Tomorrow's Newspapers Online. 08-10-2013 | Politics

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins and the company's board is increasingly coming around to the idea that taking BlackBerry private would give them breathing room to fix its problems out of the public eye, the sources said.

"There is a change of tone on the board," one of the sources said on Thursday.

No deal is imminent, however, and BlackBerry has not launched any kind of a sale process, the sources said. Even if it tried, BlackBerry could find it hard to come up with a buyer and the funding to go private. With the company still posting losses and bleeding subscribers, private equity firms and other buyers may not want to step up.

The company's shares have fallen more than 19 percent this year. Its market value has fallen to $4.8 billion, from $84 billion at its peak in 2008.

BlackBerry, which had been pinning its hopes for a turnaround on its new line of BlackBerry 10 devices, declined to comment. The sources declined to be named because these discussions are private.

BlackBerry's openness to consider a deal marks a radical shift in thinking at the once high-flying smartphone maker. Until recently, BlackBerry, formerly known as Research in Motion and a pioneer in providing secured emails on handheld devices, had been bent on staying independent, betting its turnaround on its latest smartphones.

Last month, Heins said the company was on the right track and just needed more time to fix its problems. He said the company will unveil more devices that run on the BlackBerry 10 operating system over the next eight months.

The company has also been looking at options such as licensing its BlackBerry 10 software and other partnerships.

Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry has recently had discussions with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners about potential collaboration in enterprise computing, one of the sources said.

Silver Lake is caught in a bruising $25 billion battle to take Dell Inc (DELL.O) private. Should it succeed in the Dell buyout, one possibility could be for it to collaborate with BlackBerry in mobile computing, where the PC maker has struggled to gain traction, the source said.

Texas-based Lavabit service has shut down but said legal reasons prevented it explaining why.

Correspondents say Lavabit appears to have been in a legal battle to stop US officials accessing customer details.

In addition, secure communications firm Silent Circle has shut its email service because messages cannot be kept wholly secret.

Web watchers

Mr Snowden, a former contractor to the American National Security Agency (NSA), has admitted leaking information about widespread US surveillance on electronic communications to the media.

He fled the US - where he now faces espionage charges - and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.

Lavabit came under scrutiny following reports that Mr Snowden was using the service while holed-up in Moscow airport.

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," Mr Levison wrote in a letter posted on the Lavabit website.

He said he had decided to "suspend operations" but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.

"This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States," he wrote.

Silent Circle said it shut down its email service for both technical and political reasons. "Email as we know it... cannot be secure," wrote Jon Callas, co-founder and head of technology officer at Silent Circle, in a blogpost. "Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has."

By contrast, he said, the firm was keeping its secure voice and text services going because it had control over the infrastructure supporting them and could guarantee that messages were not intercepted or tampered with en route.

In addition, said Mr Callas, it was anticipation of future government calls to hand over customer details that prompted the Silent Mail shutdown.

"We see the writing (on) the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now," he said. "We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.

Last month Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to fix the price of e-books bought via iTunes.

It was ordered to terminate deals with five major companies and allow other e-book retailers to sell to iPad and iPhone users for the next two years.

The publishers say they are being punished by the restrictions.

Under agreements put in place between Apple and companies including Hatchett and Macmillan, electronic book price-fixing took place, creating unfair competition for other retailers, the court ruled last month.

At the time most of the publishers reached separate settlements totalling more than $150m (£96m) but Apple said it would fight the "false allegations".

According to the Associated Press news agency, the publishers' complaint says: "The provisions do not impose any limitation on Apple's pricing behaviour at all.

"Rather, under the guise of punishing Apple, they effectively punish [publishers that settled in the case]."

Garner analyst Van Baker told AP that the ruling seemed "heavy-handed".

"It is basically putting a stake through a portion of Apple's business, and I confess to being surprised by that," he said.

"The Department of State ordered this drawdown due to specific threats concerning the U.S. consulate in Lahore," said a travel warning posted on the Department of State's website on Thursday.

The warning in Lahore, near Pakistan's border with India, comes two days after Washington evacuated some diplomats from Yemen and told its nationals to leave that country immediately.

