On Wednesday, Tim Cook lambasted at many companies, saying they are weaponizing data against people and societies. Cook's remarks made headlines across the world. But someone reminded that even Apple appears to be bending backwards at places. Agreeing with everything Tim Cook had shared, Alex Stamos, former CSO of Facebook called out the company over its actions to limit access to apps in China. From a report: "We don't want the media to create an incentive structure that ignores treating Chinese citizens as less-deserving of privacy protections because a CEO is willing to bad-mouth the business model of their primary competitor, who uses advertising to subsidize cheaper devices," Stamos said in a series of tweets responding to recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook.

[...] Though Stamos said he agreed with "almost everything" Cook said, in a series of tweets he called out Apple for blocking the ability to download VPN and encrypted messaging apps in China, which could provide ways to connect to the internet and send messages privately and without surveillance.

Apple's newest version of iOS has rendered the GrayKey hacking tech useless, a report said Wednesday. How Apple pulled it off wasn't immediately clear, but it would have a huge implication for the law enforcement agencies around the world that have relied on GrayKey to break into locked iPhones. Forbes reports: Apple has put up what may be an insurmountable wall. Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what's called a "partial extraction," sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.

Previously, GrayKey used "brute forcing" techniques to guess passcodes and had found a way to get around Apple's protections preventing such repeat guesses. But no more. And if it's impossible for GrayKey, which counts an ex-Apple security engineer among its founders, it's a safe assumption few can break iPhone passcodes. Police officer Captain John Sherwin of the Rochester Police Department in Minnesota said of the claim iOS 12 was preventing GrayKey from unlocking iPhones: "That's a fairly accurate assessment as to what we have experienced."

Samsung is suing its Russian brand ambassador for using an iPhone X, demanding as much as $1.6m in compensation, media reports submitted by readers said Wednesday. From a report: Russian brand ambassador for Samsung, Ksenia Sobchak, is reportedly being sued by the South Korean smartphone producer, for allegedly being caught in public using an iPhone X instead of handsets she was supposed to be promoting. Ksenia Sobchak was hired by Samsung to market its smartphones in the country, with the Russian TV presenter, journalist, and politician contracted to use the smartphones in public. Under the terms of similar agreements between companies and influential people, they are not typically allowed to be seen using competing products in public, a rule that Sobchak broke.

According to The Mirror, Sobchak was spotted using an iPhone X during a television interview, with the personality attempting to hide the Apple smartphone under a piece of paper while the cameras were on. Sobchak is also said to have used the iPhone X during social events in Moscow and other TV appearances, again against the contract's rules.

An investigation by Italy's competition authority has found that software updates "significantly reduced performance" on Samsung's Android handsets and iPhones. From a report: Apple and Samsung are being fined Euro 10m ($11.4m) and Euro 5m ($5.7) respectively in Italy for the "planned obsolescence" of their smartphones. An investigation launched in January by the nation's competition authority found that certain smartphone software updates had a negative effect on the performance of the devices. Believed to be the first ruling of its kind against smartphone manufacturers, the investigation followed accusations operating system updates for older phones slowed them down, thereby encouraging the purchase of new phones.

In a statement the antitrust watchdog said "Apple and Samsung implemented dishonest commercial practices" and that operating system updates "caused serious malfunctions and significantly reduced performance, thus accelerating phones' substitution." It added the two firms had not provided clients adequate information about the impact of the new software "or any means of restoring the original functionality of the products."

Apple's CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized against people and societies -- arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a "data industrial complex." From a report: Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit from privacy-hostile business models. But his target was clear. "Our own information -- from the everyday to the deeply personal -- is being weaponized against us with military efficiency," warned Cook. "These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance," he added. In a series of tweets, Cook added: It was an honor to be invited to ICDPPC 2018 in Brussels this morning. I'd like to share a bit of what I said to this gathering of privacy regulators from around the world. It all boils down to a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in? GDPR has shown us all that good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of everyone. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. No matter what country you live in, that right should be protected in keeping with four essential principles.

First, companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place. Second, users should always know what data is being collected from them and what it's being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn't. Anything less is a sham. Third, companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it. And fourth, everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights. Technology is capable of doing great things. But it doesn't want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. That part takes all of us. We are optimistic about technology's awesome potential for good -- but we know that it won't happen on its own.

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from 9to5Mac: At the Jamf Nation User Conference, IBM has announced that it is open sourcing its Mac@IBM provisioning code. The code being open-sourced offers IT departments the ability to gather additional information about their employees during macOS setup and allows employees to customize their enrollment by selecting apps or bundles of apps to install.

Back in 2015, IBM discussed how it went from zero to 30,000 Macs in six months. In 2016, IBM said Apple products were cheaper to manage when you looked at the entire life cycle: "IBM is saving a minimum of $265 (up to $535 depending on model) per Mac compared to a PC, over a 4-year lifespan. While the upfront workstation investment is lower for PCs, the residual value for Mac is higher The program's success has improved IBM's ability to attract and retain top talent -- a key advantage in today's competitive market."

A new report from The Information says that Apple's upcoming TV service that is in the works to showcase its original TV shows will be available in more than 100 countries next year. The service will launch in the United States in the first half of 2019, with a global expansion to follow later in the year. MacRumors reports: According to The Information, Apple's original content will be made available for free to Apple device owners, a rumor we heard earlier this month from CNBC. While Apple's content will be available at no cost, Apple will encourage users to sign up for television subscriptions from other cable networks such as HBO or STARZ. Apple has reportedly started negotiating with content providers about what it will pay to carry TV shows and movies, but programming is not expected to be the same in each country. It is also not quite clear how Apple content will be positioned alongside content from third-party services.

Several iCloud services are experiencing problems this afternoon, users reported. While Apple PR has not issued a statement yet, the status page of Apple services reflect the issues, too. Citing people and the status page, news outlet MacRumors reports that Cloud Drive, iCloud Mail, iCloud Keychain, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Calendar, Mail Drop, Find My iPhone, and more services are performing "slower than normal" for some users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, followed Apple's lead in calling the for the retraction of Bloomberg's story about spy chips being embedded in servers. "They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories," Jassy wrote in a tweet on Monday. "Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract."

Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.

"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"

Louis Rossmann says US Customs and Border Patrol seized $1,000 worth of laptop batteries, claiming they were counterfeit. From a report: Earlier this year, Louis Rossmann, the highest-profile iPhone and Mac repair professional in the United States, told Motherboard that determining "the difference between counterfeiting and refurbishing is going to be the next big battle" between the independent repair profession and Apple. At the time, his friend and fellow independent repair pro, Jessa Jones, had just had a shipment of iPhone screens seized by Customs and Border Patrol. Rossmann was right: His repair parts were also just seized by the US government.

Last month, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized a package containing 20 Apple laptop batteries en route to Rossman's store in New York City. The laptop batteries were en route from China to Rossmann Repair Group -- a NYC based repair store that specializes in Apple products. "Apple and customs seized batteries to a computer that, at [the Apple Store], they no longer service because they claim it's vintage," Rossmann, the owner and operator of Rossmann Repair Group, said in a YouTube video. "They will not allow me to replace batteries, because when I import batteries that are original they'll tell me the they're counterfeit and have them stolen from by [CBP]." CBP seized the batteries on September 6, then notified Rossmann via a letter dated October 5. Rossmann produced the letter in its entirety in his video.

A new report sheds some light on the issue of paid click farms gaming Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts. From a report: Earlier this month, Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts began to exhibit some unusual issues -- no-name podcasts vaulting over popular, well-established ones -- but the company appeared to quickly fix its chart. Unfortunately, the problems have popped up again, and an analysis from podcast industry tracker Chartable suggests that paid click farms are now gaming the list, which it calls "the closest thing to the Billboard Top 100 in the podcast world." In theory, Apple's podcast popularity rankings might not matter -- podcasts are free, and Apple's only one source of such rankings. But after introducing its Podcast Directory in 2005, Apple became the world's largest aggregator of such programming, and its rankings serve two purposes: showing listeners what's hot, and helping advertisers determine which shows to support, thereby keeping their creators afloat. The core problem is that Apple's Top Podcasts chart appears to use a poor and easily manipulated ranking metric. Chartable believes that it's based entirely upon a podcast's total number of new subscribers over the past week, with weights assigned to movement in the past one to three days.

