather than the start of the end of the bull market,” said Hooft. “People are trying to take into account the news coming out of China and Europe and emerging markets, and then trying to figure out how that plays back into the US tech sector. For me, what I was thinking about doing this morning when I saw Facebook was down was buying more Facebook.”
Uncertainty in the startup world may mean good news for media giants large enough to weather a market correction – and perhaps even the smaller startups that could get swallowed up by them.
“We’re at a point where both kind of core supports of the media ecosystem are shaking – advertising and the subscription business,” said analyst Rich Greenfield of the research firm BTIG. “Every one of these companies has ‘missed’ mobile.”
Companies attracting upwards of $1bn in funding were “relatively small acquisitions” for giants like Disney, Greenfield noted.
“You’ve got massive companies like Snapchat sitting out there,” he said, referring to the social network reported to be raising some $650m in its latest round – ahead of a valuation that could be worth $16bn.
Hooft said for tech companies that have managed to acquire hundred-million-dollar stakes in the last year and a half, it is a buyer’s market and mergers-and-acquisition activity is very likely as soon as cash-rich techies “see an opportunity to do some talent acquisition or to buy cheaply into a space so they can give it a go”.
And the larger tech firms themselves might get in on the action: “A lot of the tech companies have a lot of cash and they have to do something with it,” said Hooft.
Regardless of who ends up acquired and who gets forced to IPO in an uncertain market, “valuations will probably be toned down a bit”, said the other venture capitalist, who asked not to be named.
“The focus is on how hard it is going to be for some very high-end stuff to go public,” he said. “How does Pinterest go public now? Dropbox? Square?”
Russia's media watchdog said Tuesday it had lifted a short-lived ban on Russian-language Wikipedia over an entry on a form of cannabis.
Roskomnadzor said Wikipedia had complied with a court order and edited an entry about charas, a substance made from the resin of the cannabis plant.
"The entry on the narcotic substance charas that is currently on Wikipedia, according to an expert conclusion of the federal drug control agency, does not breach legislation," it said in a statement.
Russian law prohibits online content about drug use, suicide and information that allegedly incites hatred.
Access to Wikipedia was cut overnight after the media watchdog announced Monday that it had been added to a register of banned sites, but it was up again on Tuesday.
"Unexpectedly, confirmation has arrived from Roskomnadzor that the entry on Charas has been excluded from the register of banned sites," Wikimedia Russia executive director Stas Kozlovsky wrote on Twitter.
Under a controversial Russian law, if a website is added to the banned register on a court order, the entire site is blocked, even if the offending material is only on one page.
A court in June had ruled that the Russian Wikipedia entry on charas contained banned information on the drug.
Roskomnadzor had said on Friday that Wikipedia had failed to comply with the ruling and warning that "the whole resource will be blocked".
Russian Wikipedia responded by posting an entry on how to get around an official blockage of the site. Its Twitter feed had said Monday: "Good morning, country! Possibly this is our last morning."
Infidelity website Ashley Madison and its parent company have been sued in federal court in California by a man who claims that the companies failed to adequately protect clients' personal and financial information from theft, saying he suffered emotional distress.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by a man identified as John Doe, seeks class-action status.
The lawsuit accuses Ashley Madison and parent company Avid Life Media Inc, which is based in Toronto, of negligence and invasion of privacy, as well as causing emotional distress.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
The lawsuit follows a breach of the Ashley Madison website by a group called the Impact Team, which downloaded "highly sensitive personal, financial, and identifying information of the website's some 37 million users," the lawsuit said.
The hacker group threatened to release information if the site was not shut down, and in August, when the site had not been shut down, published "stolen personal information," the suit said.
The data, which was dumped online, included millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations.
The lawsuit claims that the data breach could have been prevented if the company had taken "necessary and reasonable precautions to protect its users' information, by, for example, encrypting the data."
The lawsuit says that in addition to making "extremely personal and embarrassing information ... accessible to the public," the data breach made personal details such as addresses, phone numbers and credit card information available on the web.
