With Apple's latest iPhone just around the corner, reports suggest that it will include support for satellite communications, which consumers could use when terrestrial-based 4G and 5G are not available. The one getting most of the glory: Globalstar, the once-embattled satellite company. From a report: Globalstar shares shot up more than 40% at one point today. Shares in satellite companies Iridium and AST SpaceMobile also rose, more than 9% and 4%, respectively. One report tracks to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who, as MacRumors explained, discussed how the iPhone 13 lineup will feature hardware that is able to connect to low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which could allow iPhone 13 users to make calls and send messages. The MacRumors report notes that the upcoming iPhone 13 supposedly features a customized Qualcomm X60 baseband chip that supports satellite communications; other smartphone brands reportedly are waiting until 2022 for the X65 baseband chip for turning on satellite communications functionality. While there are ample ways to support LEO connectivity in handsets, the bottom line is: The "simplest scenario" for providing LEO communications to users is if network operators work with Globalstar, according to the Kuo-based report. That raised some eyebrows, rightly so.

Although Apple is making some changes to its App Store policies and setting up a $100 million fund for small developers, critics say that the terms of a class-action settlement don't meaningfully loosen the company's grip on its digital marketplace. From a report: Spotify Chief Legal Officer Horacio Gutierrez: "Apple's proposed concessions fail to address the most basic aspects of their anticompetitive and unfair App Store practices. They are attempting to distract policymakers and regulators and slow down the momentum that's building around the world to address their behavior."

Match Group: "This is a raw demonstration of their monopolistic power: making capricious changes designed to spur good PR for their benefit right as legislation, regulatory scrutiny and developer complaints are closing in on them. We hope everyone sees this for what it is -- a sham."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-NY): "This new action by Apple is a good first step towards addressing some of these competition concerns, but more must be done to ensure an open, competitive mobile app marketplace, including commonsense legislation to set rules of the road for dominant app stores."

Infosecurity magazine reports: Some of the world's biggest tech companies have committed tens of billions of dollars to improving supply chain security, closing industry skills gaps and driving security awareness among the public, according to the White House.

As reported by Infosecurity yesterday, the Biden administration welcomed the CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM and others to a meeting yesterday to discuss the "whole-of-nation" effort needed to address cybersecurity threats." The result of that encounter has been a series of commitments from these firms, including $10bn from Google over the next five years to expand zero trust and improve supply chain and open source security. The tech giant will apparently also help 100,000 Americans earn "digital skills certificates."

IBM said it would train 150,000 people in cyber skills over the coming three years and focus on improving the diversity of the security workforce, while Microsoft has committed $20bn over five years to drive security by design, and $150m for federal, local and state governments. Apple will establish a new program to improve supply chain security, including among its 9000 US suppliers, with multi-factor authentication (MFA), vulnerability remediation, event logging and incident response all playing a key role. Amazon is making MFA devices available to all AWS customers and rolling out the security training it offers employees to the general public.

Aside from these commitments, the White House announced the expansion of its Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative, from the electricity sector to natural gas pipelines, and said the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would develop a new framework for supply chain security. In another potentially significant move, insurer Resilience said it would require policyholders to meet a threshold of cybersecurity best practice as a condition of receiving coverage — something experts have been demanding for some time across the industry.
NextGov.com also quotes the president's remarks about a cybersecurity executive order issued May 12th: "Because of that order, government will only buy tech products that meet certain cybersecurity standards, which will have a ripple effect across the software industry, in our view, ultimately improving security for all Americans,"

Tim Cook celebrated 10 years as Apple CEO by collecting and selling off three quarters of a billion dollars' worth of stock. CNN reports: The transactions were revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday, which showed that Cook had acquired and sold more than 5 million shares of the iPhone maker. As head of the world's most valuable company, Cook has received lofty stock awards in recent years. One of the incentives was tied to Apple's performance in the S&P 500 over the past three years. The stock award was triggered this week because the firm was one of the index's top performers, generating shareholder returns of nearly 192% from August 2018 to 2021, it said in a filing. Cook's windfall came just days after he also donated 70,000 Apple shares (worth about $10 million) to charity, according to a separate regulatory filing Tuesday. It did not disclose the name of the recipient.

