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Daily Cuppa: Cisco boom, Oracle pays, Assange gets asylum

Cisco reported better-than-expected earnings, Oracle coughed up for an Indian slush fund, Julian Assange got diplomatic asylum and RIM's CEO spoke to ZDNet.
Written by Josh Taylor, Contributor

It's Friday, you made it and we've got the latest on Cisco, Oracle, RIM, Fujitsu and Julian Assange to catch you up on what happened overnight.

Cisco has reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings of US$1.9 billion, bringing the company's total 2012 earnings to US$8 billion. According to Cisco, it is poised to capitalise on cloud computing, video traffic and mobility.

RIM's CEO Thorsten Heins sat down with ZDNet's global editor Larry Dignan to talk about the company's plans for BlackBerry 10.

Oracle will pay US$2 million in fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Oracle opted to settle the case after the SEC alleged that employees based in Oracle's Indian offices structured transactions with the government to allow distributors to hold US$2.2 million in what was called "unauthorised side funds". Distributors then paid local vendors, which didn't provide anything to Oracle, and those payments were hidden by fake invoices.

IBM has bought solid-state storage company Texas Memory Systems for an undisclosed amount. IBM has said that it will try to integrate some of Texas Memory System's flash technology into its hardware products, such as Smarter Storage.

The big news overnight was that Ecuador has granted Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange diplomatic asylum. Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past two months, after his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual coercion allegations failed. Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patiño said that if Assange were to be sent to Sweden, he would face the risk of being deported to the US and is unlikely to get a fair trial for the leaking of diplomatic cables back in 2010.

The situation will no doubt be pretty tense over the next few days. The UK has indicated that it is still planning to try to extradite Assange to Sweden, and has even pointed out that it has the power to enter the embassy to extract Assange, though it has not yet indicated whether it will do this.

And finally, as Facebook's share prices reach an all-time low, Germany's data-protection agency wants Facebook to either delete all of the facial-recognition data it has, or at least seek consent from users before keeping it.

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