Avid Life Media could not be reached immediately for a comment outside regular business hours.
Avid Life Media was sued in Canada last week in a class-action suit that seeks some $760 million in damages.
The case is filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California No. 15-cv-06405.
(Reporting by Rishika Sadam in Bangalore; Editing by Leslie Adler)
The security researcher who hacked into a moving Jeep earlier this year has resigned as an engineer at Twitter Inc after three years on the job, a person familiar with the matter said.
Charlie Miller, a former National Security Agency hacker who is the one of the world's best-known security experts, declined to comment on his departure or say what he would do next.
A Twitter spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
Miller's latest feat, breaking into a moving Jeep as it drove on the highway, was done with IOActive researcher Chris Valasek and was the subject of talks at this month's security conferences in Las Vegas.
Their efforts, which were coordinated with manufacturer Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, prompted the first vehicle recall to protect drivers from possible malicious hacking.
FCA USA LLC recalled 1.4 million vehicles to install software intended to prevent hackers from emulating the experiment, which used the cellular network to enter the entertainment system and then win control of the engine, brakes and steering.
Shares in Twitter, which is seeking a permanent chief executive officer, have fallen by more than 40 percent from the first day of trading in 2013 level and set a record low as the broader market sank on Monday.
The arrest of MtGox boss Mark Karpeles has begun to shed light on the defunct Bitcoin exchange after hundreds of millions of dollars in virtual currency vanished from its digital vaults last year.
But as details of a lengthy investigation by Japanese police trickle out, at least one crucial question remains unanswered: where is the money?
On Friday authorities issued a fresh arrest warrant for Frenchman Karpeles over claims he stole several million dollars from clients, including about $48,000 allegedly spent on a luxury canopy bed.
Karpeles, 30, who has reportedly denied the allegations, was initially taken into custody earlier this month and has been held without formal charges for three weeks, as allowed under Japanese law.
A fresh warrant resets the clock on how long police can hold him and grill the self-described computer geek over Tokyo-based MtGox's missing Bitcoins.
So far, police have accused Karpeles of manipulating data and stealing sums that amount to just a fraction of the 850,000 coins -- worth around $480 million at the time, or $387 million at current exchange rates -- that disappeared last year.
MtGox, which once said it handled around 80 percent of global Bitcoin transactions, filed for bankruptcy protection soon after the cyber-money went missing, leaving a trail of angry investors calling for answers.
The company initially said there was a bug in the software underpinning Bitcoins that allowed hackers to pilfer them.
Karpeles later claimed he had found some 200,000 of the lost coins in a "cold wallet" -- a storage device, such as a memory stick, that is not connected to other computers.
But the whereabouts of the money and Karpeles' involvement appear far from solved.
"If there were instances of mismanagement or fraud like this carried out by Mark Karpeles, then he should be held accountable," Bitcoin investor Kim Nilsson told AFP.
"(But) if these charges against (him) don't adequately explain where all the Bitcoin ... money went, then there are still unresolved questions, quite possibly additional crimes and criminals, that must be investigated further."
- Real or fake? -
Nilsson also questioned whether MtGox's Bitcoin deposits were even real in the first place.
"Did MtGox at any point actually hold the coins in question, or have there been faked deposit entries merely making it look that way?" he asked
MtGox reportedly kept its own funds and clients' money in the same bank account.
In an interview with Japan's top-selling Yomiuri newspaper, Karpeles' mother said her "genius" son learned computer languages at age three and started making simple programmes of his own two years later.
Back in 2006, Karpeles -- who reportedly lived in an $11,000-a-month penthouse Tokyo apartment -- wrote on his blog that computer crime was "totally contrary to my ethical principles".
But four years later, a Paris court sentenced him in absentia to a year in prison for hacking. He had come to Japan to work for a web development company in 2009 and later got involved with the Bitcoin exchange.
- Tangible object -
Investors have called on the firm's court-appointed administrators to publicise its data so that experts around the world can help analyse what happened at MtGox.
