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“In Apple’s first 40 years it shipped 1,591,092,250 computers,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “This shipment total is higher than any other computer company in its first 40 years. Actually there are no other PC makers that are 40 years old. One computer maker (IBM) is older but they only sold PCs for 24 years and what they still sell they don’t sell in high numbers.” Dediu writes, “Combining the history of customer creation and customer preservation with the value obtained from each customer implies that the next 40 years will be about creating another large tranche of customers whose...

Running Windows 7. Plugged in my iphone to download some work photos, and an update from Apple popped up to update itunes and video software. I started the download and my AVG business antivirus detected the win32/herz virus and deleted it. Checking on the name and it appears to be a particularly nasty virus. If any Apple fans on here know how to notify Apple, I'll be glad to send the URL link. It starts with swcdn.apple.com/... and seems to be a legitimate link.

Almost as soon as Apple added “emoji” to its iPhone, the feature became a political football. Various groups complained that their skin tone or their flag or their lifestyle wasn’t included in the set of mini graphics that can be sent in a text message. And so, Apple has been diligently adding options in the name of supporting diversity. After getting complaints that the human-looking emoji were all yellow, Apple last year made it possible to pick the skin tone of most faces. For example, there are now six shades of Santa Clause from which to choose. And, to add...

Apple won a major victory in its showdown with the government when the US Justice Department (DOJ) abandoned its plans on Monday to force the company to write software to bypass iPhone security measures. The Justice Department told a federal court on Monday that it no longer needed Apple's help to access data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, and requested that its original order for Apple's technical assistance be withdrawn. According to the DOJ, the reason it withdrew is because it was successfully able to access the data on the iPhone without Apple's help....

The U.S. Justice Department announced Monday it has successfully accessed data stored on the iPhone that belonged to the San Bernardino gunman without Apple's help, ending the court case against the tech company. The surprise development effectively ends a pitched court battle between Apple and the Obama administration. The government told a federal court Monday, without any details, that it accessed data on gunman Syed Farook's iPhone and no longer requires Apple's assistance.

Foxnews announced FBI has broken into San Bernadino terrorist phone without aid from apple.

Apple announces plans to hand over iCloud encryption key management to users Apple has announced its plans to transfer iCloud encryption key management to account holders, a move which could stand in the way of or even prevent the FBI and other law enforcement agencies from requesting users' information.The tech giant currently manages the encryption key management for all iCloud account holders.eWeek reports that because of this level of control, Apple provided federal authorities with several iCloud backups of Syed Rizwan Farook, an individual who participated in a mass shooting and attempted bombing in San Bernardino, California back in December....

The iMessage vulnerability got a lot of attention, but another bug allows for remote execution over Wi-Fi, which is a much bigger threat. Apple released new versions of several operating system products earlier this week, fixing vulnerabilities in OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 among others. Because encryption and Apple are big news these days, the attention mostly went to an admittedly interesting flaw in Apple's encryption for iMessage, reported by a research team, led by well-known cryptographer Matthew Green. But the bug is not an easy one to exploit and doesn't even expose a lot. There are much...

"all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer" So the only thing preventing a more general purpose quantum computer is money and enough engineers... Hmm... (POLL-AT-LINK) Via: PC World: Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes. In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or...

An Obama Administration regulation may require the FBI to hand over the hack developed by what ever company that may succeed in hacking into the San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone 5c, so that Apple can plug that vulnerability. What irony. . . Link only due to copyright considerations: Thank You for Hacking iPhone, Now Tell Apple How You Did It (link only due to copyright issues)

Washington (AFP) - The FBI Thursday defended the handling of its legal battle with Apple over encryption following an abrupt retreat from its bid to force the tech giant to help unlock an attacker's iPhone. FBI director James Comey said his agency only decided to back down from its efforts after it found an outside party that appeared to have the ability to extract data from the handset without Apple's help. Comey made the comments in a statement, which was also posted as a letter to the Wall Street Journal, responding to an editorial critical of the government's handling of...

