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Apple CEO Hides Behind Staffers as He’s Grilled for Enabling Communist China’s Human Rights Abuses

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Apple CEO Tim Cook hid behind staffers Tuesday to avoid answering questions from a reporter who grilled him on Apple enabling the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses.

Cook hid from Fox News reporter Hillary Vaughn as he was leaving a meeting with U.S. lawmakers in the nation’s capital.

“Do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest?” Vaughn asked.

Cook did not respond.

(Read more from “Apple CEO Hides Behind Staffers as He’s Grilled for Enabling Communist China’s Human Rights Abuses” HERE)

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Musk Claims Dispute With Tech Giant Over Twitter’s Potential Removal From App Store ‘Resolved’

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that he and Apple CEO Tim Cook met Wednesday and claimed to have resolved a dispute over the social media site’s presence on the tech giant’s App Store.

“Good conversation,” Musk posted on Twitter two and a half hours after he tweeted a five-second video showing a pond at Apple’s headquarters. “Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

Musk claimed Monday that Apple threatened to boot Twitter from the App Store, targeting Cook in a series of tweets, as well as amplifying a claim from LBRY, a content creation site, about censorship. Musk noted that the option of designing a smartphone was on the table if Twitter was removed from the app stores of Apple and Google.

(Read more from “Musk Claims Dispute With Tech Giant Over Twitter’s Potential Removal From App Store ‘Resolved’” HERE)

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Apple Watch Saves Life of Woman With Heart Tumor: ‘It Truly Saved My Life’

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A woman from Maine is now recovering from surgery to remove what would have been a deadly heart tumor, and she has Apple Watch to thank for her new lease on life.

Kim Durkee, 67, said that for three nights in a row back in May, her Apple Watch alerted her that she may be in atrial fibrillation, otherwise known as an abnormal heart arrythmia. At first, she dismissed the alerts and presumed that the watch may have been malfunctioning.

“The third night, the numbers went a little too high for comfort,” Durkee said. “Then I said, ‘You know what? Go to the emergency room. If they tell you it’s nothing to worry about, then toss the watch.”

Though she had no other symptoms, she visited local doctors in Maine, who confirmed that she was, indeed, in atrial fibrillation. And the cause of the A-fib nearly floored her: a myxoma, a rare tumor that forms in primitive connective tissue, usually in the heart. In Durkee’s case, the myxoma had obstructed blood flow in her heart, causing the arrythmia. If gone undetected, it would’ve likely resulted in a stroke. (Read more from “Apple Watch Saves Life of Woman With Heart Tumor: ‘It Truly Saved My Life’” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

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Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

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Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp., among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing. (Read more from “Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests” HERE)

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Privacy Experts Warn Consumers Apple’s Photo-Scans May Return

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When Apple announced a new program that would scan photos in all products, from phones to tablets and more, whether the owners wanted that or not, privacy experts rose up to protest.

The company then said it would delay the program “while consulting with various groups about its impact,” according to a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But the EFF has now issued a warning that consumers should not allow themselves to become complacent about the plans for the company’s breach of privacy.

“The delay may well be a diversionary tactic,” the organization explained in a report this week. “Every September, Apple holds one of its big product announcement events, where Apple executives detail the new devices and features coming out. Apple likely didn’t want concerns about the phone-scanning features to steal the spotlight.”

The EFF said the program “poses an enormous danger to privacy and security,” and the “disastrous” idea should not be allowed to fade into the background. (Read more from “Privacy Experts Warn Consumers Apple’s Photo-Scans May Return” HERE)

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Voting App Disappears After Russia Pressures Tech Companies Ahead of Elections

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Silicon Valley companies might need to offer an explanation after a voting app created by allies of imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny vanished from Google and Apple stores on Friday.

The Russian people head to the polls on Friday to elect a new parliament. The vote lasts three days and the current party in charge, the United Russia, is anticipating a win. The app disappeared when voting started across Russia for the elections, raising concerns about what the reasoning was behind the move.

“Allies of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic opponent, planned to use the mobile app to organise a tactical voting campaign to deal a blow to United Russia,” Reuters reported.

As The Washington Post reported, “Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency, had threatened to fine the Silicon Valley giants if the app, which encourages voters to cast ballots against the party of President Vladimir Putin, was not removed. The censorship agency argued that the companies were interfering in the nation’s electoral processes.”