But the case presented a complex challenge to Japanese police, as financial watchdogs around the world struggle to work out how to regulate digital money.
Unlike traditional currencies backed by a government or central bank, Bitcoins are generated by complex chains of interactions among a huge network of computers around the planet.
"The Bitcoin case is really an embezzlement case, but embezzlement has to involve a 'tangible object,'" said Hisashi Sonoda, a criminal law professor at Japan's Konan University.
"Japanese criminal law treats digital currency as 'data,' not what we call 'tangible object' in a legal sense."
Backers say virtual currencies, which started to appear around 2009, allow for an efficient and anonymous way to store and transfer funds online.
But critics argue the lack of legal framework governing the currency, the opaque way it is traded and its volatility make it dangerous.
Following Karpeles' arrest, Tokyo vowed to boost digital-currency regulations.
Japan's penal code "is not really catching up with quickly changing business models", hampering authorities' investigation, Sonoda said.
"If there was a clause or a fresh law targeting digital currency, that would have been helpful for investigators."
Consumer electronics company Apple Inc has hired a senior engineer from electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc, according to a LinkedIn posting, as part of Apple's effort to build a team of experts in automated driving.
A LinkedIn profile for Jamie Carlson shows that he has left Tesla and moved to Apple. At least six others with experience developing self-driving technology and systems have joined Apple, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Attempts to reach all seven people were unsuccessful and Apple declined to comment.
Sources have said that Apple is developing a car and studying self-driving technology, but it is unclear if the iPhone maker is designing a vehicle that could drive itself.
Since January, Apple has hired Megan McClain, a former Volkswagen AG engineer with expertise in automated driving, and Vinay Palakkode, a graduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, a hub of automated driving research.
In August, Apple hired Xianqiao Tong, an engineer who developed computer vision software for driver assistance systems at microchip maker Nvidia Corp .
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Apple hired Paul Furgale, former deputy director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, earlier this year.
So-called advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, handle tasks such as keeping a vehicle in a lane or driving by itself in stop-and-go traffic, and they are considered the building blocks for self-driving cars.
According to Carlson's LinkedIn profile, he joined Apple in August in an unnamed position in a special projects group.
Through July, Carlson was an engineer on Tesla's Autopilot self-driving car program, and before that he worked on automotive vision systems for Michigan-based supplier Gentex Corp.
Other Apple hires since September 2014 with similar experience have worked at automakers BMW AG, Volkswagen and Ford Motor Co , automotive suppliers Delphi Automotive, Robert Bosch GmbH and TRW, now a part of ZF Friedrichshafen AG, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Among those hired last fall were Sanjai Massey, an engineer with experience in developing connected and automated vehicles at Ford and several suppliers; Stefan Weber, a former Bosch engineer with experience in video-based driver assistance systems, and Lech Szumilas, a former Delphi research scientist with expertise in computer vision and object detection.
Emails sent by the founder of infidelity website AshleyMadison.com appear to have been exposed in a second, larger release of data stolen from its parent company, cyber security experts confirmed on Thursday.
The data dump by hackers who have attacked the site appears to include email messages linked to Noel Biderman, founder and chief executive officer of its Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media.
In a message accompanying the release, the hackers said: "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now."
That appeared to be a riposte to the company's initial response to Tuesday's dump that the data may not be authentic.
The earlier dump exposed millions of email addresses for customers of Ashley Madison - whose tagline is 'Life is short. Have an affair.' - including for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations.
The U.S Defense Department and Postal Service are also investigating the alleged use of military and other government email accounts on the site.
Former reality TV star and family values campaigner Josh Duggar admitting to cheating on his wife after reports he had subscribed to the site.
The hackers object to the site's business practices, specifically a "paid delete" option that allows people to pay to remove all their information but, they say, does not actually do that.
David Kennedy, founder and security consultant at TrustedSec, said that the fresh release appears to be authentic.
"Everything appears to be legit," he said in an email. "We have portions downloaded and its confirmed legitimate thus far."