The United States shut nearly two dozen missions across the Middle East after a worldwide alert on August 2, warning Americans that al Qaeda may be planning attacks in August, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.

Still, a U.S. embassy spokeswoman said the closure was due to a specific threat to Lahore. A U.S. national security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Pakistan threat was unconnected to the one that closed other embassies.

The U.S. embassy spokeswoman said it was unclear when the consulate would reopen. Tensions have also risen this week with Pakistan's neighbor India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

A cosmopolitan city dominated by an ancient Mughal fort, Lahore is Pakistan's cultural capital but has also suffered from attacks by militant groups.

A bomb killed five people and wounded dozens on a restaurant-lined street, popular with tourists, in Lahore last month. Attacks have gone up since the landslide election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in May elections.

The Lahore warning noted that "several foreign and indigenous terrorist groups pose a potential danger to U.S. citizens throughout Pakistan".

Pakistan is home to a number of militant groups, including al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other sectarian groups.

The U.S. State Department initially announced the wider embassy closures would be only for last Sunday, then extended the closures of some by a week and added Burundi, Rwanda and Mauritius to the closure list.

A number of the missions would have been closed anyway for most of the week due to the Eid celebration at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the State Department said.

Yemen, one of the poorest Arab countries, is the base for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active branches of the network founded by Osama bin Laden. Militants have launched attacks from there against the West.

Idan Aharoni, the head of cyber intelligence at EMC Corp's RSA security division, said that some online scam artists and thieves are using Perfect Money's digital currency to launder money and conceal profits in much the same way they allegedly did with Liberty Reserve's currency.

On behalf of their clients, which include major financial institutions, Aharoni and his team monitor Internet forums that hackers use to sell stolen credit card information. After Liberty Reserve was taken down in May, activity on these forums initially slowed and then picked up again, with some hackers saying they would accept Perfect Money for payments, he said.

"We expected a large migration to another e-currency, and that has happened," said Aharoni, whose RSA unit sells security services to 30,000 corporations and government agencies, including the popular Secure ID tokens that protect access to computer systems.

Perfect Money, which has been in operation since at least 2007, could not be reached for comment. A request submitted through its website failed to elicit a response, and the company does not list a phone number for its offices or identify any management or employees.

Reuters could not determine who owns Perfect Money. Its website says it is based in Panama, but the Panamanian government said in a statement in January that Perfect Money does not have offices in the country and has not been issued any licenses by securities regulators to operate there.

Law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world have expressed concerns that digital currencies, which are not tied to any particular government, are emerging as vehicles for hackers, cyber criminals and drug dealers to launder money.

Currencies like Perfect Money are governed by a single company or entity that administers the transfer of units between customers. Once a user obtains an account, he or she can transfer Perfect Money units to other users inside the system. These units can be redeemed for cash or bank credit by third-party exchange services, which are separate businesses not under control of the currency's operator.

The three-judge panel questioned whether Apple should or could be required to prove that one feature of a product such as a smart phone is the driver of consumer demand for that product.

The Federal Circuit last year rejected Apple's request for a pretrial sales ban against Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone.

Many of the protesters were left-leaning and middle-class youth who voted for Humala two years ago, but now they say he and other political leaders are dangerously out of touch.

A former military officer and one-time nationalist radical, Humala has pledged to ensure more Peruvians benefit from growth rates of around 6 percent a year, record reserves and solid fiscal surpluses.

Humala has largely pleased investors by continuing free-market policies, but detractors say he has not made much progress on the "great transformation" he once promised.

With a quarter of Peruvians living in poverty, and crime and corruption still widespread, Humala's approval ratings have slumped.

The street protests peaked with a rally of around 8,000 at the end of July. They were small compared to other protest movements in Latin America, but the biggest in Lima since 2000, when demonstrators took to the streets against President Alberto Fujimori. He was forced from power that same year and is in prison for corruption and human rights violations.

The recent protests spilled over from social media and into the streets last month after lawmakers in Humala's party were caught on tape negotiating controversial appointments for judges and a human rights ombudsman in an under-the-table deal with other major parties.

While recent demonstrations were directed against all of Peru's political class, they highlighted Humala's political isolation as he struggles to push through education, health, policing and civil service reforms. The government is clearly concerned.

