Items tagged with Legal
Apple has been at odds with law enforcement over its ever-increasing security measures that have at times thwarted efforts to gain access to iPhones during an investigation. Earlier this month reports surfaced indicating that law enforcement had been able to get a user to unlock his iPhone using Face ID. Law enforcement now faces a new challenge; a company called Elcomsoft is warning law enforcement to not look at an iPhone with Face ID. The reasoning behind not looking at the iPhone is that security measures on the device can make it harder to unlock the phone if it sees the wrong face too many...
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When Apple launched the iPhone X, it went through extremes to make the display are of the smartphone as large as possible while minimizing the bezels. This meant the introduction of the notch at the top of the screen and the deletion of the home button where the fingerprint scanner was previously placed. Rather than put the fingerprint scanner on the back of the iPhone, Apple went to Face ID where your face serves as your password. The first reported instance of law enforcement having an iPhone X owner unlock their device with their face has now occurred. Forbes reports that when the FBI searched...
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Apple has lost an ongoing patent battle against a Canadian patent holding firm called WiLan. WiLan proudly announced that it won a judgement against Apple to the tune of $145.1 million after it was found that the company's iPhone family infringed upon a pair of patents. That is most certainly a fraction of a drop in the massive Scrooge McDuck-like coffers over at Apple, but it is still a large sum of money. The patents involved include No. 8,457,145 and No. 8,537,757. That first patent is titled "Method and apparatus for bandwidth request/grant protocols in a wireless communication system."...
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The European Union is set to hit Google with the largest fine in history over its Android operating system practices. The EU has been working on the case against Google for quite some time and judgment was looming earlier this week, but there was no word on just how large of a fine Google might face. The EU antitrust case against Google has been building for over a year now. A report has surfaced today that claims that the fine against Google will be 4.3 billion euros or about $5 billion. Such a massive fine would most certainly set a record for antitrust penalties according to a person familiar...
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Last month the EU tried to overhaul its old copyright law and step into the modern age. The problem was that the law as crafted and supported by many musicians was very overreaching to most. The copyright rules would have placed the responsibility on websites for checking for copyright infringements and forced those websites to pay to link to news stories. Basic linking is what the internet lives on and it is done on literally every website out there. The controversial regulation has now been defeated in a European parliament in a vote that came down 318-278. The legislation was known as the Copyright...
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Apple has been fighting Qualcomm over patents that the iPhone allegedly violates. Qualcomm filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) previously, and a panel has recommended that a trade judge find that Apple infringed on at least one of these patents. If the judge does rule that Apple infringed on the patent, there is a chance that the import of some iPhone devices into the United States could be blocked. More than likely any ruling that Apple violated patents would simply mean a licensing fee paid by Apple to keep a steady flow of iPhone coming into...
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Apple wants to make it harder for anyone to gain unauthorized access to iPhones with a new USB Restricted Mode in iOS 12. That move infuriated law enforcement as it meant that the GrayKey iPhone hacking tool (and others from Cellebrite) used by authorities to crack iPhones would be useless. Grayshift, the company behind GrayKey, didn’t take Apple's new restrictions lying down. Grayshift went on the offensive and has been actively working to crack Apple's new USB Restricted Mode, and the company is now claiming victory. If you haven’t been following USB Restricted Mode, the...
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Apple is no stranger to class action lawsuits and has fought many of them over the years. The most recent had to do with the butterfly keyboard on MacBook Pro computers. Apple is now facing another class action suit and this time the suit is over the Apple Watch. The class action lawsuit claims that all Apple Watches from the original Series 0 through the current Series 3 share the same defect that affects the screen. The main claim in the suit is that there is a defect that results in the screens cracking, shattering, or detaching from the body of the watch. The screen issues seen are allegedly...
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The FBI has quoted statistics to the public and Congress that claimed investigators had been locked out of encrypted devices like smartphones nearly 7,800 times. It is now being reported that the actual number is much smaller in the area of between 1,000 and 2,000 incidents. The report claims that over a time frame of seven months, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray cited the inflated figure as evidence that the FBI needed to address what it calls "Going Dark." Going Dark is a term the FBI uses to describe the spread of encrypted software that can block investigators from accessing data...
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Nintendo has been selling Switch consoles in droves pushing its earnings to record levels. Months back, a company called Gamevice took issue with Nintendo and filed a patent infringement suit against the Switch for allegedly infringing on patents relating to how controllers attach to the sides of an electronic device. While the Switch controllers attach only to the Switch console, the Gamevice patent has to do with controllers that attach to each side of its Wikipad gaming tablet and detachable controllers for third-party tablets. Gamevice eventually dropped the lawsuit for unknown reasons. That...
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Last month, the FTC stepped up and said that those "Warranty Void if Removed" stickers were totally illegal and ran afoul of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. The FTC is now back and is telling six companies that they are in violation, giving the firms 30 days to clean up their acts or face potential legal action. The FTC sent letters out to ASUS, HTC, Hyundai, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, which have all been warned that language on their websites is in violation of U.S. laws. The letters were obtained by Motherboard via a Freedom of Information Act request. The letters state, "This...
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Microsoft decided to file criminal charges against an e-waste recycler named Eric Lundgren. The case against Lundgren originally went to court months ago, but the man remained free as his appeal worked its way through the court system. A federal appeals court has now upheld the original ruling, meaning that Lundgren will serve a 15-month prison sentence and will be forced to pay a $50,000 fine. What led to this harsh prison sentence? Lundgren had taken to downloading free software that Microsoft offers to Windows users commonly called restore disks. Lundgren's idea was to make these discs available...
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Police around the world have been using fingerprints to catch criminals for decades. Normally these fingerprints are lifted from surfaces or objects at the scene of a crime. Police in Wales recently used a photograph of a finger to catch and convict 11 drug traffickers. The process of using fingerprints from a digital photo is hailed as groundbreaking. Dave Thomas of South Wales Police said that the police force will now analyze images more closely when it finds them on smartphones seized during investigations. In this case, the police seized a smartphone at a home where an anonymous tip informed...
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Apple CEO Tim Cook and other members of Apple's executive team want employees to know they will make it very difficult for them if they leak inside information about the company or its products. However, at least one of the folks Apple is directly addressing wasn't intimidated by a recent memo posted to the internal company blog detailing how Apple will take action against leakers. Nay, this Apple leaker leaked the memo threatening to destroy leakers if they leaked any more confidential information. Cook may be in his office spinning his totem right now thinking this must be an Inception-induced...
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