A report in Vice Media's online technology site Motherboard, which first reported the new data dump, said the release bore the same fingerprints as Tuesday's release.
The additional release will likely ratchet up the pressure on Avid Life, which has been quiet about exactly how much and what sort of data was stolen in a breach in July.
The company, which also owns websites CougarLife.com and EstablishedMen.com, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
"These guys are very diligent about not being caught," said Erik Cabetas, managing partner of Include Security, who has done forensic work on the initial dump.
The release includes source code for the website as well as smartphone apps and proprietary company data, he added. The availability of the source code could allow other hackers to set up a similar site or find and exploit vulnerabilities on the actual site, which is still operating.
The 20-gigabyte data dump reported on Thursday would be roughly double the size of the earlier one.
Despite the negative publicity surrounding the cyber attack, demand for Ashley Madison's services has been steady since the data breach first announced in July, said Mark Brooks, CEO of Internet dating consultancy Courtland Brooks.
"I would have thought this would be a death knell for that company because their entire business basis is privacy," Brooks said. "It just goes to say that all press is good press...The awareness of the brand is through the roof."
U.S. MILITARY, POSTAL SERVICE PROBES
The data release could have severe consequences for U.S. service members. Several tech websites reported that more than 15,000 email addresses were government and military ones.
The Pentagon said it was aware of reports that military email addresses were among those posted earlier in the week.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a Pentagon news conference that different service branches were looking into the matter.
"I'm aware of it. Of course it's an issue because conduct is very important. We expect good conduct on the part of our people," Carter said. "The services are looking into it, as well they should be, absolutely."
The U.S. Postal Service and its internal watchdog also plan to review whether or not some of the agency's employees may have violated federal policies by using their government email on the infidelity website.
(Reporting by Alastair Sharp and Josephine Mason; Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in New York and David Alexander in Washington; Editing by Grant McCool and Christian Plumb)
The share price of Tesla Motors shot up this week after a financial analyst said that the electric vehicle maker is “uniquely positioned to dominate” the auto industry.
Is Tesla, with its tightly integrated supply chain, following the strategy of another one-time dominant automaker – the Ford Motor Company – of over 100 years ago? Can it revolutionize the world by making an affordable electric car for the masses, much the way Henry Ford did with the Model T in 1908?
Henry Ford took control of his supply chain and made his own parts rather than buy from suppliers, which gave the company the scale needed to improve performance and lower costs. Now Musk is building a new “giga” battery factory, giving Tesla more control over this strategic component. Will it work out the same as for Ford?
Putting Ford in the black
In his 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow, Ford claimed his integrated approach was the key to his success (“if you want it done right, do it yourself”). In fact, he claimed to mine iron ore in Minnesota, ship it to the famous River Rouge facility in Detroit and have it sitting as a Model T in a Chicago driveway in 84 hours! However, at the time, complete standardization (yes, Ford is said to have stated “You could have any color you wanted as long as it was black”) was necessary to make this happen. No options were available as they are for today’s cars, but standardization led to lower prices.
Putting folding roofs onto Model T’s in 1915: part of Henry Ford’s moving assembly line and standardized work process.
Prior to the Model T, the typical car’s sticker price would often hit US$2,000, or almost five years of wages, which put cars out of reach for all but the rich. Working to make his car affordable, Ford sold the Model T for $260 by 1926, leading to massive market share – over 50% of the automobiles on the road worldwide were Ford’s.
By this time the average working household income had reached about $1,300 per year. That put the Model T at two to four months of a typical factory worker’s wages, something comparable to or less than today’s economy car!
Huxley’s Brave New World and Fordism
Ford’s significance can even be seen in Huxley’s classic futuristic science fiction work Brave New World from 1932. Huxley anticipated a world with intercontinental rocket plane travel and TV networks, in vitro fertilization, cloning and genetic engineering. Huxley also saw Ford’s approach to be so central to the future that Fordism – Ford’s system of mass production – would become the primary religion!