Cook joined Apple in 1998 and served in a variety of senior roles before assuming his current position, including chief operating officer and executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations. He was named CEO in August 2011, after co-founder Steve Jobs famously stepped down. Jobs died weeks later from complications of pancreatic cancer. Prior to joining Apple, Cook worked at Compaq and IBM (IBM).

Apple announced today it has reached a proposed settlement in a lawsuit filed against it by developers in the United States. The agreement, which is still pending court approval, includes a few changes, the biggest one being that developers will be able to share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store -- which means they can tell customers about payment options that aren't subject to Apple commissions. The settlement also includes more pricing tiers and a new transparency report about the app review process. From a report: The class-action lawsuit was filed against Apple in 2019 by app developers Donald Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball, who said the company engaged in anticompetitive practices by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through its App Store. In today's announcement, Apple said it is "clarifying that developers can use communications, such as emails, to share information about payment methods outside of their iOS app. As always, developers will not pay Apple a commission on any purchases taking place outside of their app or the App Stores."

It's long been known that Google pays Apple a hefty sum every year to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up from $10 billion in 2020. 9to5Mac reports: In the investor note, seen by Ped30, Bernstein analysts are estimating that Google's payment to Apple will increase to $15 billion in 2021, and to between $18 billion and $20 billion in 2022. The data is based on "disclosures in Apple's public filings as well as a bottom-up analysis of Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) payments." Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely "paying to ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it." The analysts outline two potential risks for the Google payment to Apple, including regulatory risk and Google simply deciding the deal is no longer worth it:

In an interview earlier this year, Apple's senior director of global privacy Jane Horvath offered reasoning for the deal, despite privacy concerns: "Right now, Google is the most popular search engine. We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia."

A South Korean parliamentary committee voted on Wednesday to recommend amending a law, a key step toward banning Google and Apple from forcibly charging software developers commissions on in-app purchases, the first such curb by a major economy. From a report: Apple and Alphabet's Google have faced global criticism because they require software developers using their app stores to use proprietary payment systems that charge commissions of up to 30%.

In a statement on Tuesday, Apple said the bill "will put users who purchase digital goods from other sources at risk of fraud, undermine their privacy protections," hurt user trust in App Store purchases and lead to fewer opportunities for South Korean developers. Wilson White, senior director of public policy at Google, said "the rushed process hasn't allowed for enough analysis of the negative impact of this legislation on Korean consumers and app developers". Experts said app store operators could assure security in payment systems other than their own by working with developers and other companies. Further reading: Apple and Google's Fight in Seoul Tests Biden in Washington.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent to Apple for a dual-display MacBook with a virtual keyboard replacing the traditional keyboard and with the ability to wirelessly charge an iPhone. 9to5Mac reports: As reported by Patently Apple, this patent was submitted three years ago, and only now has Apple won it. With this patent, the company could take a radical path and get rid of a physical keyboard. The interesting thing about this application is that while rumors suggest that Apple will remove the only touchable interface on the MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar, this patent imagines a MacBook with no physical keyboard at all. Patently Apple says this virtual keyboard could be rearranged, swapping the position of the virtual keyboard and trackpad. With a virtual keyboard, Apple could bring gestures from iOS and iPadOS as well, such as pinch, zoom, slide to select, and more. In the patent, Apple says this MacBook includes biometric sensors, which we could interpret as Face ID, fingerprint sensors (aka Touch ID), and a wireless charger, which would be in the left down corner of the notebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Los Angeles Times: A Los Angeles County man broke into thousands of Apple iCloud accounts and collected more than 620,000 private photos and videos in a plot to steal and share images of nude young women, federal authorities say. Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, has agreed to plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer, court records show. Chi, who goes by David, admitted that he impersonated Apple customer support staff in emails that tricked unsuspecting victims into providing him with their Apple IDs and passwords, according to court records. He gained unauthorized access to photos and videos of at least 306 victims across the nation, most of them young women, he acknowledged in his plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Fla.

Chi said he hacked into the accounts of about 200 of the victims at the request of people he met online. Using the moniker "icloudripper4you," Chi marketed himself as capable of breaking into iCloud accounts to steal photos and videos, he admitted in court papers. Chi acknowledged in court papers that he and his unnamed co-conspirators used a foreign encrypted email service to communicate with each other anonymously. When they came across nude photos and videos stored in victims' iCloud accounts, they called them "wins," which they collected and shared with one another. "I don't even know who was involved," Chi said Thursday in a brief phone conversation. He expressed fear that public exposure of his crimes would "ruin my whole life."

