EC fines eight disc drive suppliers over cartel conduct

The European Commission has handed €116 million ($182.8 million) in fines to eight major optical disc drive suppliers, including Sony and Lite-On, for allegedly involving in cartel behaviour in breach of EU antitrust rules.

An investigation by the commission found that eight suppliers of CD, DVD and Blu-Ray drives had colluded in procurement tenders for supplying drives to laptop and desktop PCs from Dell and HP.

The suppliers covered by the ruling were Philips, Lite-On, their joint venture Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, Sony, Sony Optiarc and Quanta Storage.

These companies are alleged to have communicated their bidding strategies and shared results of procurement tenders between June 2004 and November 2008, with the intention of avoiding aggressive competition in tender processes.

The EC said the companies were aware that this behaviour was illegal and tried to conceal their activities to avoid detection by taking steps including not referring to company names in internal correspondence and favouring face-to-face meetings over electronic communications.

Philips, Lite-On and their JV were granted full immunity from fines because they revealed the existence of the cartel.

Toshiba Samsung has been handed the largest fine of €41.3 million, Hitachi-LG was fined €37.1 million, Sony was hit for €21 million, Sony Optiarc was fined €9.8 million and Quanta storage will have to pay €7.1 million.

The variation in the size of the fines is due to factors including some companies participating in the cartel for a shorter length of time, and the fact that Philips, Sony and Sony Optiarc only took part in the behaviour over procurement tenders from Dell.

Google steps up full disk encryption requirements

Google has tweaked the requirements for Android 6.0 devices to require those devices meeting hardware and other standards to support full disk encryption and secure boot functionality.

The new requirement specifications for devices running Android 6.0 stipulate that if a device has a lock screen and has more than 512 MB of RAM, it must support full disk encryption.

Full disk encryption must be applied to both the application private data petition and the shared storage petition, if this is a non-removable part of the device.

Devices supporting full-disk encryption above a certain AES crypto performance standard must have this enabled out of the box, instead of as an option. They must also support the verified boot feature, which is designed to verify the integrity of the software loaded during the Android boot-up phase every time the device is switched on.

The guidelines also stipulate that encryption must use AES with a key of 128 bits or greater. The encryption key can’t be written to storage at any time without itself being encrypted, and must not be sent off the device.

Apple’s encryption capabilities have been a key point of differentiation in the smartphone battle being waged between Android and iOS devices. Google’s move appears to be aimed at helping bridge this gap.

Image courtesy of Beth Cortez-Neavel under CC