Israel's Cellebrite, a provider of mobile forensic software, is helping the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's attempt to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Wednesday. If Cellebrite succeeds, then the FBI will no longer need the help of Apple Inc (AAPL.O), the Israeli daily said, citing unnamed industry sources. Cellebrite officials declined to comment on the matter. Apple is engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. Justice Department over a judge's order that it write new software to disable passcode protection on the iPhone used by the...

On Monday, less than 24 hours before the hearing was scheduled to start, the US government asked to cancel its big court date in the Apple vs FBI fight. The judge convened a quick conference with the Department of Justice and Apple attorneys. A transcript shows the judge repeatedly emphasizing that the order to compel Apple to create a backdoor for the government is “unenforceable” and has been so since the court battle began weeks ago.The March 22 hearing was set to be an all-out battle. Both sides planned to call witnesses, with one to two hours of live...

The Associated Press — The Supreme Court has agreed to referee a pricy patent dispute between Samsung and Apple. The justices said Monday they will review a $399 million judgment against South Korea-based Samsung for illegally copying patented aspects of the look of Apple's iPhone. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, and Samsung are the top two manufacturers of increasingly ubiquitous smartphones. The two companies have been embroiled in patent fights for years. The justices will decide whether a court can order Samsung to pay Apple every penny it made from the phones at issue, even though the disputed features are...

Here's Zdziarski's possible explanation ... [Most of the tech experts I’ve heard from believe the same as I do – that NAND mirroring is likely being used to some degree to brute force the pin on the device. This is where the NAND chip is typically desoldered, dumped into a file (likely by a chip reader/programmer, which is like a cd burner for chips), and then copied so that if the device begins to wipe or delay after five or ten tries, they can just re-write the original image back to the chip. This technique is kind of like cheating...

Just because Apple and the FBI avoided an historic showdown in court this week over a previously issued court order for Apple to create a so-called “government OS” that bypasses normal iPhone security measures, that doesn’t mean the whole thing was tidily wrapped up.For one thing, no legislative precedent was set here – at the eleventh hour, the FBI said it thinks a mysterious outside party (which may have now been identified) will be able to help it get inside an iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino shooters – leaving the law enforcement agency free to pursue a...

The FBI being apparently assisted by an Israeli tech firm in its efforts to unlock the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook — a perpetrator of December’s attacks in San Bernardino, Calif. Apple has been steadfast in its refusal to aid the FBI in accessing the phone’s information, saying that doing so would breach privacy rights, but U.S. prosecutors said on Monday that a “nongovernmental third party” had provided them with a solution. On Wednesday, the English-language version of Israeli news website Ynet.co.il, in an article that featured reporting from Reuters, ventured that the “third party” in question is Cellebrite,...

Apple has quickly released a patch for a flaw in its encryption capability for the iOS mobile and OS X desktop operating systems which could allow attackers to unscramble protected iMessage photos and videos. First reported by the Washington Post, a group of researchers led by cryptographer Matthew Green at John Hopkins University discovered they could intercept iMessage content stored in Apple's iCloud by brute-force guessing the encryption key. With the encryption key at hand, attackers could retrieve files from iCloud accounts without users knowing. Attackers would need to be able to bypass Apple’s TLS certificate pinning, which associates the...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The Justice Department moved to cancel a Tuesday hearing over whether Apple should be forced to help investigators break into an iPhone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting, saying it might no longer need Apple’s assistance to extract data from the device. In a new court filing on Monday, Justice Department lawyers wrote that as of Sunday, an outside party had demonstrated a way for the F.B.I. to possibly unlock the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino gunmen. “Testing is required to determine whether it is...

A pair of House committees is forming a bipartisan working group of eight lawmakers to prepare for possible legislation addressing how the widespread use of encryption affects law enforcement investigations. "The bipartisan encryption working group will examine the issues surrounding this ongoing national debate," House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton. R-Mich., said Monday. As chairman of the two committees that have jurisdiction over encryption issues, Goodlatte and Upton are ex officio chairs of the working group. They released that statement jointly along with Michigan Rep. John Conyers and New Jersey Rep. Steve...