Tag: apple

Unsinkable Apple hits Selfiegate iceberg

Posted on September 4, 2014 by - News

Der Untergang der TitanicHistory says that Apple’s share price should be going sky high right now buoyed by the expected launch of a new iPhone6 and whipped to a frenzy by its free publicity provided by the Tame Apple Press.

However, the company shares are suffering their worst day and one brokerage warning of a stock downgrade unless its new products show better promise for profit growth.

Shares of the smartphone maker slumped four percent as users realised that the company’s iCloud was not the safest place to store their snaps. Apple has done its best to say that its security was not at fault in its Cloudgate boob, which saw naked snaps of Hollywood stars appear online, however evidence is mounting that is not the case.

It seems investors are starting to realise that Apple has not introduced a new product since the iPad in 2010 and is not expected to create anything brilliantly new with its coming iPhone.

It has been thought that an increasingly desperate Apple would unveil a version of a smartwatch next week but even the technology for that has been done to death as Jobs’ Mob’s own version was constantly delayed.

Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves said unless next week’s shows massive incremental profit opportunities, he was likely to downgrade Apple’s rating.

Apple needed a security flaw in its iCloud exposing like a hole in the head. Apple wants its clouds to become repositories of sensitive home and healthcare data, and payments and financial information too.

Security experts have been warning for ages that Apple’s cloud is not up to snuff security wise and the current breach just proves how untrustworthy it is.

Apple faces firestorm over celeb hacking

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceIt appears that the Tame Apple Press are finally giving up on Jobs’ Mob and admitting that the leak of racy celebrity photos was actually caused by a security fault on Apple’s iCloud.

Earlier this week it looked like Apple was going to avoid any mention in the hack as the press insisted that such an attack on the iCloud was impossible because it had this magical thing called “encryption.” Apple even went as far as denying that the iCloud was breached by hackers who posted nude pictures of celebrities.

Photos from the celebrities were stolen individually, the company said. The celebrity accounts were “compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that is all too common on the Internet,” Apple insisted.

However by yesterday it was clear that Apple was not going to get away with that. Journalists were starting to ask real security experts about how hackers got the information and it was fairly clear that there was a bit of a tiny weeny hole in the iCloud.

Reuters, which normally spins pro-Apple adverts pretending to be news, sheepishly admitted that the highly public affair remains potentially one of Apple’s worst public crises in years. Speculation continues to spread on blogs about flaws in the iCloud service.

Brandwatch, a company that analyses sentiment on social media, blogs and other sites, found Apple had received 17,000 mentions on Twitter were related to the security breach and the negative words associated Apple’s iCloud service include “violation,” “disgusting violation,” “criminality,” “failure,” “glitch” and “disappointment”.

What is worrying Reuters is that it could upset Apple’s coming launch of the iPhone 6 which actually includes features that use the iCloud for mobile payments. After all, if you are in the middle of a security crisis the last thing you want is to tell potential customers that the same technology which handed over naked pictures of beautiful celebs to the paparazzi can be doing the same thing with your credit card information.

“This could be a scary time publicly for Apple,” JD Sherry, vice president of cybersecurity provider Trend Micro wrote in a Tuesday blogpost. “They haven’t had many, Antennagate and Apple Maps come to mind, and this would most likely trump those.”

 

Apple’s iWatch delayed – report

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

Taroko Gorge, Taiwan. Picture Mike MageeManufacturers on high tech island Taiwan are reporting that Apple’s iWatch is unlikely to see the light of day until 2015.

Speaking under terms of anonymity to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, the vendors say there’s still a way to go because components are still in their engineering verification stage and then has to undergo production verification testing.

And, more than that, vendors who make the components that go into the iWatch haven’t yet received firm orders from Apple.

Although Apple is holding one of its signature press conferences on September 9th, the company is unlikely to announce the iWatch then, Digitimes says.

Yesterday Swatch said it would enter the now rather competitive arena of wearable technology with a smart watch.  The jury is still out whether the world and its dog actually wants to wear this kind of device, however.

Microsoft tried to introduce a smart watch in the 1990s but the idea went down like a lead balloon.

