July 2013

[Commentary] AT&T and T-Mobile have recently announced plans that let people upgrade their phones more often. But before you get too excited, you need to do the math.

With both the new T-Mobile and AT&T deals, it's possible to get a new phone sooner -- as soon as six months with T-Mobile and a year with AT&T -- and you might not have to sign a two-year service agreement. But you're still on the hook for monthly payments that could wind up costing you as much as or more than you're paying now. In the old model of paying a subsidized price, you actually get to keep your phone, which means you can give it to someone or sell it. But to find out the real price of any phone, you have to include the service costs, and that's where it gets even more complicated. It may take you several hours on the Web or on the phone to figure out your best deal. But considering the amount of money at stake over a two-year period, it's worth the effort.

The Obama Administration has weighed whether to back tax breaks, insurance perks and other legal benefits for businesses that make meaningful improvements to their digital defenses.

Those incentives — considered in May and not yet final — would aim to entice power plants, water systems and other forms of critical infrastructure to adopt the voluntary cybersecurity standards that the government and industry are drafting in response to President Barack Obama’s executive order. The Department of Homeland Security first raised the ideas in a May 21 presentation, labeled “preliminary,” and an Obama Administration official cautioned that the presentation is a “snapshot in time” — and that it only “reflects some preliminary analysis.” Still, businesses could find much to like in the proposed perks. They include limited protections from legal liability, for example, and new tax incentives for companies — presumably for demonstrating good cyber behavior. But many of the incentives suggested in the presentation could require action by Congress, which failed repeatedly to approve any cybersecurity legislation last year.

Angela Merkel and her ministers claim they first learned about the US government's comprehensive spying programs from press reports. But Spiegel has learned that German intelligence services themselves use one of the NSA's most valuable tools.

Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and its domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), used a spying program of the American National Security Agency (NSA). This is evident in secret documents from the US intelligence service that have been seen by SPIEGEL journalists. The documents show that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was equipped with a program called XKeyScore intended to "expand their ability to support NSA as we jointly prosecute CT (counterterrorism) targets." The BND is tasked with instructing the domestic intelligence agency on how to use the program, the documents say.

After a year of setbacks, French conglomerate Vivendi is nearing a pair of milestones in its effort to pay down towering debt and refashion itself as a smaller—and more handsomely valued—media company.

Vivendi is expected to discuss plans aimed at extracting more than $3 billion from its cash-rich Activision Blizzard videogame subsidiary through a special dividend, according to people familiar with the matter. The Vivendi board may push to have the U.S.-based unit approve the dividend at its own board meeting later this week, these people said. Vivendi's board also is slated to discuss advancing negotiations to sell its controlling stake in North African phone operator Maroc Telecom for about $5.5 billion, plus debt, to Emirates Telecommunications Corp., according to some of those people and others familiar with the discussions. Those deals—if pulled off—would put Vivendi in a position to begin a much-bigger transformation pushed by the company's 74-year-old chairman, Jean-René Fourtou: a plan to spin off French phone operator SFR, Vivendi's biggest unit by revenue.