The scam started to unravel In March 2018. A California company that specializes in removing celebrity photos from the internet notified an unnamed public figure in Tampa, Fla., that nude photos of the person had been posted on pornographic websites, according to [FBI agent Anthony Bossone]. The victim had stored the nude photos on an iPhone and backed them up to iCloud. Investigators soon discovered that a log-in to the victim's iCloud account had come from an internet address at Chi's house in La Puente, Bossone said. The FBI got a search warrant and raided the house May 19. By then, agents had already gathered a clear picture of Chi's online life from a vast trove of records that they obtained from Dropbox, Google, Apple, Facebook and Charter Communications. On Aug. 5, Chi agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four crimes.

For months, Apple and Google have been fighting a bill in the South Korean legislature that they say could imperil their lucrative app store businesses. The companies have appealed directly to South Korean lawmakers, government officials and the public to try to block the legislation, which is expected to face a crucial vote this week. From a report: The companies have also turned to an unlikely ally, one that is also trying to quash their power: the United States government. A group funded by the companies has urged trade officials in Washington to push back on the legislation, arguing that targeting American firms could violate a joint trade agreement.

The South Korean legislation would be the first law in the world to require companies that operate app stores to let users in Korea pay for in-app purchases using a variety of payment systems. It would also prohibit blocking developers from listing their products on other app stores. How the White House responds to this proposal poses an early test for the Biden administration: Will it defend tech companies facing antitrust scrutiny abroad while it applies that same scrutiny to the companies at home?

Washington has a longstanding practice of opposing foreign laws that discriminate against American firms, sometimes even when doing so conflicts with domestic policy debates. But President Biden wants a consistent approach to his concerns about the tech giants' incredible power over commerce, communications and news. In July he signed an executive order to spur competition in the industry, and his top two antitrust appointees have long been vocal critics of the companies. The approach the White House chooses may have widespread implications for the industry, and for the shape of the internet around the world.

According to 9to5Mac, Apple has confirmed that it's already been scanning iCloud Mail for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), and has been doing so since 2019. It has not, however, been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups, which sent the internet into a frenzy when it announced its intents to begin doing so. From the report: The clarification followed me querying a rather odd statement by the company's anti-fraud chief [Eric Friedman]: that Apple was "the greatest platform for distributing child porn." That immediately raised the question: If the company wasn't scanning iCloud photos, how could it know this? [...] Apple confirmed to me that it has been scanning outgoing and incoming iCloud Mail for CSAM attachments since 2019. Email is not encrypted, so scanning attachments as mail passes through Apple servers would be a trivial task. Apple also indicated that it was doing some limited scanning of other data, but would not tell me what that was, except to suggest that it was on a tiny scale. It did tell me that the "other data" does not include iCloud backups.

Although Friedman's statement sounds definitive -- like it's based on hard data -- it's now looking likely that it wasn't. It's our understanding that the total number of reports Apple makes to CSAM each year is measured in the hundreds, meaning that email scanning would not provide any kind of evidence of a large-scale problem on Apple servers. The explanation probably lays in the fact that other cloud services were scanning photos for CSAM, and Apple wasn't. If other services were disabling accounts for uploading CSAM, and iCloud Photos wasn't (because the company wasn't scanning there), then the logical inference would be that more CSAM exists on Apple's platform than anywhere else. Friedman was probably doing nothing more than reaching that conclusion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai: A group of Apple workers has announced a campaign to improve working conditions within the company. On Monday, company employees launched a Twitter account called Apple Workers to gather stories from colleagues about workplace issues such as "persistent patterns of racism, sexism, inequity, discrimination, intimidation, suppression, coercion, abuse, unfair punishment, and unchecked privilege." The account links to a website that contains the campaign's announcement as well as a link to join it.

"We've exhausted all internal avenues. We've talked with our leadership. We've gone to the People team. We've escalated through Business Conduct. Nothing has changed," the announcement read. "It's time to Think Different." "Connect with us to share your own experience, stay informed, or unite in solidarity with other current or former Apple workers. United, we can collaborate to iterate a healthier workplace," the announcement continued. "We are working together to craft a statement on our behalf, reflecting our stories and an outline of changes we expect to see Apple make."

