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A Langley family is blaming tech giant Apple for a fire that destroyed their home. Cathy and Ian Finley say the fire was sparked by an iPhone 6 that was charging on a chair in their living room. “I came home and put my phone on charge in our house, went off to feed the goats and 20 minutes later I came back and there was smoke billowing from the roof of our house,” Cathy said. After a year of negotiating with their insurer, the Finleys have been awarded a $600,000 payout, which is going towards the construction of a...

Which machines triumphed in the battle between computers from the past eight decades? One computer is the size of three wardrobes and performed calculations to help build a nuclear reactor, the other is a tiny electronic board designed to teach children to code. If you had to place bets on which would prove the more powerful machine, your money would probably be on the former. However, while the first computer was built in 1951, the second was released in 2016, and in the intervening years technology has advanced so far that the supercomputers of yesteryear pale in comparison to even...

SAN ANGELO — Becca Blackman Wilcox couldn’t drive fast enough. She floored the accelerator of her 2016 Dodge Charger up to 91 mph, rushing to the safety of a police station in Brady, Texas. A few feet behind the 45-year-old’s car, headlights trailed, flashing in her rearview mirror. At 7:37 p.m. Feb. 24 the mother of nine had called 911 thinking the driver of the paper-tagged maroon Ford Explorer was intoxicated. But 20 minutes later, Wilcox was fearing for her life. Earlier that day Wilcox stopped at a San Angelo convenience store on her drive from New Mexico to Copperas...

In what appears to be a major breakthrough for law enforcement, and a possible privacy problem for Apple customers, a major U.S. government contractor claims to have found a way to unlock pretty much every iPhone on the market. Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department...

Apple releases macOS 10.13.3 supplemental update with with Telugu text bug fixes Apple has released macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 Supplemental Update with a fix to CoreText wherein a Telugu character could crash text apps. Apple addressed a memory corruption issue via improved input validation. macOS 10.13.3 Supplemental Update is available via Software Update. Apple releases iOS 11.2.6, watchOS 4.2.3, and tvOS 11.2.6 with with Telugu text bug fixes Apple has released iOS 11.2.6, watchOS 4.2.3, and tvOS 11.2.6 with fixes to CoreText wherein a Telugu character could crash text apps. Apple addressed a memory corruption issue via improved input validation....

MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, found by Princeton and NVIDIA researchers, may require significant hardware changes to be mitigated. MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, could put PCs at risk of another type of cyberattack. The MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime exploits could be harder to protect against than the original Meltdown and Spectre flaws, because of how deep their flaws exist in the processor. Security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton have discovered new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that may be more difficult to tackle than the originals. Dubbed MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, these flaws were further...

Maybe your phone is scratched up, the battery won’t hold a charge anymore, or you’re just plain sick of it. Whatever the reason, you start to shop around for a new phone, but all your budget will allow is a bland, mid-range device. So you hop online to see what kind of bargain you can pick up second hand. Someone is selling last year’s flagship iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, barely used, at a drastically lower price. You pounce and secure yourself a shiny new smartphone at a steal. The phone arrives in a couple of days, as described, and you...

Apple publicly fought the FBI in 2016 over issues related to privacy, encryption, and an iPhone used by a terrorist. Texts between FBI employees released earlier this week give a peek into how some agents saw the battle. In February 2016, as Apple and the FBI were quietly sparring over how to unlock an iPhone owned by one of the perpetrators of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, two FBI officials unrelated to the case back in Washington DC were privately discussing their distaste for Apple CEO Tim Cook. "And what makes me really angry about that Apple...

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2018 first quarter ended December 30, 2017. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $88.3 billion, an increase of 13 percent from the year-ago quarter and an all-time record, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.89, up 16 percent, also an all-time record. International sales accounted for 65 percent of the quarter’s revenue. “We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it...

One of the hardest things about being at the top of the market is staying there. Europe's antitrust regulators have accused Qualcomm of indulging in monopolistic practices by making payments to Apple, to help maintain its position as the world's largest maker of smartphone chips. The European Competition Commission is fining Qualcomm 997 million euros ($1.2 billion), representing about 5% of Qualcomm's 2017 revenues, for making payments to Apple on the condition that it wouldn't buy the chips that run its iPhones from other competitors. "Qualcomm illegally shut out rivals from the market for LTE baseband chipsets for over five...

Apple has now released Meltdown patches for its three most recent versions of the macOS operating system. Earlier this month Apple said it was working on mitigations for the Spectre vulnerability, which is said to be harder to exploit Tim CookMark Neuling - CNBC Apple on Tuesday took the next step toward protecting Mac users from recently disclosed security vulnerabilities that have been shown to affect many kinds of devices. The move brings Apple closer to being on par with Microsoft in terms of deploying protections for older versions of its desktop operating systems. On Tuesday Apple said it...

