Just
because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s
useless.
Thomas Edison
President Trump took
aim at Iran this week and set off an earthquake that’s split America off from
Europe and the rest of the world. And it’s a great tectonic rift that calls
into question the viability or wisdom of partnering with America, or using
American components in trade.
The near collapse of
China’s ZTE telecoms giant following US sanctions, has set in motion a long
term international quest to bypass and replace any and all US choke points. At
a stroke there is near universal distrust of American intentions. It is hard to
see how America rows back from the course President Trump has set out on.
International
agreements involving the USA, are now voidable at the discretion of the US
President of the day. US contracts of supply are terminable at the whim of the
occupant of the White House. At a stroke, President Trump turned America into
an unreliable and dangerous trade partner. The long term damage is only in its
infancy. Wherever possible, the rest of the world is incentivised to replace US
technology and parts.
Up first, a shocked
Europe reels from the Trump earthquake.
May 11, 2018 / 2:01 PM
Europe moves to safeguard interests in Iran after U.S. pullout
BERLIN/PARIS
(Reuters) - Europe’s largest economies lobbied to protect their companies’ investments
in Iran on Friday, seeking to keep the nuclear deal with Tehran alive after
Washington pulled out and threatened to impose sanctions on European companies.
Germany and
France have significant trade links with Iran and remain committed to the
nuclear agreement, as does Britain, and the three countries’ foreign ministers
plan to meet on Tuesday to discuss it.
That is part
of a flurry of diplomatic activity following Tuesday’s unilateral withdrawal
from what U.S. President Donald Trump called “a horrible, one-sided deal”, a
move accompanied by the threat of penalties against any foreign firms doing
business in Iran.
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel said ways to save the deal without Washington needed
to be discussed with Tehran, while France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire
said EU states would propose sanctions-blocking measures to the European
Commission.
“Do we
accept extraterritorial sanctions? The answer is no,” Le Maire told reporters.
“Do we
accept that the United States is the economic gendarme of the planet? The
answer is no.
“Do we
accept the vassalization of Europe in commercial matters? The answer is no.”
British
Prime Minister Theresa May and Trump agreed in a phone call that talks were
needed to discuss how U.S sanctions on Iran would affect foreign companies
operating in the country.
May’s
spokeswoman said May had told Trump that Britain and its European partners
remained “firmly committed” to ensuring the deal was upheld as the best way to
prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Both Le
Maire and Germany’s finance minister Olaf Scholz had spoken to their U.S.
counterpart Steven Mnuchin, urging him to consider exemptions or delays for
companies already present in the country.
Le Maire
said he was seeking concrete exemptions for countries already present in Iran,
including Renault, Total, Sanofi, Danone and Peugeot. Scholz had also asked for
concrete measures to help German companies, Handelsblatt newspaper reported.
The 2015
agreement between major powers and Iran set limits on its nuclear activities in
exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Europeans fear a collapse of the deal
could intensify conflicts in the Middle East.
Germany,
France and Britain want talks to be held in a broader format to include Iran’s
ballistic missile programme and its regional military activities, including in
Syria and Yemen.
“The extent
to which we can keep this deal alive ... is something we need to discuss with
Iran,” said Merkel, who earlier spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on
the issue.
----French exports to Iran doubled to 1.5 billion euros ($1.79 billion) last year, driven by sales of aircraft and automobile parts, according to customs data.
Exports of German goods to Iran rose by around 400 million euros to 3 billion euros. Around 120 German firms have operations with their own staff in Iran, including Siemens (SIEGn.DE), and some 10,000 German companies trade with Iran.
“We are ready to talk to all the companies concerned about what we can do to minimise the negative consequences,” Altmaier told Deutschlandfunk radio. “That means, it is concretely about damage limitation”.
More
May 12, 2018 / 3:15 AM
China's ZTE paid over $2.3 billion to U.S. exporters last year, ZTE source says
(Reuters) - Chinese technology company ZTE Corp
0000063.SZ (0763.HK), which this month suspended its
main operations after a U.S. Commerce Department ban on American supplies to
its business, paid over $2.3 billion (1.7 billion pounds) to 211 U.S. exporters
in 2017, a senior ZTE official said on Friday.
ZTE paid over $100 million each to Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O), Broadcom Inc (AVGO.O), Intel Corp (INTC.O) and Texas Instruments (TXN.O), the official said.
As one of the world’s largest telecom equipment makers, ZTE relied on U.S. companies such as Qualcomm and Intel for components.
The extent of the impact of the Commerce Department ban on U.S. suppliers was noted by the ZTE official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, as Chinese and U.S. government officials discuss a Washington visit next week by China’s top economic official.
In March last year ZTE paid nearly $900 million in penalties for exporting U.S. technology to Iran and North Korea in violation of sanctions.
In April this year, the Commerce Department found ZTE had violated the terms of last year’s settlement and banned U.S. companies from providing exports to ZTE for seven years. As a result, ZTE suspended its main operating activities earlier this month.
----The ban also hurts ZTE’s ability to provide services,
such as repairs to infrastructure, to customers in other countries and regions
in which it operates. ZTE provides services for 100 million users in India, 300
million users in Indonesia, and 29 million users in Italy, the official said.
More
In EUSSR news,
Brussels is about to get the new Italian government from hell. But can Brussels
really bully Italy the way it can small upstarts like Hungary, Poland and the
Czech Republic? My guess is that we will
shortly find out.
May 11, 2018 / 3:27 PM
Wanted - Italian prime minister, as 5-Star and League negotiate
ROME
(Reuters) - Italy’s two anti-establishment parties, the 5-Star Movement and the
far-right League, are drafting a programme for a new government in the hope of
ending almost 10 weeks of political stalemate, but are still seeking someone to
lead it.