The site also links to a "Wage Transparency Survey," an initiative led by Cher Scarlett, an Apple employee who has recently organized an internal survey to find out if there are wage gaps inside the company. "Apple colleagues of all types -- we are gathering in solidarity to push Apple to change internally," Scarlett wrote on Twitter. The Apple employees are organizing in part on Discord channel, according to the person who runs the channel, who goes by Fudge. The person described themselves as a former Apple Authorized Service Providers employee, and asked to remain anonymous. Fudge said that the Discord channel has around 200 current and former employees.

Apple TV+ has released a nearly three-minute long trailer for its upcoming series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.

Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning." A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life...

The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire...

The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.

"What seemed like a small update has, for some, turned into a huge headache," reports ZDNet: Over on Apple's support forum, there are several threads from users complaining that iOS 14.7.1 broke their iPhones, causing a "no service" problem where users are unable to connect to cell service. Ther">e are similar threads on Apple's developer forums as well.

While there doesn't seem to be a pattern to which phones are affected, I've seen reports of everything from the iPhone 6 to iPhone 12 affected, and the cause is clear — upgrading to iOS 14.7.1.
"Users are saying that restarting the phone, removing the SIM, and even resetting network settings didn't help," according to 9to5Mac (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader antdude).

Forbes reports the bug appears to happen when you lose your cellular connection and switch to WiFi calling, "so those living in areas with good reception may never see it. Of course, this scenario also helps to mask the scale of iPhones which might be affected." If you haven't upgraded to iOS 14.7.1 yet, this potentially crippling flaw could (understandably) put you off upgrading. The problem is that the release also contains a critical fix for a new zero-day security flaw...

An explanation for Apple's controversial decision to begin scanning iPhones for CSAM has been found in a 2020 statement by Apple's anti-fraud chief. Eric Friedman stated, in so many words, that "we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn." The revelation does, however, raise the question: How could Apple have known this if it wasn't scanning iCloud accounts...? 9to5Mac reports: The iMessage thread was spotted by the Verge as it works its way through the internal emails, messages, and other materials handed over by Apple as part of the discovery process in the Epic Games lawsuit. Ironically, Friedman actually suggests that Facebook does a better job of detecting it than Apple did: "The spotlight at Facebook etc. is all on trust and safety (fake accounts, etc). In privacy, they suck. Our priorities are the inverse. Which is why we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn, etc."

A fellow exec queries this, asking whether it can really be true: "Really? I mean, is there a lot of this in our ecosystem? I thought there were even more opportunities for bad actors on other file sharing systems." Friedman responds with the single word, "Yes." The document is unsurprisingly labeled "Highly confidential -- attorneys' eyes only."

The stunning revelation may well be explained by the fact that iCloud photo storage is on by default, even if it's just the paltry 5GB the company gives everyone as standard. This means the service may be the most-used cloud service for photos -- in contrast to competing ones where users have to opt in. Apple has said that it has been looking at the CSAM problem for some time, and was trying to figure out a privacy-protecting way to detect it. It may well be this specific conversation that led the company to prioritize these efforts.

For more than a year, an active member of a community that traded in illicitly obtained internal Apple documents and devices was also acting as an informant for the company. An anonymous reader shares a report: On Twitter and in Discord channels for the loosely defined Apple "internal" community that trades leaked information and stolen prototypes, he advertised leaked apps, manuals, and stolen devices for sale. But unbeknownst to other members in the community, he shared with Apple personal information of people who sold stolen iPhone prototypes from China, Apple employees who leaked information online, journalists who had relationships with leakers and sellers, and anything that he thought the company would find interesting and worth investigating. Andrey Shumeyko, also known as YRH04E and JVHResearch online, decided to share his story because he felt that Apple took advantage of him and should have compensated him for providing the company this information.

"Me coming forward is mostly me finally realizing that that relationship never took into consideration my side and me as a person," Shumeyko told Motherboard. Shumeyko shared several pieces of evidence to back up his claims, including texts and an email thread between him and an Apple email address for the company's Global Security team. Motherboard checked that the emails are legitimate by analyzing their headers, which show Shumeyko received a reply from servers owned by Apple, according to online records. Shumeyko said he established a relationship with Apple's anti-leak team -- officially called Global Security -- after he alerted them of a potential phishing campaign against some Apple Store employees in 2017. Then, in mid-2020, he tried to help Apple investigate one of its worst leaks in recent memory, and became a "mole," as he put it. Last year, months before the official release of Apple's mobile operating system iOS 14, iPhone hackers got their hands on a leaked early version.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a system that would scan iPhone and iPad photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The announcement sparked a civil liberties firestorm, and Apple's own employees have been expressing alarm. The company insists reservations about the system are rooted in "misunderstandings." We disagree.