"If the political class in power does not change, this could become massive and the government is aware of that," a senior figure inside the Humala administration told Reuters.

The source, who declined to be named, said the prime minister has been meeting with youth leaders to calm the "crisis of representation."

"We are going to act very carefully so that the work of the government and of Congress is in tune with them," he said.

HUMALA LOSING SUPPORT

Humala had a 65 percent approval rating shortly after taking office two years ago, but a recent Ipsos poll showed it had fallen to 33 percent. He had to shuffle his Cabinet twice after anti-mining protests in rural areas, although he is more popular than two former presidents at a similar time in office.

Using lab-based synthetic biology, experiments in bacterial evolution, and mathematical modelling the study finds links between organisms and markets.

Bacterial investment crashes and boom-bust cycles are described in a paper in the journal Ecology Letters.

The study is the clearest experimental test of a 50-year-old theory relating trade-offs to competitive success. The evolutionary successes of bacteria are plain to see as they are found across the globe, but bacteria may also have something to say about investment success more generally.

A research group from the UK and Australia used strains of the bacterium E. coli that were constrained in the amount of resource that they had for growth, but that were also subjected to varying degrees of biological stress.

Different strains of E. coli developed covering a range of ability to cope with stress and invest in growth.

Petri dish as trading floor Externally imposed "market conditions", represented by changing salt and acid contents of their environment, influenced the outcome of the "investment decisions" made by each bacterium, with success rewarded by survival, and failure leading to extinction.

The consequences of the trade-offs between development of stress-resistance, which involves the acquisition of costly proteins, or increasing consumption to grow were recorded in the evolution of the genetic codes of the successful bacterial strains. The observations were used to test and validate mathematical models of bacterial investment booms and crashes.

Dr Ivana Gudelj from the University of Exeter was one of the authors of the study, and said: "We have shown that very different investment opportunities can require different investment strategies.

"These strategies are constrained by the subtleties in trade-offs that are usually invisible or ignored in real markets. The study is a classic demonstration of Darwinian economics and survival of the fittest."

Evolutionary niche

Almost half a century ago Richard Levins first suggested that trade-offs in organisms' investment decisions lead to them exploiting different niches, and this concept may apply both in biological ecology and in financial markets, but it has not previously been demonstrated as clearly by experimental observations.

The requirement covers recording and sharing of gameplay videos, making Skype video calls and using a service that finds gaming opponents.

An Xbox Live Gold account that currently costs $60 (£40) will be needed for all these features.

Sony PlayStation 4 owners will also have to pay for some online services.

Microsoft revealed the requirement in an update to webpages detailing the Xbox One's features.

The webpage shows that, as with the current Xbox 360, a Live Gold account is needed if owners want to use their new console for online multiplayer gaming, watch Netflix or similar streaming services and to browse the web via their TV.

In addition, on the Xbox One the annual subscription will let players share videos with friends. The console records a rolling sample of a player's previous five minutes gameplay to make it easier to share key moments.

The payment will also let owners chat to friends via video on Skype and use the OneGuide and SmartMatch services.

OneGuide analyses what Xbox One owners usually watch and recommends TV shows and YouTube content to match. The SmartMatch service links players with other gamers of a similar ability to ensure they are not outclassed in multiplayer matches.

It may have been coincidence that the Kremlin released details of the telegram a day after Barack Obama pulled out of a planned summit with Putin, but little is left to chance in Russian politics.

The warm words to the man who once said he looked Putin in the eye and got a "sense of his soul" highlighted how different the relationship is between the leaders in the Kremlin and the White House now.

Bush described Putin years later as cold blooded, and ties soured over the war between Russia and Georgia which began five years ago this week, but there was respect and camaraderie on display when they first met as presidents in June 2001.

At Obama's most recent meeting with Putin during a G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June, the Russian president scowled, lectured and fidgeted. At times he glowered.

Would a better relationship with Putin have made Obama take a different decision on attending the September talks in Moscow? Perhaps not, but a stronger rapport might have helped them avoid a situation where such a decision was even considered.

