A SOFTWARE ENGINEER who used to work at IBM has pleaded guilty to economic espionage and theft of trade secrets after admitting stealing proprietary software code belonging to the firm. Jiaqiang Xu pleaded guilty in a court in White Plains, New York. He had been employed by IBM in China for four years from 2010 until May 2014.The code, according to Reuters, relates to IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), a high-performance clustered file system that runs on IBM’s AIX Unix (since 1998), Linux (since 2001) and Windows (since 2008), and is widely used in supercomputing.Xu was picked up by undercover officers in White Plains, where he was recorded offering software based on the stolen code. The FBI was tipped off after it received reports, according to the South China Morning Post, that someone in China ”was claiming to have access to the code and using it for business ventures”.The case bears some similarities to a trade secrets case in Taiwan involving semiconductor company TSMC. Earlier this year it accused a departing member of staff of copying documents in order to take to a new employer, Shanghai Hueli Microelectronics (HLMC), on mainland China.

Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] said on Tuesday it underpaid its New York City drivers for the past two-and-a-half years, an error that could cost the ride-hailing company tens of millions of dollars.Uber generally takes a commission from its drivers after deducting taxes and some fees, but it instead took a higher percentage from its New York City drivers using the full fare before accounting for sales taxes and fees, according to the Wall Street Journal, whoch first reported the news. on.wsj.com/2rPJOUkUber usually takes a 25 percent commission from U.S. drivers under a November 2014 nationwide driver agreement, the report said.The company could pay drivers back at least $45 million, averaging at about $900 per driver, the Journal reported.”We are committed to paying every driver every penny they are owed – plus interest – as quickly as possible,” Rachel Holt, Uber’s regional general manager for U.S. and Canada, said via email.

Apple has hired its first head of diversity.Longtime Apple employee Denise Young Smith has taken on a new role as vice president of inclusion and diversity. The company hasn’t had someone heading up those efforts since Jeffrey Siminoff left the company to join Twitter in 2015. He had been director of inclusion and diversity since 2013.Smith, who has been at Apple since 1997, will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, a source familiar with the company told CNNTech.The news of Smith’s new position was first reported by 9 to 5 Mac. Smith, who started in her new role on Monday, had already updated her LinkedIn page with her new title.

Google has tried to restrict reporting on a high-stakes gender discrimination case brought by the US government and fought to have the case thrown out of court because of a federal attorney’s comments to a reporter.Court documents reveal that Google unsuccessfully argued that a judge should dismiss a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Labor (DoL), claiming that a government attorney may have violated ethics rules by doing an interview with the Guardian on 7 April.Google accused of ’extreme’ gender pay discrimination by US labor department Read moreThe DoL has accused Google of systematically underpaying women, and the court battle centers on the company’s refusal to hand over salary data the government has requested.

EU antitrust regulators will rule in the ”next few months” whether Alphabet’s Google abused its dominance of internet searches and other areas, a senior European Commission official said on Monday, an outcome that could lead to a hefty fine.The world’s most popular internet search engine has been in the Commission’s crosshairs since 2010 over the promotion of its own shopping service in internet searches at the expense of the services of rivals.The EU competition enforcer opened a second front against Google last year as it charged the company with using its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals.It has since leveled a third charge, that of blocking rivals in online search advertising. This relates to Google’s ”AdSense for Search” platform, in whoch Google acts as an intermediary for websites such as online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers. These searches produce results that include search ads.

United Nations experts investigating violations of sanctions on North Korea have suffered a ”sustained” cyber attack by unknown hackers with ”very detailed insight” into their work, according to an email warning seen by Reuters on Monday.The hackers eventually breached the computer of one of the experts on May 8, the chair of the panel of experts wrote in an email to U.N. officials and the U.N. Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee, known as the 1718 committee.”The zip file was sent with a highly personalized message whoch shows the hackers have very detailed insight into the panel’s current investigations structure and working methods,” read the email, whoch was sent on May 8.”As a number of 1718 committee members were targeted in a similar fashion in 2016, I am writing to you all to alert you to this heightened risk,” the chair of the panel of experts wrote, describing the attack as part of a ”sustained cyber campaign.”