John Paczkowski and Joseph Bernstein, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, went on the record for the first time to deny allegations that the company was the victim of a hardware-based attack carried out by the Chinese government. And, in an unprecedented move for the company, he called for a retraction of the story that made this claim. Earlier this month Bloomberg Businessweek published an investigation alleging Chinese spies had compromised some 30 US companies by implanting malicious chips into Silicon Valley bound servers during their manufacture in China. The chips, Bloomberg reported, allowed the attackers to create "a stealth doorway" into any network running on a server in which they were embedded. Apple was alleged to be among the companies attacked, and a focal point of the story. [...] "We turned the company upside down," Cook said. "Email searches, datacenter records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There's no truth to this." A Bloomberg spokesperson said, "We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources."

Apple has not documented some high-severity bugs it patched that were reported to it by Google's Project Zero researchers. From a report: While it's good news that Apple beat Project Zero's 90-day deadline for patching or disclosing the bugs it finds, the group's Ivan Fratric recently argued that the practice endangered users by not fully informing them why an update should be installed. This time the criticism comes from Project Zero's Ian Beer, who's been credited by Apple with finding dozens of serious security flaws in iOS and macOS over the years. Beer posted a blog about several vulnerabilities in iOS 7 he found in 2014 that share commonalities with several bugs he has found in iOS 11.4.1, some of which he's now released exploits for.

Beer notes that none of the latest issues is mentioned in the iOS 12 security bulletin even though Apple did fix them. The absence of information about them is a "disincentive" for iOS users to patch, Beer argues. "Apple are still yet to assign CVEs for these issues or publicly acknowledge that they were fixed in iOS 12," wrote Beer. "In my opinion a security bulletin should mention the security bugs that were fixed. Not doing so provides a disincentive for people to update their devices since it appears that there were fewer security fixes than there really were."

This week's FTC hearings on the growing power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google only included economists who have taken money, directly and indirectly, from giant corporations that have a stake in the debate. From a report: Amid growing concern over the power of such behemoths as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, in recent months there's been a bipartisan push for better enforcement of antitrust rules -- with even President Trump saying in August that their size and influence could constitute a "very antitrust situation." The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched its most wide-ranging study of corporate concentration in America in more than 20 years with a series of hearings being held around the country. Chairman Joseph Simons, a practical enforcement-minded leader, launched the hearings by expressing concern over the growing problem of monopoly, which is now found in nearly every sector of the economy. "I approach all of these issues with a very open mind," said Simons, "very much willing to be influenced by what I see and hear."

But there's a problem. The FTC organized these hearings so that Simons and the public would be hearing from many economists who have taken money, directly or indirectly, from giant corporations. For example, on Monday, the FTC convened a panel titled "The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms" to look specifically at the most dynamic and dangerous set of concentrated economic actors, the big tech platforms. Every single one of the economists who testified had financial ties to giant corporations. One example is David Evans, the chairman of the Global Economics Group. Evans scoffed at the danger of platform monopolies. He indicated that the question of "whether Facebook and Google and Amazon are monopolies, it's all interesting, it's great to read in the New York Times," but it's "not all that relevant" to the practice of antitrust. His firm has taken money directly from Microsoft, Visa, the large investment bank SIFMA, and the Chinese giant tech giant Tencent. Another example is Howard Shelanski, a partner at Davis Polk. Shelanski is more enforcement-minded, but he expressed caution, testifying that we don't know enough for antitrust enforcers to understand whether powerful technology companies hold unassailable market positions. Shelanski pointed to his own children, saying that they've stopped using Facebook because it's uncool. As it turns out, his law firm's clients include Facebook, as well as Comcast, and Chinese search giant Baidu.