Apple releases iOS 11.2.5 Tuesday, January 23, 2018 · 1:17 pm Apple today released iOS 11.2.5 which includes support for HomePod and introduces the ability for Siri to read the news (US, UK and Australia only). This update also includes bug fixes and improvements. HomePod support Setup and automatically transfer your Apple ID, Apple Music, Siri and Wi-Fi settings to HomePod. Siri News Siri can now read the news, just ask, “Hey Siri, play the news”. You can also ask for specific news categories including Sports, Business or Music. Other improvements and fixes Addresses an issue that could cause the...

Associated Press Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview that President Trump’s tax plan would result in a faster-growing economy and greater job creation. In an interview with ABC News, Cook discussed a number of recent announcements by Apple, including their plan to invest $350 billion in the U.S. economy over the next five years and how President Trump’s tax plan will help the U.S. economy. Cook refused to “take a position” on how the new tax plan will affect individual Americans but commented on the corporate tax saying, “I do believe the corporate side will result in...

A bug publicly released by a developer can freeze — and possibly crash — your device if you open it in Messages. According to an article by Nicole Nguyen at Buzzfeed, yesterday afternoon software developer Abraham Masri publicly posted the bug — a security vulnerability called "chaiOS" that he found while attempting to break the operating system via "fuzzing" — to Github. Fuzzing is essentially a way of testing for vulnerabilities that involves putting way too much data into a system in order to crash it. 👋 Effective Power is back, baby! chaiOS bug:Text the link below, it will freeze...

In a recent interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledges the company should have been clearer with iPhone owners. The iPhone throttling issue that Apple brought upon itself last year shows no signs of going away any time soon, but Apple CEO Tim Cook finally acknowledges that the company should have been clearer with iPhone owners. For those of you who aren't following the story closely, it all started back in July of last year, when Apple released iOS 10.2.1 following reports that iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE handsets were shutting down randomly due to cold weather, low battery...

President Donald Trump sat down for an interview Thursday morning with four reporters from The Wall Street Journal: Rebecca Ballhaus, Michael C. Bender, Peter Nicholas and Louise Radnofsky. White House attendees included Communications Director Hope Hicks, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn.One portion of the interview involved Apple, Foxconn, and iPhone manufacturing:WSJ: Is there a possibility that Donald Trump could sign a comprehensive immigration bill which would provide a path to legal status, citizenship for 11 million people who are here illegally?Mr. Trump: Well, I’m not talking amnesty at all. I’m not...

“At a Catcher Technology Co. manufacturing complex in the Chinese industrial city of Suqian, about six hours’ drive from Shanghai, workers stand for up to 10 hours a day in hot workshops slicing and blasting iPhone casings for Apple Inc., handling noxious chemicals sometimes without proper gloves or masks,” Bloomberg News reports. “These conditions — some described in a report Tuesday by advocacy group China Labor Watch and others in Bloomberg News interviews with Catcher workers — show the downside of a high-tech boom buoying the world’s second-largest economy. Chinese recruiters play up the chance to build advanced consumer electronics...

An FBI forensic expert lambasted Apple for making iPhones hard to hack into. Ever since Apple made encryption default on the iPhone, the FBI has been waging a war against encryption, complaining that cryptography so strong the company itself can’t break it makes it harder to catch criminals and terrorists. On Wednesday, at the the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan, FBI forensic expert Stephen Flatley lashed out at Apple, calling the company “jerks,” and “evil geniuses” for making his and his colleagues' investigative work harder. For example, Flatley complained that Apple recently made password guesses slower, changing the...

Earlier this year Forbes reported on an especially creepy strain of malware known as FruitFly targeting Apple Macs. At the time, it was unclear just what the spy tool was for, though it appeared to be used for surveilling people's personal Macs, in particular peeping at them through their webcam. Now the U.S. Department of Justice has unveiled an indictment against 28-year-old North Royalton, Ohio, resident Phillip Durachinsky, who is not only accused of spying on Apple Mac owners via Fruitfly but also of producing child pornography. Prosecutors alleged Durachinsky had been installing spyware on people's PCs for more than...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is increasingly unable to access data from some electronic devices that could help in prosecuting criminals and terrorists, which is an ‘“urgent public safety issue,’ said Christopher Wray, director of the agency, speaking at a cybersecurity conference here Tuesday,” Sara Castellanos reports for The Wall Street Journal. “In fiscal year 2017, the FBI was unable to access the content of 7,775 devices tied to defendants and victims in criminal cases, Mr. Wray said in a speech at the International Conference on Cybersecurity. That number represents more than half of all the devices tied to criminal...