Celebrity leak was Apple cock up

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceThe coverage of the leak of celebrity photos from Apple’s iCloud has been surprisingly free of blaming Job’s Mob for the leak.  

In fact, some of the coverage has even praised Apple’s security for its magical encryption which apparently absolved Jobs’ Mob of all the blame for the hack.

The large-scale hacking found snaps on the accounts of Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Selena Gomez.

However Next Web has found proof hat the leaks were caused by a breach in Apple’s iCloud service.

A Python script emerged on GitHub that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find My iPhone service.

The vulnerability allegedly discovered in the Find My iPhone service appears to have let attackers use this method to guess passwords repeatedly without any sort of lockout or alert to the target. Once the password has been eventually matched, the attacker used it to access other iCloud functions.

The tool was published for two days before being shared to Hacker News and Apple has moved to actually fix the hole.

Find My iPhone  has been used before for such attacks.  It that case hackers were holding victims ransom, locking their phones and demanding money in exchange for giving their phone back.

The Independent reported that Apple has “refused to comment” on any security flaw in iCloud today. So the Tame Apple press can go on telling users that Apple security is perfect.

Apple loses another court battle

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

novità-apple-2013A federal judge has rejected Apple’s attempt to block the sale of several older Samsung smartphones that copied auto-correction feature in the iPhone’s keyboard, the method to create links for email addresses and phone numbers appearing in text and the swiping gesture for unlocking the phone’s display screen.

While that particular trial, which was spun as a victory, is starting to make Apple look a little silly.  Firstly, in this case the jury awarded Apple only $119 million in damages well below the $2.2 billion in damages that Apple wanted.

And now Apple’s demand that US District Judge Lucy Koh issued an order that would have prevented future US sales of nine Samsung phone models that it claimed infringed on the iPhone technology has been rejected.

Koh said Apple had not adequately proven Samsung’s intellectual theft had hurt its sales or diminished its reputation for innovation. She noted that Apple had licensed some of the features that Samsung infringed upon to the makers of other smartphones that competed against the iPhone.

Samsung told the court the damages awarded to Apple amounted to a royalty payment for its past and future infringements on the patents at issue.

Apple had wanted to ban the US sale of these Samsung models: the Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II, Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Galaxy S III, and Stratosphere.

 

Microsoft to release a Chromecast rival

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

tvMicrosoft thinks that there is room for another TV casting dongle and is apparently thinking about releasing a rival to Chromecast.

Redmond has not mentioned the dongle so far but it did pop up in an FCC filing.

The filing  lacks much info to identify the device, but it carries the model number HD-10.

The FCC filing says that this device has an HDMI port, Wi-Fi and a USB charging unit.

But if you look at the Wi-Fi Alliance product database you can spot that Microsoft’s HD-10 is described as a Miracast dongle.

Miracast is a wireless standard that lets devices connect to one another and share media.  It is not as sexy as the Chromecast or Apple AirPlay. Miracast doesn’t let users queue up multiple files from different sources or play multiplayer games, and it requires media to be played on other devices and sent to the TV, rather than directly from online and cloud sources.

However, this does mean that Microsoft will get its Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices casting to the TV which, at the moment, it cannot do.

 

 

Apple faces iPhone 6 supply problems

Posted on August 25, 2014 by - News

gala_appleIt has not even launched yet but the iPhone 6 is already causing a few headaches for the fruity purveyor of expensive toys, Apple.

Word on the street is that Apple cannot get enough screens ready for the new iPhone 6 smartphone because at the last minute it needed to redesign a key component.

The product was due to be announced next month and would be Apple’s first significant product launch in a while. The tame apple press are calling the problems a “hiccup” and are uncertain if this could delay the launch or limit the number of phones initially available to consumers.

Two supply chain sources said display panel production suffered a setback after the backlight that helps illuminate the screen had to be revised, putting screen assembly on hold for part of June and July.

Apple, wanted to cut back to a single layer of backlight film, instead of the standard two layers, for the 4.7-inch screen, which went into mass production ahead of the 5.5-inch version.

