U.S. stocks edged lower at the open on Monday (January 14) as shares of Apple were weighed down by demand concerns, while investors faced a busy week for corporate earnings.
The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 0.39 point to 13,488.04. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index shed 1.89 points, or 0.13 percent, to 1,470.16. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 11.34 points, or 0.36 percent, to 3,114.30.
Meantime, Oracle Corp released an emergency update to its Java software for surfing the Web on Sunday, but security experts said the update fails to protect PCs from attack by hackers intent on committing cyber crimes.
The software maker released the update just days after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged PC users to disable the program because of bugs in the software that were being exploited to commit identity theft and other crimes.
Oracle's failure to quickly secure the software means that PCs running Java in their browsers remain vulnerable to attack by criminals seeking to steal credit-card numbers, banking credentials, passwords and commit other types of computer crimes.
Some security consultants are advising businesses to remove Java from the browsers of all employees except for those who absolutely need to use the technology for critical business purposes.
