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Your Kids’ iPhones May Be the Most Dangerous Things They Own

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What’s an acceptable level of online child sexual abuse, blackmail, and sextortion? How many teen suicides must happen before someone acts? Most parents would say the answer is obvious: zero.

Apple doesn’t seem to agree. Despite serving as the constant digital companion for millions of American kids, the company has done nothing to rein in the iMessage app — a tool that now functions as an unregulated playground for child predators. Apple has shrugged off the problem while iMessage becomes the wild west of child exploitation: unchecked, unreported, and deadly.

You wouldn’t leave a toddler alone by the pool. You wouldn’t hand your 9-year-old the keys to a pickup. And when you drive that truck, you don’t let your kid ride on the hood. But every day, parents hand their children a device that could be just as dangerous: the iPhone.

That device follows them everywhere — to school, to bed, into the darkest corners of the internet. The threat doesn’t just come from YouTube or TikTok. It’s baked into iMessage itself — the default communication tool on every iPhone, the one parents use to text their kids.

Unlike social media platforms or games, iMessage gives parents almost no tools to limit its use or increase safety. No meaningful restrictions. No guardrails. No accountability. (Read more from “Your Kids’ iPhones May Be the Most Dangerous Things They Own” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

Have an iPhone? Millions of Users Warned to Change Settings Now

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Apple released an emergency security update Thursday, disclosing that there were vulnerabilities for certain iPhone, iPad and Mac products.

These vulnerabilities were disclosed in a software update, which the company said should safeguard the products.

The first issue involved the potential for an application to execute arbitrary code with “kernel privileges,” which refers to a discrete right to perform an operation.

The second issue, according to Apple, was in WebKit, which is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages.

Apple said it was “aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.” The issue could allow a potential attacker to take complete control of these devices. (Read more from “Have an iPhone? Millions of Users Warned to Change Settings Now” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

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Apple Removes Facebook’s Security App From the App Store

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Apple has removed Facebook’s Onavo security app from the App Store because it does not comply with its privacy rules.

“We work hard to protect user privacy and data security throughout the Apple ecosystem,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Wednesday. “With the latest update to our guidelines, we made it explicitly clear that apps should not collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing and must make it clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used.”

According to a Wall Street Journal story on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter, Apple officials told Facebook last week that Onavo violated the company’s rules on data collection by developers, and suggested last Thursday that Facebook voluntarily remove the app.

Facebook acquired Israel-based Onavo in 2013, snapping up the free security app that lets users access a virtual private network, or VPN, to browse the web and download apps with a greater degree of privacy. Facebook in the past has offered that service to users without clearly disclosing that it owns the app, and has collected data about what other types of apps those customers use.

In June, Facebook told Congress that it does not use Onavo data “for Facebook product uses” or to collect information about individuals, but it has admitted to using Onavo to gather broad information about which apps are popular and how people are using them, which it uses to improve its own products. (Read more from “Apple Removes Facebook’s Security App From the App Store” HERE)

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With IPhone’s New FaceID, Cops Can Unlock Your Phone by Pointing at Your Face—While You’re Cuffed

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On Tuesday, the world watched as Apple unveiled their tenth-anniversary special edition iPhone, the iPhone X. While iPhone boasts a newer more secure phone—using its patented new facial recognition system—Internet sleuths were quick to point out the ominous implications behind the new tech.

As RT reports, the iPhone X replaces the iconic “home” button, featured on all previous versions, with a new “TrueDepth camera system.” A little black bar at the top of the phone contains several sensors, cameras, and even a dot projector that all work together to create a mathematical 3D model of the owner’s face.

However, there are some ways this technology can actually be used against you.

Imagine for a moment, you are one of the countless individuals who just filmed a gruesome act of police brutality. Many of those countless individuals, as TFTP has frequently reported, have found themselves subject to unlawful detainment and illegal search and seizure as cops attempt to erase any evidence of their wrongdoing. Now, imagine that the only thing standing in the way of a coverup of an innocent person being killed by police is the password on your phone to protect the video from police deleting it.

