Top of the Order:

No Can Do: Cisco Systems may not be the hippest tech company around. It doesn’t make iPhones. It’s not a platform for President Donald Trump to blast out tweets. And it’s not a place for someone to post photos of himself and his daughter at the ballpark just after the adorable kid accidentally knocked over one of daddy’s $11.50 beers.

What it does, though, is allow you to do a lot of your online stuff quickly and easily. Cisco’s routers and switches help companies operate their networks, send communications and, in effect, make the trains run on time. Like any company worth its salt, Cisco cares about the security of its products. If it didn’t, no one would care about what Cisco makes.

Which is why when Cisco says it can’t fix something wrong with its gear, it might raise a few red flags. And when Cisco says it can’t fix something that would let the CIA come on in and snoop around inside the company’s switches … Well, are white flags about to be in order?

You do have to wonder. Because when Cisco came out and said that a vulnerability in more than 300 models of its switches would let the CIA use a pretty simple command to unleash some malicious code and take control of the devices, you can probably bet Cisco had its work cut out for it when reassuring customers everything would be OK.

Cisco laid out a lot of the technical nuts and bolts around the matter in an advisory note, saying that it would release software updates to address the problem. However, for the IT guys in charge of maintaining their companies’ Cisco gear, they may have to just hope for the best for the time being.

“There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability,” Cisco said.

The heads-up from Cisco about its gear being vulnerable to the CIA hacking efforts is one of the first to come from a top tech company since Wikileaks two weeks ago made public almost 9,000 documents, which it claimed show how the CIA found ways to hack into many popular consumer and business tech products.

The website Ars Technica said that for those switch users who don’t want to disable telnet on their switches, they can “reduce the risk of exploits by using an access control list to restrict the devices that are permitted to send and receive telnet commands.” Sounds simple enough, right?

Middle Innings:

And You’re Out: Social media sites such as Twitter have come under fire for not moving quickly enough to take down the accounts of users who promote hate speech or support terrorist groups. On Tuesday, Twitter revealed how far it has come in going after such accounts, and it’s no small effort. Twitter said that between August 2015 and December 2016, it took down more than 636,000 accounts that promoted terrorism. It took down almost 377,000 of those between July and December of last year.

Apple Goes Snap?: It looks like Apple is taking the bait and wading into territory where Snap and its Snapchat messaging app have made their names. On Tuesday, Apple gave a look at a new app it has created, called Clips. The app will let users add images to photos, make videos by combining live shots with photos and do all kinds of things that Apple hopes with make its iPhones even more attractive to consumers and social media users.

And About Those iPhones: Starting this Friday, you can get an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus in red. Apple unveiled its new (Product)Red iPhones Tuesday, as well as a revamped iPhone SE with twice the storage of the previous model. Apple also said it was coming out with a new entry-level iPad that will start at $329 and replace the iPad Air 2, which is being discontinued.

Bottom of the Lineup:

Here’s a look at how some leading Silicon Valley stocks did Tuesday.

Movin’ on Up: There weren’t many notable gainers, as much of the market reacted negatively to losses from banking and industrial stocks. Among area companies, small gains came from Rocket Fuel, Applied Micro Circuits and IXYS.

In the Red: Decliners included Synaptics, SunPower, Ultra Clean Holdings, ServiceNow and FormFactor.

The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.8 percent to 5,793.83.

The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up 1.1 percent to finish the day at 20,668.01.

And the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index shed 1.2 percent to fall to 2,344.02.

Quote of the Day: “But no one knows there are excessive levels of a cancer-causing chemical in the whole grain variety.” — Charles Margulis of the Oakland-based Center for Environmental Health. Margulis was warning about parents feeding their children a Walgreen’s brand of Disney animal crackers due to the potential of a high-level of a cancer-causing chemical.

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