Corporate Scandal : The Hewlett-Packard Spying Scandal

By: Stevens, Dakota

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that HP's general counsel, at the behest of chairwoman Patricia Dunn, contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak. In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting. The pretexting involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. The information leaked related to HP's long-term strategy and was published as part of a CNET article in January 2006. Most HP employees accused of criminal acts have since been acquitted.
Hewlett-Packard has also been at the center of a fiasco in recent years. In November 2007, Hewlett-Packard released a BIOS update covering a wide range of laptops with the intent to speed up the computer fan as well as have it run constantly, whether the computer was on or off. The reason was to prevent the overheating of defective NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) that had been shipped to many of the original equipment manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple. In July 2008, HP revealed an extension to the initial one-year warranty covering a few of the affected computers, but leaving many more without the protection, despite research showing that these computers were also affected. Since this point, several websites have been documenting the issue, most notably www.hplies.com, a forums dedicated to what they refer to as Hewlett-Packard's "multi-million dollar cover up" of the issue. There have been several small claims lawsuits filed in several states, as well as suits being filed in other countries.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1170701299
• ISBN13: 9781170701294
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Webster's Digital Services
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 7.4" x 9.7"