A secure phone, at this moment, is the only thing that can protect the documented evidence of criminal behavior. Luckily—for the police—if you have a new iPhone X, all they theoretically need to do is to handcuff you and point it at your face. Now they have access to all of your private information.

Think police won’t try to delete your video? Think again.

Just last week, in an exclusive report, TFTP exposed a case of alleged deleted evidence in Lincoln Parish, Louisiana, after a police officer killed a deaf electrical engineer. A security guard said he watched and filmed police kill Josh Cloud—an account which differs greatly from the official story—and he was detained and his video deleted.

Had his phone been locked and had the security guard resisted alleged police pressure to confiscate his phone, evidence of a police murder may still exist. However, if he had an iPhone X, even if he would’ve resisted, they need only point it at his face.

“With the iPhone X, your iPhone is locked until you look at it and it recognizes you. Nothing has ever been more simple, natural and effortless,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing said in his keynote speech Tuesday. “This is the future of how we’ll unlock our smartphones and protect our sensitive information.”

However, as many have pointed out, this simplicity is the device’s potential downfall.

This abuse, as Snowden points out, can come in many forms.

While some folks expressed concern that the iPhone X will allow someone to unlock your iPhone while you sleep, Apple directly countered that claim, noting that the feature will only work when the user looks at the device with their eyes open. Schiller also explained that FaceID will recognize a user even when they change their hairstyle, put on glasses, wear a hat or change their appearance in other ways—perhaps when an unconscious person has their eyes pulled open.

The good news, however, is that while this technology has these ominous implications for abuse, it is far more secure than any of the previous devices. According to Schiller, the Touch ID had a false unlock rate of one in 50,000, whereas the new FaceID only had an error rate of one in 1 million.

Apple also has an extensive history of resisting the police state attempts at creating back doors to their technology. Just last year, in a landmark case, Apple refused to help the government break the law and allow for the various spy agencies to monitor iPhone users with a special decryption key for the State.

Had the government successfully forced Apple into unlocking the phone or creating a backdoor to their encryption, experts in the technology field warned that this could be the end of privacy as we know it. For now, however, privacy is still winning—that is, until we see the first case of police unlocking an iPhone X by pointing at a handcuffed person’s face. (For more from the author of “With IPhone’s New FaceID, Cops Can Unlock Your Phone by Pointing at Your Face—While You’re Cuffed” please click HERE)

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Snowden: NSA Has Hidden Software Compromising All iPhones

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Photo Credit: Tech Times Edward Snowden, the infamous former contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked thousands of pages of previously classified NSA intelligence documents, reportedly thinks that Apple’s iPhone has “special software” that authorities can activate remotely to be able to gather information about the user.

“Edward never uses an iPhone; he’s got a simple phone,” said the lawyer of Snowden, Anatoly Kucherena, in an interview with the Russian media company RIA Novosti.

“The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him; that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone,” Kucherena added.

It is not clear if the “special software” being referred to in the interview is made up of standard diagnostic tools, or if the NSA whistleblower thinks intelligence agencies from the United States have found a way to compromise the mobile operating system developed by Apple.

Apple was among the first companies accused of participating in the PRISM data mining project of the NSA, following the release by Snowden of the agency’s classified documents. The project reportedly involved extracting video, audio, pictures, documents, emails and connection logs from devices, allowing analysts to track the movement of the device’s user and the communications that they are receiving or sending out. (Read more about why NSA has hidden software embedded in all iPhones HERE)

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Court Rules Police Can Force Users to Unlock iPhones With Fingerprints, But Not Passcodes

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A Circuit Court judge in Virginia has ruled that fingerprints are not protected by the Fifth Amendment, a decision that has clear privacy implications for fingerprint-protected devices like newer iPhones and iPads.

