IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 23 September
23-09-2010
by Sylvia Leatham
Zara to take online orders from Ireland | Australian teen admits exposing Twitter flaw
The Irish Times reports that an Irish-registered holding company for US software firm Adobe last year was used to book USD599.5 million or 85 percent of Adobe's global pretax profits for 2009. Adobe Software Trading also accounted for 59 percent of the firm's worldwide revenues of USD2.94 billion. It paid a dividend of USD700 million to its Californian-based parent last year. Adobe Software Trading's pretax profits dropped by 19 percent to USD599.5 million last year, while revenues fell to USD1.6 billion. Adobe Software Trading is the intermediary holding company for Adobe's subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific regions.
The Irish Independent reports on the launch of the 2010 Silver Surfer Awards at the Science Gallery by Age Action and mobile network Three. Last year's winner, 96-year-old Marguerite Faulkner called upon other older citizens to follow her lead in surfing the internet. Faulkner began using the internet eight years ago. "As long as your mind is active, I think you should try and avail yourself of every opportunity that is there for you," she said. The pensioner, from Cookstown, Tyrone, uses the web to talk to her seven grandchildren via Skype and to search for information on books and art.
The paper also says that Spanish clothing retailer Zara plans to start selling clothes in Ireland over the internet within months. Inditex, the owner of the store, said it was satisfied with the response to its initial launch of Zara online sales earlier this month, saying it would extend the offer to Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The company already sells in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the UK.
The Irish Examiner reports that a 17-year-old Australian schoolboy has admitted exposing a security flaw in Twitter which led to a massive attack on the site earlier this week. Pearce Delphin, whose Twitter name is @zzap, said he tweeted a piece of "mouseover" JavaScript code which brings up a pop-up window when the user hovers their cursor over the message. The idea was soon taken up by hackers who tweaked the code to redirect users to pornographic sites and create worm tweets that replicated every time they were read. "I did it merely to see if it could be done... that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet," said Delphin.
The Financial Times reports that Google is taking legal action in an attempt to stop rogue pharmacies advertising on its sites. The search giant filed a suit in a US federal court on Tuesday against advertisers which Google says have broken its rules, in an open-ended action which will expand as it catches more offenders. "Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google," said Michael Zwibelman, litigation counsel at Google. "Rogue pharmacies are bad for our users, for legitimate online pharmacies and for the entire e-commerce industry -- so we are going to keep investing time and money to stop these kinds of harmful practices."
The paper also says that Microsoft is to increase its dividend by 23 percent over the previous quarter and will authorise up to USD6 billion in additional debt. The move could appease shareholders who are keen to see the software company return cash to investors. The USD0.16 per share dividend is payable 9 December and represents a USD0.03 rise over the previous quarterly dividend. "This higher dividend, combined with our ongoing share repurchase program, reflects our commitment to returning capital to our shareholders and our confidence in the long-term growth of the company," said Peter Klein, chief financial officer of Microsoft.
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