The Switchboard: You don’t know Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba
Published every weekday, the Switchboard is your morning helping of hand-picked stories from the Switch team.The Jack Ma Way. David Barboza at the New York Times has a nice profile of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba -- the Chinese e-commerce giant set for an initial public offering later this year. "Alibaba, a company started out of Mr. Ma’s apartment in 1999, is now a technology colossus worth more than American stalwarts like eBay and Hewlett-Packard," Barboza writes. "Under his leadership, Alibaba has become not just the dominant force in China’s e-commerce but also a symbol of the country’s breathtaking economic rise."
The U.S. government's secret plans to spy for American corporations. Over at the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald writes about a 2009 intelligence report that recommends “a multi-pronged, systematic effort to gather open source and proprietary information through overt means, clandestine penetration (through physical and cyber means), and counterintelligence.” The effort would include “cyber operations” to infiltrate “covert centers of innovation” such as R&D facilities.
Apple CEO Tim Cook promises more security options for iCloud. The Post's Hayley Tsukayama reports that Apple is upping some security protocols after the theft of private photos from celebrities last week. "Within the next two weeks, Cook said Apple plans to start alerting users when someone tries to change a password for their iCloud accounts, restore data from device backups stored in iCloud, and when Apple senses that someone is logging into an iCloud account from a new device." Cook also said the company will expand its use of two-factor authentication.
Reddit bans celebrity photo forums after a week of 'Whack-a-Mole.' "Six days after stolen naked photos of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton were posted online, Reddit has now banned the forums that help spread images on its site," reports Liz Gannes at Re/code reports. "The company was careful to say that, even after some delay, it was not changing its policies but rather enforcing existing ones."
The FBI finally says how it ‘legally’ pinpointed Silk Road’s server. Recent filings in the case against alleged online drug market kingpin Ross Ulbricht show how the government was able to identify the location of the servers running the site, reports Andy Greenberg at Wired. "The FBI claims to have found the server’s location without the NSA’s help, simply by fiddling with the Silk Road’s login page until it leaked its true location."
