IBM today unveiled IBM z16, IBM's next-generation system with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator—delivering latency-optimized inferencing. This innovation is designed to enable clients to analyze real-time transactions, at scale -- for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions. Building on IBM's history of security leadership, IBM z16 also is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today's encryption technologies.

IBM innovations, including the IBM z16, have formed the technology backbone of the global economy for decades. Today's modern IBM mainframe is central to hybrid cloud environments, valued by two thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, 8 of the top 10 insurers, 7 of the top 10 global retailers and 8 out of the top 10 telcos as a highly secured platform for running their most mission critical workloads. For example, according to a recent IBM commissioned study by Celent "Operationalizing Fraud Prevention on IBM Z," IBM zSystems run 70% of global transactions, on a value basis. "IBM is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission critical data lives," said Ric Lewis, SVP, IBM Systems. "This opens up tremendous opportunities to change the game in their respective industries so they will be positioned to deliver better customer experiences and more powerful business outcomes.

Newegg (owned by Beijing-based Hangzhou Liaison Interactive Information Technology) has been sued by a conglomerate of South Korean banks. The plaintiffs claim that the Southern California computer parts retailer has aided, abetted, and profited from enabling a Ponzi Scheme to take place with its products orders. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that Newegg and ASI Corp., a South Korean computer wholesaler, made fraudulent orders from Korean hardware manufacturer Moneual, whose chief executive, Hong-seok Park, was sentenced in 2015 to 23 years in prison for financial fraud, and additionally subject to fines and forfeitures.

Newegg and ASI took part on the whole scheme by creating non-existent, exaggerated-pricing (sometimes 300x higher than market value) orders for Moneual products, thus allowing it to gain a higher valuation from investors. By inflating sales figures, the suit alleges that Moneual was able to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from South Korean banks. As a reward, Newegg and ASI received kickbacks from Moneual.

Amazon inventory of AMD's Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 processors seem to be suffering from RMA fraud, if several reddit reports and a general article from WCCFtech are to be believed. The RMA fraud appears to consist of a scheme in which an unknown party has been buying up quantities of Ryzen 7 or 5 series CPUs, and RMAing them back to Amazon with a fake CPU inside. The fake CPU appears to be an older Intel-based LGA packaged model, ironically.

The RMA gets by because the heatspreader is relabeled with an authentic looking AMD Ryzen label, which is presumably enough to fool a very PC-knowledge limited Amazon RMA check-in employee. This means the product gets sold again as an open-box item, as usually happens with RMAs.

Over-promising and under-delivering with its very first accelerated processing units (APU), codenamed "Llano," is coming back to haunt AMD, with a US District Court ruling that the company must face claims from investors over potential securities fraud. Launched in Q3-2012, AMD's A-series "Llano" APUs went largely unsold due to various factors including lack of product appeal, competition from Intel, forcing AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. The related development first took shape in January 2014.

The swelling unsold "Llano" inventory forced an inventory writedown of $100 million, reducing the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanking the value of the AMD stock. While AMD talked about the concept of an APU for years, Intel was the first to come out with a processor that integrates a graphics processor, with its Core i3 and Core i5 "Clarkdale" processors. The suit claims that AMD misrepresented production of "Llano" chips to its investors despite supply issues from its foundry partner GlobalFoundries, artificially inflating the value of the company in 2011-12. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing resulting in unsold inventory, and in consequence, the $100 million writeoff.

Popular PC cooling products maker Zalman filed for bankruptcy, in midst of a huge controversy by its parent company Moneual. Executives of Moneual cooked-up sales and export figures from Zalman to markets like the United States, in a bid to pick up large fraudulent loans for the company, which it could never pay off, pushing it to bankruptcy.

The controversy came to light, when a whistleblower former-employee of Moneual took these details to the press. It's alleged that CEO Harold Park (Hong-seok), Vice President Scott Park (Min-seok) and Vice President Won Duck-yeok committed a fraud, in which subsidiary Zalman would inflate its sales and export data, to qualify for large bank loans. The trio then used it to lift US $2.92 billion in loans, which the company could never pay back. Zalman has since filed for bankruptcy protection, with the Seoul Central District Court; while the three top Moneual executives, and 13 other mid-level ones, were arrested over allegations of export fraud.

Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH) today published an in-depth analysis of 2011 Facebook attacks within its Internet Threats Trend Report, a year-end synopsis of Internet threats. The report and infographic present a comprehensive analysis of scores of malicious Facebook activities during the past year, as identified by Commtouch Labs. Affiliate marketing sites are the final destination in three-fourths of all Facebook deceptions, according to the report. Visitors to these sites are induced to fill out surveys that generate affiliate payments for the scammers, victimizing legitimate businesses that pay affiliate fees.

Users are induced to click on the scams through social engineering tactics such as free merchandise offers, celebrity news, new (fake) Facebook applications, or simply a trusted friend sending a message stating: "You have to see this!" After users first click on the scams, malware or malicious scripts are to blame for the further spread of slightly over half the analyzed scams, with those falling into three main categories: likejacking, rogue applications, and malware or "self-XSS," each of which is described in the report.

In what's very likely to be the worst technology blunder of the century, the United Kingdom appears to have misplaced the records of 25 million citizens. It all started when Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) decided to send two disks containing the birth records, bank accounts, insurance numbers, and all manner of other important personal information of 25 million citizens to the National Audit Office (NAO). The majority of the 25 million citizens whose information was on the two disks were recipients of Child Benefits. HMRC shipped the information out via post on October 8th, and on November 8th the NAO discovered that they did not have the two disks. While the British government spends their time pointing fingers at each other to properly determine who is at fault (you can read a more descriptive version of the drama via the source link), an American convict-turned-FBI Fraud Investigator is working hard on the case, and suspects foul play.

If you live in the United Kingdom and feel that you may have been affected by this fraud, the government has set up a hotline for you to call. The number is 0845 302 1444.

Gigabyte, a company well known for manufacturing computer components such as motherboards, has lost $5 million due to an internal scandal. A factory manager at Ningbo Gigabyte Technology in China, named Chang Chaosong, listed the company as a guarantor for a bank loan of $5 million towards a third party, meaning that Gigabyte would be held responsible for repaying the loan if the third party did not. As things happened, the third party company (which is not named) did not repay the money, leaving Gigabyte out of pocket. The deal had been carried out by Chaosong without the company's permission, leading to him being fired whilst Gigabyte investigates deeper into the matter. Gigabyte commented that this loss greatly damaged its shareholders' rights and interests and that the company now intends to strengthen its management of human resources to prevent such incidents in future.