Huxley correctly saw so many things to come, yet clearly we don’t all worship Henry Ford today. So why did this prediction not come true? Maybe it is because not long after the book was written, the growing design complexity of cars and the demands of customers made Ford’s black-only Model T no longer competitive.
To offer multiple lines of vehicles and options, Ford’s integrated supply chain had to be broken into separate companies supplying specialized sets of products. No one company could handle it all.
Yet by the 1980s, local area networks meant computers could autonomously control machines and make multiple products from the same facility at relatively low costs. Then in the 1990s, the internet made physical proximity unnecessary for achieving economies of scale since manufacturers didn’t need to control every component in the supply chain.
What Huxley missed, in other words, was the impact of computers and IT innovations, considered one of the key facilitators to modern supply chain management.
What can Musk learn from Ford?
Let’s roll the clock ahead 100 years. Elon Musk and Tesla Motors are looking to bring the electric car to the masses much the way Ford did with the Model T.
Parallels include decisions to build a “giga” factory to make batteries that are currently sourced from Panasonic in Japan, paying a premium wage to workers to reduce turnover, and planning to make an electric vehicle priced for the mass market – the upcoming Model 3.
Even model names – Tesla sells the Model S and soon the Model X – may be more than coincidental. Will it work for Tesla the way it worked for Ford? Does today’s technology allow Tesla to do even more than Ford?
Elon Musk: Ford was right about vertical integration and combining production with engineering.
The battery pack is the single most important and expensive component in an electric car. A battery can exceed $15,000 per vehicle (or $500 per kilowatt-hour of capacity). The Nissan Leaf electric car has a 24 kilowatt-hour battery and has an average range of 84 miles.
Some industry experts believe batteries need to cost about $100 per kilowatt-hour and have almost triple the current range to be truly mass market. Achieving that sort of reduction in cost and improvement in performance comes from manufacturing at greater scale, rather than relying to suppliers.
In other words, as Tesla makes more batteries, it gains more opportunities to refine production and product design.
Ford found that out, and Tesla will as well. It plans to use most of the “giga” factory capacity in Reno, Nevada to supply Tesla’s auto assembly plant in Fremont, California, but also make batteries for utilities, homes and businesses.
Because there are common battery designs and production, Tesla will be able to transfer any product and process improvements between batteries for vehicles and the grid. Tesla estimates that they will reduce battery costs by over 30% with the “giga” factory.
Claims that Tesla with pay an average of $25 per hour in Reno have not been confirmed by the company, but the ability to retain high-caliber workers is necessary to leverage the accelerated experience that comes from scale into lower costs and improved design. Ford demonstrated that a long time ago. Tesla appears to have learned that lesson.
What will it take to be the Next Model T (or Model 3!)?
Today, models for left side driving, back seats big enough for customers who want a chauffeur, a third row of seats, four doors, two doors: all add volume but unfortunately bring complexity as well. Today’s computer-controlled process technology makes design variety much more scalable than in 1920. Research and practiceshow that now, the ability to collaborate with others (within or outside of Tesla) makes physical proximity moot as well.
An artist’s rendition of Tesla’s gigafactory now under construction in Nevada which will make batteries for cars and grid energy storage.
Unlike Ford, Tesla can use a global supply chain to make a wide variety of products while still pursuing the cost benefits of large-scale manufacturing. At the same time, Tesla can focus on making in-house “core” components, like batteries, with high learning and innovation potential.
Henry Ford had to control it all because even a missing hubcap could stop the line. Musk can now choose to outsource the more commodity-like components where the potential for process or product design improvement is small.
Not there yet
Musk has increased production from 10,000 vehicles in 2012 to a projected 50,000 by the end of 2015. However, forecasts and supply issues for a variety of parts (especially batteries) are causing scheduling hiccups, which has made Wall Street anxious.