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: The parental controls in the iPhone's new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter. The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for "explicit" content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to "limit adult websites." As tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform.

The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.

Apple will hold its next big product announcement in New York later this month, the company said today. BuzzFeed News: It's the first time Apple, which usually holds these events in the Bay Area, will roll out new devices in New York City. It'll happen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on October 30. The company is widely expected to refresh its iPad and possibly the MacBook Air lineups at the event.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple on Wednesday began allowing users in the U.S. to download a copy of all of the data that they have stored with the company from a single online portal. U.S. users will be able to download data such as all of their address book contacts, calendar appointments, music streaming preferences and details about past Apple product repairs. Previously, customers could get their data by contacting Apple directly. In May, when Apple first launched the online privacy portal, it only allowed U.S. users to either correct their data or delete their Apple accounts.

Apple has issued an apology over the hacking of some Chinese accounts in phishing scams, almost a week after it emerged that stolen Apple IDs had been used to swipe customer funds. From a report: In its English statement Tuesday, Apple said it found "a small number of our users' accounts" had been accessed through phishing scams. "We are deeply apologetic about the inconvenience caused to our customers by these phishing scams," Apple said in its Chinese statement. The incident came to light last week when Chinese mobile-payment giants Alipay and WeChat Pay said some customers had lost money. The victims of the scams, Apple said Tuesday, hadn't enabled so-called two-factor authentication -- a setting that requires a user to log in with a password and a freshly-generated code to verify their identity.

The "real version" of Photoshop is coming to the iPad next year, complete with a user interface similar to the desktop application and all the main tools. Ars Technica reports: Photoshop for iPad has a user interface structured similarly to the desktop application. It is immediately familiar to users of the application but tuned for touch screens, with larger targets and adaptations for the tablet as well as gestures to streamline workflows. Both touch and pencil input are supported. The interface is somewhat simpler than the desktop version, and although the same Photoshop code is running under the hood to ensure there's no loss of fidelity, not every feature will be available in the mobile version. The first release will contain the main tools while Adobe plans to add more in the future. Cloud syncing is a key element of Photoshop on iPad. Edits made on the iPad will be synchronized transparently with the desktop -- no conversions or import/export process to go through. Using a feature not available in the iPad version should then be as simple as hitting save and then opening the file on the desktop, picking up where you left off. Adobe is also reportedly building a tablet painting app called Project Gemini, which "simulates real brushes, paints, and materials as well as the interactions between them," reports Ars. "It combines raster graphics, vector drawing, and the Photoshop engine into a single application designed for artwork and illustration."

Casey Johnston, writing for The Outline: Apple never actually caved to user complaints that its top-of-the-line computers developed sticky or dead keyboards very easily, despite having now been served with several keyboard-related class action lawsuits. In June, the company offered to repair computers with these keyboards for free for four years following the date of purchase (the cost of being without their computer notwithstanding). It claimed only a "small percentage" of users were affected. I was one of them, several times, and there were many, many others. Compared to this time last year, its computer sales are down ten percent, and not a few people have been holding off on purchasing any computer from its line in fear of getting stuck with a keyboard that doesn't work.

In July, Apple slightly redesigned the very low profile butterfly keyboard on its MacBooks and MacBook Pros, not because "a small percentage" of the previous version was rendered useless by a speck of dust, the company said, but to make it quieter; it even invited the tech press to try it out. iFixit teardowns of the hardware revealed that, in fact, Apple had added a silicone membrane under the keys that looks quite a bit like it's meant to keep dust and debris from lodging under the key and locking it up. Was that the idea? No, Apple unequivocally said. [...] But checking around online, it appears the new keyboards have the same old issues. They may be delayed, but they happen nonetheless. The MacRumors forum has a long thread about the the "gen 3 butterfly keyboard" where users have been sharing their experiences since Apple updated the design.