But the new configuration was not bright enough and the backlight was sent back to the drawing board to fit in the extra layer, costing precious time and temporarily idling some screen assembly operations.

A delay however would be a nightmare for Apple which wants larger-screen iPhones for the year-end shopping season to match those of its much cheaper rivals.

This is the second time that the iPhone 6 has had problems with its screen. Earlier there were reports of another screen technology problem, since resolved, in making thinner screens for the larger iPhone 6 model.

The fruity cargo cult is planning one of its Nuremburg rallies for the faithful in Cupertino on September 9. At this event many of the US’s finest technology writers are enthusiastically willing to sacrifice any shred of credibility they may have by standing up and cheering when Tim Cook releases a product which is more or less the same as everything else on the market.

Apple is expected to unveil the new iPhone 6 with both 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch screens – bigger than the 4-inch screen on the iPhone 5s and 5c, but about industry standard for Android phones.

 

Apple’s smart watch launch slips

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

stop-watchThe Duke Nukem  of mobile products , Apple’s Smartwatch is set to be delayed yet again, according to the latest report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo has been telling anyone who will listen that Apple is having production issues surrounding its new smartwatch.

“We reiterate our view that iWatch, as compared to existing products, and as Apple’s (US) first attempt at a wearable device, represents a much higher level of difficulty for the company as regards component and system design, manufacturing and integration between hardware and software,” says Kuo.

The problem is that Apple wants the iWatch’s to be small and have a flexible AMOLED display which is new territory for a smartwatch.  Apple is also having difficulty water proofing the gizmo which is an area which Jobs’ Mob has not had to worry about much before.

He said that if the reports are correct that Apple will use sapphire glass for the iWatch display that could also put a spanner in the works. Sapphire glass is much tougher and flexible than the kind of toughened glass used in smartphones, but also a lot more difficult to produce.

All of this is why Kuo said that “While we are positive on iWatch and believe that the advantages of the design and business model behind it are difficult to copy, we think, given the aforementioned challenges, that the launch could be postponed to 2015.”

He said that Apple might show off the watch at an October event, but will delay the immediate release.

Jobs’ Mob is already in trouble with the project. It is so late getting the product to market the ground has well and truly been picked over by rivals.  The only real takers for smartwatches are the sporting types, which is not exactly Apple’s target market.

 

Don’t plug an iPhone into a PC

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

Apple_iPhone_5_white-330x330Security experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that Apple’s already dismal record on security on its iPhone is made worse when the shiny toy is plugged into a  computer.

The attack takes advantage of design problems in iOS in which for some reason the Apple geniuses believed that they should trust anyone who connects to the phone with a USB,

Tielei Wang, a co-author of the study and research scientist at the institute said that Apple overtrusted the USB connection.

It all started when Wan and his team developed some malware called Jekyll, an iPhone application with well-masked malicious functions that passed Apple’s inspection and briefly ended up on its App Store.

However, that was not good enough, as it was pointed out that no one could see his or her malware in the huge App store.

Wang said they set out to find a way to infect a large number of iOS devices and one that didn’t rely on people downloading their malicious app.  The attack required the use of “botnet herders” to install malware onto PCs.

Apple requires a person to be logged into his account in order to download an application from the App Store. Wang and the researchers developed a man-in-the-middle attack that tricked the Apple device that’s connected to a computer into authorising the download of an application using someone else’s Apple ID.

As long as the application still has Apple’s digital signature, it does not even need to still be in the App Store and can be supplied from elsewhere.

To stop Apple refusing to publish the malware on its App store Wang’s team found they could sneak a developer-provisioning file onto an iOS device when it was connected via USB to a computer.

This allows a self-signed malicious application to be installed. Legitimate applications could also be removed and substituted for look-alike malicious ones. All this can be done without a user knowing.

While it sounds convoluted, it is worthwhile if you are attempting to take over a large number of iOS devices.

It is also worthwhile if you are state-sponsored hackers wanting to carry out a targeted attacks aimed at just a few users.

Apple has known about the problem for nearly a year now and is yet to fix it.  At the moment, Wang said, the best advice is to not connect your phone to a computer, especially if you think the computer might be infected with malware.