According to Judge Steven C. Fucci, while a criminal defendant can’t be compelled to hand over a passcode to police officers for the purpose of unlocking a cellular device, law enforcement officials can compel a defendant to give up a fingerprint.

The Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which protects memorized information like passwords and passcodes, but it does not extend to fingerprints in the eyes of the law, as speculated by Wired last year.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hundreds, More than a Thousand, Sleep Outside NYC’s Main Apple Store for iPhone 6

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Photo Credit: Showbiz 411If you’d told me this story I wouldn’t have believed it. But on Thursday night, walking from a screening of “Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain” to dinner at Todd English’s Food Hall in the Plaza Hotel, we were gobsmacked. More than a thousand people are lined up, with sleeping bags, for the 8am release of the NEW IPHONE 6. The line goes from Madison Avenue and 59th St. to Fifth Avenue in front of the tony Cipriani restaurant, then jumps onto the plaza in front of FAO Schwarz, next to Apple.

Along the 59th St. queue, it is mostly Asians. There are some Europeans, and no Americans from what we could tell. In some cases there were whole families. No one could adequately explain what the heck they were doing sleeping outside on a Manhattan street. The IPHONE 6 is not very different than the iPhone 6. It’s certainly not different enough to do this.

We surmised that most of the people were buying more than one iPhone, with the expectation of selling a few for big bucks. Especially overseas. One young man from Belgium could not say why he wanted the 6, since he already had the 5. “I just want it,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple’s iPhone, the New International Currency

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Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesI’ve been paying my bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites—I’ve been using the Apple (AAPL) hardware as currency.

It started by accident in December, during a business trip to New York. I live in Rome, where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the U.S. goes for €839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month’s wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard I was visiting the States, she asked me to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she’d done. Lining up inside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, I was surrounded by shoppers speaking languages from around the world. The salesman looked stunned when I said I wanted an unlocked iPhone. Just one?

A new shipment of unlocked 5s phones had just come in, he said, adding that the gold model I asked for was the most popular in Europe and the easiest to resell. To my right, a man with a credit card from a Saudi bank was trying to buy his third and fourth phones of the day. “Make it two,” I said. There was one more step: The salesman grabbed a landline from behind the counter to connect me with my bank’s antifraud department. Purchases from this store, he said, are red flags.

Do the math, and that’s no surprise. Exiting the store with my plastic Apple shopping bag secured by a rope drawstring, I no longer thought of the phones inside as appliances. They were more like gold bars.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple Denies Allowing NSA to Spy on iPhones

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Apple on Tuesday strongly denied knowledge of an alleged National Security Agency program that allows the government to penetrate and spy on iPhones.

“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products,” the company said in a statement.

Apple’s denial follows a string of reports in Der Spiegel about the NSA’s highly classified hacking arm, called Tailored Access Operations. That unit has worked, according to the German magazine, to exploit weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows, Cisco’s routers and Apple’s iPhones — the latter through a program codenamed DROPOUTJEEP, which may have allowed the NSA to tap into older versions of the device’s operating system. Separately, a security researcher this week raised questions that Apple may have assisted the NSA.

Read more from this story HERE.

Chinese Couple Sold Baby to Pay for iPhone

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Photo Credit: EPAAn unemployed couple will stand trial in Shanghai for allegedly selling their baby and using the proceeds to bankroll an online shopping spree, including the purchase of an iPhone.

The couple, named only as Mr Teng and Ms Zhang, began posting online adverts for the child in June this year, Shanghai’s Jiefang Daily newspaper reported on Friday. The adverts suggested they would be willing to part with their unborn baby in exchange for up to 50,000 yuan (£5,070).

After a home birth, designed to cover-up the crime, they handed over the baby girl and received a large cash payment into their bank account on the very same day.

Mr Teng and Ms Zhang reportedly told prosecutors they were acting in their daughter’s best interests, claiming they had hoped to place her with a financially stable family who could provide an education.

“We did not give the baby away for money but in order to give it more security,” they were quoted as saying.

Read more from this story HERE.