The top companies appeared to cave to Russian authorities instead of standing up to them, upsetting opposition allies and digital rights advocates around the world. (Read more from “Voting App Disappears After Russia Pressures Tech Companies Ahead of Elections” HERE)

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Report: Apple Compromises Privacy and Security to Cater to Communist China’s Wishes

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Apple willingly compromises certain privacy and security business practices to build a partnership with the Chinese government, a new report from the New York Times explains.

Not only does the Big Tech company store personal data of Chinese users on servers that are managed and serviced by a firm owned by the communist regime, but Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has spent years “making frequent, statesmanlike visits and meeting with top leaders” in the Asian country and caving to its wishes.

Apple often boasts that it believes “privacy is a fundamental human right,” but the company’s relationship with China seems to discard that “core value” in exchange for doing China’s bidding such as removing certain encryption technology and digital key that the communist regime disagreed with.

“We have never compromised the security of our users or their data in China or anywhere we operate,” the company said. (Read more from “Report: Apple Compromises Privacy and Security to Cater to Communist China’s Wishes” HERE)

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Developer Sues Apple for Abusing Its App Store ‘Monopoly Power’

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App developer Kosta Eleftheriou, who previously called attention to the problem of scam apps on Apple’s iOS app store, has filed a lawsuit against Apple in California accusing the company of exploiting its monopoly power over apps made available for iPhone users.

The iOS app developer Kosta Eleftheriou, who has previously called out Apple for its failure to properly police its app store and the prevalence of scam app across the platform, has filed a lawsuit against the hardware giant in California. Eleftheriou is accusing the company of exploiting its monopoly power over iOS apps “to make billions of dollars in profits at the expense of small application developers and consumers.”

A complaint was filed in Santa Clara County court on Wednesday by Eleftheriou’s company KPAW LLC, which he co-owns with his partner Ashley Eleftheriou. The complaint details the development and release timeline of Eleftheriou’s popular Apple Watch keyboard app FlickType.

Eleftheriou began highlighting the growing issue of scam apps available in the Apple App Store in February. Each of the scam apps Eleftheriou found appeared to use the same method including boosting their apparent legitimacy in the app store by purchasing fake reviews.

Eleftheriou is also of the developers of the Flesky keyboard app which was acquired by Pinterest, and Blind Type which was acquired by Google. (Read more from “Developer Sues Apple for Abusing Its App Store ‘Monopoly Power’” HERE)

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Apple Dropped Plan for Encrypting Backups After FBI Complained

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Apple Inc (AAPL.O) dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.

The long-running tug of war between investigators’ concerns about security and tech companies’ desire for user privacy moved back into the public spotlight last week, as U.S. Attorney General William Barr took the rare step of publicly calling on Apple to unlock two iPhones used by a Saudi Air Force officer who shot dead three Americans at a Pensacola, Florida naval base last month.

U.S. President Donald Trump piled on, accusing Apple on Twitter of refusing to unlock phones used by “killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements.” Republican and Democratic senators sounded a similar theme in a December hearing, threatening legislation against end-to-end encryption, citing unrecoverable evidence of crimes against children. . .

Behind the scenes, Apple has provided the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with more sweeping help, not related to any specific probe. (Read more from “Apple Dropped Plan for Encrypting Backups After FBI Complained” HERE)

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Federal Government Orders Apple, Google to Turn over Personal Data of Everyone Who Downloaded a Gun Scope App

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The federal government has asked Apple and Google to turn over the personal data of anyone who downloaded a free app used to calibrate gun scopes. . .

The app, Obsidian 4, was developed by American Technologies Network Corp (ATN). According to its Apple App Store description, it allows users to connect scopes sold by ATN to the app on their smartphone or tablet. With this, users can “watch a live video” of a hunt, as well as “adjust/change the various settings on your ATN Smart scope and review the images and videos stored on your scope[‘]s microSD card.”

This app has been downloaded “10,000+” times on Google Play. While Apple doesn’t list the number of downloads for individual apps in its App Store, their version has 74 reviews compared with Google Play’s 137 at the time of this article’s publication, suggesting that the Apple version may have had about half the number of downloads. . .

According to Forbes, the Department of Justice filed a court order on September 5 ordering both Google and Apple to give up names, phone numbers, and IP addresses of everyone who downloaded the app since Aug. 1, 2017. The document is now sealed, but Forbes managed to view it while it was briefly publicly available. (Read more from “Federal Government Orders Apple, Google to Turn over Personal Data of Everyone Who Downloaded a Gun Scope App” HERE)

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