"Sometimes, at times of crisis, when diplomats fail to reach a compromise, personal relationships can be important, as a last resort ... There is a lack of personal chemistry between Obama and Putin," said Maria Lipman, a Russian analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center think tank.

BAD START AT PUTIN'S DACHA

Bush's good start with Putin at talks in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, followed four months later by a meeting at Bush's Texas ranch, stands in contrast to the difficult beginning of the Obama-Putin relationship.

When Obama came to Russia in July 2009, Putin was prime minister but still the dominant figure in Russia under the presidency of his protege Dmitry Medvedev, and the former KGB spy invited Obama to his dacha, or country house.

"We may not end up agreeing on everything, but I think that we can have a tone of mutual respect and consultation that will serve both the American people and the Russian people well," Obama told Putin.

Diplomatic sources said that despite this, Putin went on to give Obama a political lecture and they failed to break the ice. Russian officials, however, say Obama was frosty and has always been high-handed.

But hey, it's getting a new logo!

Yahoo announced Wednesday that it will unveil a new corporate logo September 4 -- the first such change since the company was founded 18 years ago. The new look will retain the current purple color scheme and, yes, its trademark exclamation point. Yodel away, Yahoo fans.

"Over the past year, there's been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at Yahoo!, and we want everything we do to reflect this spirit of innovation," Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt wrote in a blog post. "While the company is rapidly evolving, our logo — the essence of our brand — should too."

To build some buzz around the new logo, the Internet company will display a different variation of the logo on its homepage and throughout its network in the United States for each of the next 30 days. The first example, shown above, opts for a more streamlined look, although the second "O" is larger than the first, reflecting -- in Yahoo's words -- the company's " fun, vibrant, and welcoming" character.

The variations on the new logo -- this video clip offers a potential preview -- also will be showcased each day on Yahoo's Twitter account (#dailylogo). Why the interest in Yahoo CEO?

Mayer has been working to reinvent the struggling Yahoo since she took over leadership of the company in July of last year. In the past 12 months Yahoo has bought more than 16 startups, including the popular Tumblr blogging platform, and reinvigorated its older brands such as photo site Flickr.

Under her reign, Yahoo's stock price has climbed from $15 to almost $30 (it's currently at $27), although some analysts remain skeptical about the company's long-term fortunes.

But the customer growth came at the cost of heavy spending on marketing, which weighed on its financial results. Its parent company, Deutsche Telekom AG, which owns 74 percent of T-Mobile US, said it would plow more money into the No. 4 U.S. mobile provider to help it continue to grow.

T-Mobile US on Thursday said it added a net 688,000 contract customers in the second quarter, including wireless broadband customers and phone users, well ahead of an average forecast of 140,000 from four analysts, whose estimates ranged from 33,000 to 254,000.

Bigger rival AT&T Inc added just over 550,000 subscribers in the quarter, while Sprint Corp lost 1.045 million contract customers as it shut down its Nextel network.

T-Mobile US Chief Executive John Legere told CNBC that his company's growth was helped by customer defections from AT&T. In its marketing, T-Mobile US often compares its prices and policies to those of AT&T.

"We're taking customers from AT&T at a ratio of two to one," Legere said in the television interview. "They're in complete fight-back mode, and I find it more humorous every day."

AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011 but the deal was blocked by U.S. regulators. Since then the companies have been competing with each more viciously than ever.

While New Street analyst Jonathan Chaplin was impressed with T-Mobile US' customer growth, he questioned whether it would be able to keep up the pace.

"The question remains as to whether TMUS can sustain the performance in postpaid as the iPhone buzz fades and competitive intensity rises," Chaplin said in a research note.

Customer growth helped boost the company's revenue, but T-Mobile US had to spend heavily on marketing to attract new users.

The company, which merged with smaller rival MetroPCS in April, said that including MetroPCS, adjusted second-quarter earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) dropped 30 percent from a year earlier to $1.3 billion.

Chaplin said he had expected $1.33 billion.

T-Mobile US, which last recorded subscriber growth in the first quarter of 2009, set a target for 2013 net subscriber additions of between 1 million and 1.2 million.

Citi analyst Michael Rollins said that target suggests a slowdown in growth from the second quarter.