Saab lives!

GM has found a buyer for Saab, it's going to a Dutch exotic car maker backed by Russian (mob?) money.

"General Motors said today that it has struck a preliminary deal to sell Saab to Spyker Cars, a tiny Dutch maker of high-end sports cars, saving the Swedish automaker from what seemed like certain extinction after previous bids for it collapsed. A previous bid from Spyker was rejected by GM in late December because GM was uncomfortable with Spyker's Russian backers. The biggest investor in Spyker is the Russian bank Convers Group, which is controlled by Alexander Antonov. In March, Mr. Antonov was shot seven times and reportedly lost a finger in an attempt on his life in Moscow. No arrests have been made. His son Vladimir, 34, is a top executive at Convers and the chairman of Spyker." GM is taking a bath on the deal, financially speaking.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/01/26/2315256/GM-Is-Selling-Saab-To-Spyker-Cars?art_pos=13

Saab had an amazing list of innovations that they pioneered, I'm glad to see them continuing.

EDIT: after reading more on the deal, the sale is contingent on, among other things, Antonov being bought out and leaving the board of Saab. Convers Group will have nothing to do with the new company.

Evidence weakens that China was behind the most recent cyberattacks

click2005 notes a an article in The Register calling into question the one piece of hard evidence that has been put forward to pin the Google cyberattacks on China. It was claimed that a CRC algorithm found in the Aurora attack code was particular to Chinese-language developers. Now evidence emerges that this algorithm has been widely known for years and used in English-language books and websites. Wired has a post introducing the Pentagon's recently initiated effort to identify the "digital DNA" of hackers and/or their tools; this program is part of a wide-ranging effort by the US government to find useful means of deterring cyberattacks. This latter NY Times article notes that Google may have found the best deterrence so far — the threat to withdraw its services from the Chinese market.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/26/1818231/Evidence-Weakens-That-China-Did-the-Recent-Cyberattacks?art_pos=20

This is the problem with internationally-coordinated attacks: hard to investigate, even harder to prosecute.