 

“Murderer” relied on Apple to hide body

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

appleThe award for the most stupid Apple fanboy of the year has to go to a bloke who relied on Apple’s Siri to find him a good place to hide the body of his murder victim.

A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garther ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate, a court was told.

Prosecutors said that a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo was incandescent with rage with his roommate in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving an ex- girlfriend and strangled him

Bravo then turned on Siri on his iPhone and entered the following query, “I need to hide my roommate”.

Siri was rather helpful and asked him what kind of place he was looking for? Swamps. Reservoirs. Metal Foundries. Dumps.

Following Siri’s advice, police say he buried the body in a makeshift grave in a forest close to Bravo’s apartment. During the same period he asked Siri for advice on where to hide the body, also used a flashlight app nine times which detectives think helped him see while he buried the body.

What Bravo did not know was that during a murder inquiry, Siri will squeal like a stuck pig to the cops and all computer records are handed over.

The trial is continuing, and even if Bravo didn’t do it, his conversation with Siri makes him look a little suspicious.

 

Apple makes more tablets

Posted on August 12, 2014 by - News

tabletDespite losing ground to more reasonably priced tablets, the fruity cargo cult is bashing out some more.

According to Bloomberg  Apple’s suppliers have begun manufacturing new iPad tablets in a desperate bid to revive flagging sales.

Apple has seen growth plummet from 2012, as larger phones became more popular and people delayed replacing their tablets.

Bloomberg said that mass production of the iPad with a 9.7-inch (24.6-cm) screen has already started, and it is likely to be unveiled by the end of current quarter or early next quarter.

A new version of the 7.9-inch iPad mini is also entering production and is likely to be available by the end of the year, Bloomberg said.

Even if the tablets don’t make any impact on the consumer market, Apple must be hoping that its partnership with IBM might net a few more sales by entering into a largely untapped corporate market.

That is if IBM can convince corporations that they really want less secure Apple gear on networks which are mostly based around Microsoft.

Apple shipped 13.2 million iPads in the June quarter, 8 percent less than a year earlier. Sales of the devices, which accounted for 15 percent of Job’s Mobs’  revenue, fell short of Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter in a row.

Megacorps get the hard word

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

Judge-DreedA settlement between Apple, three other IT outfits and their employees has been rejected by a judge saying it was too low given the strength of the case against the employers.

Apple, Google, Intel  and Adobe failed to persuade  US District Judge Lucy Koh to sign off on a $324.5 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by tech workers, who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other’s employees.

Koh in San Jose, California, said there was “substantial and compelling evidence” that Apple Messiage founder Steve Jobs “was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy,” Koh wrote

In their 2011 lawsuit, the tech employees said the conspiracy had limited their job mobility and, as a result, kept a lid on salaries. The case has been closely watched because of the possibility of big damages being awarded and for the opportunity to peek into the world of some of America’s elite tech outfits.

The whole case was based largely on emails in which Jobs and Google’s  Eric Schmidt hatched plans to avoid poaching each other’s prized engineers.

In rejecting the settlement, Koh referred to one email exchange which occurred after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee. Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.

The four companies agreed to settle with the workers in April shortly before trial. The plaintiffs had planned to ask for about $3 billion in damages at trial, which could have tripled to $9 billion under antitrust law.

The plaintiffs are worried because workers faced serious risks on appeal had the case gone forward.

But Koh repeatedly referred to a related settlement last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest deal compared to the one involving Disney under the settlement.

To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal “would need to total at least $380 million,” Koh wrote.

A further hearing in the case is scheduled for September 10.

Apple and Intel: sheesh!

Posted on August 7, 2014 by - News

rejection-2One of the dafter silly season stories to cross our desk has been the bizarre claim that Apple will eventually drop Intel and use its own ARM based chips.

The source of this is a former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee who wrote in his bog that the end is nigh for Intel on the Mac.