We wrote the only peer-reviewed publication on how to build a system like Apple's -- and we concluded the technology was dangerous. We're not concerned because we misunderstand how Apple's system works. The problem is, we understand exactly how it works.

Our research project began two years ago, as an experimental system to identify CSAM in end-to-end-encrypted online services. As security researchers, we know the value of end-to-end encryption, which protects data from third-party access. But we're also horrified that CSAM is proliferating on encrypted platforms. And we worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM.

We sought to explore a possible middle ground, where online services could identify harmful content while otherwise preserving end-to-end encryption. The concept was straightforward: If someone shared material that matched a database of known harmful content, the service would be alerted. If a person shared innocent content, the service would learn nothing. People couldn't read the database or learn whether content matched, since that information could reveal law enforcement methods and help criminals evade detection.

But we encountered a glaring problem.

Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn't restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser. About the authors of this report: Jonathan Mayer is an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. He previously served as technology counsel to then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris and as chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau. Anunay Kulshrestha is a graduate researcher at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy and a PhD candidate in the department of computer science.

More than 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter on Thursday urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children's messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse. From a report: "Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children," the groups wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. The largest campaign to date over an encryption issue at a single company was organized by the U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). Some overseas signatories in particular are worried about the impact of the changes in nations with different legal systems, including some already hosting heated fights over encryption and privacy.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is calling Apple's plan to scan photos on user devices to detect known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) a "dangerous precedent" that "could be misused when Apple and its partners come under outside pressure from governments or other powerful actors." They join the EFF, whistleblower Edward Snowden, and many other privacy and human rights advocates in condemning the move. Advocacy Director Parker Higgins writes: Very broadly speaking, the privacy invasions come from situations where "false positives" are generated -- that is to say, an image or a device or a user is flagged even though there are no sexual abuse images present. These kinds of false positives could happen if the matching database has been tampered with or expanded to include images that do not depict child abuse, or if an adversary could trick Apple's algorithm into erroneously matching an existing image. (Apple, for its part, has said that an accidental false positive -- where an innocent image is flagged as child abuse material for no reason -- is extremely unlikely, which is probably true.) The false positive problem most directly touches on press freedom issues when considering that first category, with adversaries that can change the contents of the database that Apple devices are checking files against. An organization that could add leaked copies of its internal records, for example, could find devices that held that data -- including, potentially, whistleblowers and journalists who worked on a given story. This could also reveal the extent of a leak if it is not yet known. Governments that could include images critical of its policies or officials could find dissidents that are exchanging those files.
[...]
Journalists, in particular, have increasingly relied on the strong privacy protections that Apple has provided even when other large tech companies have not. Apple famously refused to redesign its software to open the phone of an alleged terrorist -- not because they wanted to shield the content on a criminal's phone, but because they worried about the precedent it would set for other people who rely on Apple's technology for protection. How is this situation any different? No backdoor for law enforcement will be safe enough to keep bad actors from continuing to push it open just a little bit further. The privacy risks from this system are too extreme to tolerate. Apple may have had noble intentions with this announced system, but good intentions are not enough to save a plan that is rotten at its core.

NicknamesAreStupid writes: As a follow-up to [last week's story about a large homeless encampment growing on the site Apple earmarked for its North San Jose campus], Apple appears to be using the promise of building affordable homes as a part of moving the current homeless encampment out. [According to Patently Apple, "Apple is preparing construction activities at its huge north San Jose office campus, a move that could bring thousands of jobs to the mixed-use tech hub." The company says it "would spend millions to reach out to and relocate residents of a homeless encampment that has formed on the company's land." Specific plans and details have yet to be released.]

This raises the question: will companies revert to a new form of "company town" used by the coal and oil companies during the 20th century? Instead of villages in remote locations, will tech companies build urban islands of homes for employees, effectively subsidizing their housing in a manner similar to subsidized healthcare of the mid-twentieth century? Of course, the catch is that if you leave the company, you lose your home.