To address
concerns that their pledges to raise welfare spending and cut taxes will
undermine the economic stability of the heavily indebted country, 5-Star leader
Luigi Di Maio said the administration would not be a threat to Europe.
Di Maio met
with League leader Matteo Salvini for a second consecutive day, and afterward
they signalled there had been progress on policy, but still offered no names
for the top job.
Asked about
the premiership, Salvini told reporters: “When we have something to say, we’ll
say it.”
The two
party leaders will meet again in Milan on Saturday, and a 5-Star source said
the aim was to offer a candidate to President Sergio Mattarella on Sunday.
Vincenzo
Spadafora, a close aide to Di Maio, said the two parties were looking for
someone outside both parties who “has a high profile and is trusted by Italian
citizens and Italy’s international partners”.
Di Maio insisted after the March 4 election that he should be the next prime minister, but dropped this demand last week to help clinch a deal with the League.
5-Star won 32 percent of the vote, making it the largest party in parliament, while the League got 17 percent to become the second-largest. Salvini said weeks ago he would not insist on leading any government his group was a part of.
The parties said meetings to agree a programme to cut taxes, hike welfare payments and bolster efforts to stop irregular immigration had made progress.
More
In other news, Mexico
just got cyber hacked, but by whom? America’s NSA to pay for Trump’s wall? The
Russians? The Ukrainian mafia?
May 12, 2018 / 12:47 AM
'Unauthorized transfers' siphon funds from Mexican banks: central bank
MEXICO CITY
(Reuters) - An as yet unknown amount of funds were sucked out of at least five
Mexican financial groups through “unauthorized transfers” in recent days, a top
central bank official said on Friday, while stopping short of calling it a
cyber attack.
Lorenza
Martinez, head of Banxico’s payment system, told Reuters that it was still
unclear how much money had been fraudulently transferred and she refrained from
naming the affected institutions, which could include banks and brokers.
“These
unauthorized transfers were originated in the system that connects the
institutions to the payment system,” Martinez said in a telephone interview,
noting that banks had to migrate to an alternate, slower technology to process
payments.
Slow
interbank transfers since the end of April and terse statements by authorities
have fed concerns in social media that Latin America’s second biggest economy
could be the latest victim of cyber attacks that have hit central banks and
financial groups around the world.
Martinez
said that the central bank’s SPEI interbank transfer system was not compromised
but that the problem had to do with software developed by institutions or
third-party providers to connect to the payment system.
Mexico’s
SPEI system is a domestic network similar to the SWIFT global messaging system
that moves trillions of dollars each day.
Hackers have
used SWIFT connections to target banks around the world, but the Brussels-based
company has not disclosed the number of attacks.
Martinez
refrained from calling the incidents in Mexico a cyber attack. “At this time,
we cannot reject any hypothesis,” she said. “It was something done on purpose,
but how it was done, we are in the process of finding out.”
Martinez
said that no clients had been affected since the transfers hit accounts of
financial institutions in the central bank.
The funds
had been wired to accounts that appeared to be false, she said.
Local banks
were carrying out their own investigations with security experts and were in
the process of filing charges with authorities after the incident that also
involved cash withdrawals from the bogus accounts, she said.
More
Finally, modern
technology’s latest Trojan Horse. If researchers can do it in the lab, “five
eyes” and Russian, Chinese, and Israeli spooks can do it too. How did that
incriminating evidence get on your computer?
Technological
progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t.
Researchers can now send secret audio instructions
undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s
Assistant.
May 10, 2018
BERKELEY, Calif. — Many people have grown accustomed to
talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set
an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.
Over the last two years, researchers in China and the
United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that
are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s
Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly
activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers,
making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the
technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money
or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.
A group of students from University of California,
Berkeley, and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide
commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to
get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.
This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a
research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly
into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears
someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an
instruction to add something to your shopping list.
We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,”
said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C.
Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors.
[Read more on what Alexa can hear when
brought into your home]
Mr. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that
these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before
someone starts exploiting them. “My assumption is that the malicious people
already employ people to do what I do,” he said.
These
deceptions illustrate how artificial intelligence — even as it is making great
strides — can still be tricked and manipulated. Computers can be fooled into
identifying an airplane as a cat just by changing a few pixels of a digital
image, while researchers can make a self-driving car swerve or speed up simply
by pasting small stickers on road signs and confusing the vehicle’s computer
vision system.
----Courts have ruled that subliminal messages may
constitute an invasion of privacy, but the law has not extended the concept of
privacy to machines.
Now the technology is racing even further ahead of the
law. Last year, researchers at Princeton University and China’s Zhejiang
University demonstrated that voice-recognition systems could be activated by
using frequencies inaudible to the human ear. The attack first muted the phone
so the owner wouldn’t hear the system’s responses, either.
The technique, which the Chinese researchers called
DolphinAttack, can instruct smart devices to visit malicious websites, initiate
phone calls, take a picture or send text messages. While DolphinAttack has its
limitations — the transmitter must be close to the receiving device — experts
warned that more powerful ultrasonic systems were possible.
That warning was borne out in April, when researchers at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated ultrasound attacks
from 25 feet away. While the commands couldn’t penetrate walls, they could
control smart devices through open windows from outside a building.
This year, another group of Chinese and American
researchers from China’s Academy of Sciences and other institutions,
demonstrated they could control voice-activated devices with commands embedded in
songs that can be broadcast over the radio or played on services like
YouTube.
More
It has
become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April.
DJIA: 24,163 +255 Down. NASDAQ:
7,066 +282 Down. SP500: 2,648 +188 Down.
All
three slow indicators moved down in March and continued down in April. For some
a new bear signal, for others a take profits and get back to cash signal.
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