To be fair Gassee did not come up with this theory on his own.  He was quoting Matt Richman in a 2011 blog post titled “Apple and ARM, Sitting in a Tree” where he said that  after a complicated but ultimately successful switch from PowerPC chips to Intel processors in 2005, Apple will make a similar switch, this time to ARM-based descendants of the A4  chip designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung.

Of course that was a long time ago and Apple and Samsung are no longer friends. The reasons both blogs give for a switch are low power usage and price.

“Dumping Intel for ARM would therefore allow Apple to offer ultra-affordable Macs while at the same time preserving their precious margins. In this scenario, Apple would be able to steal away even more market share from Microsoft while generating boatloads of cash in the process,” Gassee claims.

The other advantage is that Apple is a complete control freak and loves to control as much of the underlying technology in its products as possible.

If Apple moved to ARM, it would not have to suffer the expected humiliation of having to delay its new Macbooks because Intel has not made its Broadwell chip on time. While Intel CEO Brian Krazanich initially claimed that Intel’s next-gen processor would launch in time for the 2014 holiday season, it now looks as if Apple will have to wait until 2015 for that.

That is where the logic in the argument fails completely. The ARM chips are not as good performers as the Intel versions. That is not an insult; they are mobile phone chips which are not designed to do the same thing as a PC.

If Apple were interested in creating low power, “cheap as chips PCs” then it might have a chance at pulling it off, but that has not been Jobs’ Mob’s model ever.

What is bizarre about this rumour is how it has been seized on by the Tame Apple Press keen to show some superiority for Apple even as the shine goes off the company. Having told us for years that the world was moving to mobile, because Steve Jobs said it was, and that the PC was dead, they are now in the uncomfortable position of having to eat their words. They are also finding that their favourite PC maker is not the final solution in some technology fields.

PC chip design is one of them.

What is more likely is that Apple will stick to its Mobile ARM chips and look to Intel to provide its PC chips at least for the foreseeable future. About the only thing that might change Apple’s mind is that if AMD suddenly came up with some super cool chips.  They, at least, would be cheaper – not that Apple really cares that much about price.

Apple and Samsung declare truce

Posted on August 6, 2014 by - News

soldiers-2The thermonuclear patent war between Apple and Samsung is only going to be fought in the US.

The two sides have negotiated a sort of truce, where the only court battles between the two will be fought in US courts.  It is a bit like Israel and Hamas agreeing to shoot at one another only in one district of Gaza.

Samsung Electronics said that it and Apple would continue to pursue existing cases in US courts. The two companies did not strike any cross-licensing deal.

However it is widely seen as a start and a significant lessening of corporate hostilities after years of bitter patent disputes over the intellectual property rights for mobile designs and technology.  The move will end legal fights in more than 12 countries in Asia, North America and Europe.

In any event, a win in the US will mean bigger awards for damages than other countries.

But some analysts have said that the two companies would eventually bury the hatchet and sign a cross-licensing deal.

 

Apple wins approval for settlement

Posted on August 4, 2014 by - News

novità-apple-2013The fruity cargo cult Apple has managed to get a court to accept a settlement in a case where it ran an ebook racket with other publishers to jack up the price.

Apple has always denied that its super cool pricing cartel idea was illegal and that it did anything wrong.  In fact it is appealing its conviction.  The settlement is conditional on Apple not getting the case overturned on appeal.

US District Judge Denise Cote approved a $450 million settlement of claims Apple harmed consumers by conspiring with five publishers to raise e-book prices on Friday. In approving the settlement, Cote overcame concerns she had expressed over a settlement provision allowing Apple to pay just $70 million if related litigation were to drag out.

That accord calls for Apple to pay $400 million to consumers and $50 million to lawyers if the federal appeals court in New York upholds Cote’s findings, and nothing if the Cupertino, California-based company wins its appeal.

But if the appeals court overturns Cote and returns the case to her, perhaps for a new trial, Apple will owe only $US50 million to consumers and $US20 million to lawyers.

But in Friday’s decision, she noted that the states and consumers “strongly believe” such a scenario is unlikely, and that the settlement has provisions to reduce its likelihood.

She also said the plaintiffs agreed to provide more details about the settlement to consumers, to help them decide whether to accept its terms or sue Apple separately.