California's top cops seem to have obtained a questionable warrant request to enter a residence and force anyone inside to use biometric information to open their fingerprint-locked iPhones purely on the assumption they'll learn more after they access the phones, Forbes reported this morning.
Deemed as “an unprecedented attempt to bypass the security of Apple's iPhones,” Forbes found a court filing in which the Department of Justice sought to search a Lancaster, California, property.
British newspaper The Telegraph reported yesterday that the Apple Watch has been banned from government cabinet meetings after ministers warned wearable devices could be vulnerable to hacking by state-sponsored spies. Smartphones, too, have been barred from cabinet meetings because of similar concerns, with one source saying that “the Russians are trying to hack everything.”
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) looked into “legal and technical options” for breaking into another terrorists's iPhone. Wired reports that potential prospect of a second legal showdown between Apple and the Bureau was raised in a statement issued today by the FBI.
Following months of back and forth between Apple and Ireland's independent planning body An Bord Pleanála, plans for a massive $1 billion data center in Galway County have been approved, reports Business Insider. “Despite opposition from a number of individuals and local businesses,” Apple's been granted the go-ahead to build the first stage of the data center on a 197-hectare site.
The facility will support Apple’s online services for customers in Europe, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri.
Apple is one step closer to opening first-party retail stores in India, its increasingly significant market with population of 1.3 billion people, with a new Bloomberg report claiming that India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley has approved a proposal that clarifies how Apple could open retail stores without initially having to source components locally.
Last month, the cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved a three-year extension on local-sourcing rules that require foreign firms wanting to run their own local retail stores to source at least 30 percent of components within the populous country.
Reuters reports that Apple is currently under fire in South Korea as the country's antitrust regulator launches an investigation into “some matters”, without disclosing further details. Jeong Jae-chan, the head of the anti-competition body, said during a parliamentary hearing Tuesday that the agency was taking a closer look at Apple's business practices in the country.
According to local media, the agency was reviewing details of Apple's contracts with South Korean wireless carriers earlier this month.
The government of India has relaxed its strict rules on foreign direct investments, which stipulate that 30 percent of goods sold by foreign companies must be manufactured or produced within India, paving the way for Apple's retail expansion in the 1.25 billion people market. Acording to The Times of India on Monday, Apple should benefit from a new three-year relaxation on local sourcing norms.
The government of India has said 'no' to Apple's request to import used iPhones into the country, LiveMint reported today. The move comes hot on the heels of the finance ministry's decision to rejecte a recommendation from the commerce ministry to waive the 30 percent local sourcing norm for Apple to sell refurbished iPhones in its own branded stores in India.
“We are not in favour of any company selling used phones in the company, however certified they may be,” said commerce and industry minister, Nirmala Sitharaman.
The Indian government has turned down Apple's request to sell refurbished iPhones in the country after Samsung and local phone vendors voiced their opposition to the move on environmental grounds, Bloomberg reported today.
This is a setback for the Cupertino firm: its iPhone has a minuscule two percent markets share in India, where half of the population is about 25 years old.
Apple declined to provide Chinese officials with access to iOS source code, General counsel Bruce Sewell said on Tuesday at a subcommittee hearing on encryption. "We have been asked by the Chinese government. We refused."
Sewell said the request had come in the last two years, and noted several times that Apple has not cooperated with China on that level. Some lawmakers have questioned whether or not Apple has given the country special treatment.
Canadian police have been in possession of a BlackBerry's global decryption key since 2010, reports Vice. The site says recently released court documents reveal that the key was used in a criminal investigation to intercept over 1 million BBM messages.
The documents were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 murder, and they shine some light on the extent that BlackBerry, as well as telco giant Rogers, is willing to cooperate with investigators.
James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of iPhones—that is, Investigation—confirmed in an interview with CNN yesterday that a tool that the agency had purchased from a third-party to unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook's iPhone 5c cannot be used to bypass security protections on newer models, from the iPhone 5s onward.
This implies the tool relies on the fact that the iPhone 5c and earlier models lack hardware features like the Secure Enclave embedded in Apple's mobile processors (from the iPhone 5s's A7 chip and onward) which keeps encrypted sensitive information and stuff like the number of passcode attempts isolated from the rest of the system.