While the new “giga” factory coming online in the next couple of years (and others like it) may help achieve many of the needed performance and cost objectives, Tesla is not there yet. Here are three things the company needs to remember to achieve its goal of mass-market electric cars:
First, keep your eye on the core aspects of your business that define your competitive strategy. Tesla making their own batteries fits their strategy of a high-performance, low-cost electric car for the masses. Accumulating experience here moves them toward both volume and cost goals. These are both defined criteria necessary and sufficient for strategic success.
Second, avoid allocating resources to noncore aspects because the payback is not there. Shortages or failures in hubcaps or trunk carpeting are as much problems now for Tesla as for Ford. But you can outsource to supply chain partners far more easily now than then.
Finally, new products or variations of existing ones should be consistent with maintaining your core competency. That is the key to transferring innovation. If adding scale through color choices or design combinations can add to accumulated experience in the core areas without unnecessarily adding to the burden of complexity, great!
Ford’s view on color choice is no longer relevant. But Tesla’s Musk can still learn from Henry Ford’s strategy of making strategic components. Making batteries for home and business can help Tesla fuel more innovations in car batteries and vice versa.
Hackers dumped online personal details of more than a million users of infidelity website AshleyMadison.com, tech websites reported on Tuesday, the latest high-profile cyber attack that threatens to wreak strife in relationships across the globe.
After threatening to release salacious details on as many as 37 million customers of the website, which uses the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," hackers claimed to publish a huge cache of email addresses and credit card data stolen in July.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the authenticity of the posting. Avid Life Media, which owns Ashley Madison and Established Men, widely described as a "sugar daddy site," did not verify the data was real, but said it was aware of the claim.
The hackers used the dark web which is only accessible using a specialized browser.
Still within hours, thousands of email addresses from North America and Europe including many linked to corporations and universities sprouted up on other sites as people decrypted the database. It is possible to create an Ashley Madison account using someone else's name and email.
The hackers have appointed themselves as "the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society," the company said in a statement.
"These are illegitimate acts that have real consequences for innocent citizens who are simply going about their daily lives," it said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the theft alongside the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police, it said.
The hackers, who call themselves The Impact Team, leaked snippets of the compromised data in July and threatened to publish names and nude photos and sexual fantasies of customers unless Ashley Madison and another site owned by Avid Life were taken down.
"Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men," tech website Wired quoted The Impact Team as saying in a statement accompanying the online dump.
"We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM (Avid Life Media) and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data," the hackers said, according to Wired.
Other higher-profile attacks such as those on big companies, like Sony Pictures Entertainment and Target, have seen credit card data of customers stolen, unleashing massive financial damage to individuals and companies.
But this data dump appeared to confirm that the hackers were not driven by blackmail or commercial motives, but rather ideological ones.
The intrusion into the private lives of individuals marked a watershed moment in cyber crime as the data spread across the web, said Ajay K. Sood, General Manager for Canada of cyber security firm FireEye Inc.
"These guys want as much notoriety as possible. This isn't cyber terrorism. It's cyber vigilantism," he said.
Avid Life has said it is convinced the hackers were formerly connected to the company.
Still the dump was massive, according to Troy Hunt, a Microsoft security expert, who said more than 1 million unique email addresses were attached to payment records.
Wired said 9.7 gigabytes of data was posted, and appeared to include member account and credit card details.
Toronto-based cybersecurity firm Cycura, which was hired by Avid Life to investigate the attack, said it was not authorized to speak on the matter.
(Reporting by Alastair Sharp and Josephine Mason; Editing by Alan Crosby)
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Sunday that a software upgrade at an air traffic center in Leesburg, Virginia, may have led to more than 440 flights getting canceled on the heavily populated U.S. East Coast on Saturday.
Travel at airports affected by the glitch resumed normal operations by Saturday evening after tens of thousands of passengers were affected by flights up and down the Atlantic Coast being canceled or delayed.
In a post on Facebook, the FAA said it had disabled the new features added from the upgrade until it completes its investigation.
There is no sign that the automated software that was upgraded has any "inherent problems," the FAA said.
(Reporting By Elizabeth Dilts in New York and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Sandra Maler)
