The FBI Wants To Crack Another Dead Terrorist’s Locked iPhone:
WHEN THE FBI asked a court to force Apple to help crack the encrypted iPhone 5c of San Bernardino shooter Rizwan Farook in February, Bureau director James Comey assured the public that his agency’s intrusive demand was about one terrorist’s phone, not repeated access to iPhone owners’ secrets. But now eight months have passed, and the FBI has in its hands another locked iPhone that once belonged to another dead terrorist. Which means they may have laid the groundwork for another legal showdown with Apple.
Source: Wired
Apple’s much-anticipated decision to nix the headphone jack on its newest iPhone has understandably made a lot of people very angry. But there’s at least one industry that’s jumping for joy over the death of the ubiquitous audio plug: Marketing companies that track your phone’s location and target you with ads.
The reason for the celebration is Bluetooth beacons, a “proximity marketing” technology that’s been pushed by the ad-tech industry for years. The beacons come from tiny Bluetooth Low-Energy (BTLE) transmitters that have already been planted inside many retail stores, airports, and museums, which send signals to nearby mobile devices. If your device has Bluetooth enabled and comes in range of a beacon (say, in a clothing store) any apps you’ve installed that are listening for Bluetooth beacons can determine exactly where you are, target you with ads, or record your real-world shopping habits, among other things.
Source: Vice Magazine
You need to update Apple OS X and Safari right now:
Have you updated your iPhone yet? If not, go do that right now. And while you’re at it, update your Mac to the latest version of OS X—yes, right now.
Earlier this week, researchers uncovered the existence of spyware that is capable of gaining access to everything on your iPhone—and we mean everything: your text messages, phone calls, and even web activity to all your apps. And it can infect your device simply by clicking a link.
Turns out, the flaws that made this spyware possible also affect OS X Yosemite (10.10) and OS X El Capitan (10.11).
Source: dailydot.com
A Hacking Group Is Selling iPhone Spyware to Governments:
These days it seems like every government has a far-reaching and well-developed digital surveillance operation, complete with defense, international espionage, and offensive components. Smaller nations even join spy alliances to pool resources. But there are still many nation-states that for various reasons prefer not to handle their cyber intelligence development in-house. So they do what we all do when we need software: They buy it from a vendor.
On Thursday, researchers published evidence that an established private cyberarms dealer called NSO Group, whose clientele primarily comprises governments, has been selling masterful spyware that is delivered to mobile devices through a series of critical vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Once established on a device, this tool, known as Pegasus, can surveil virtually anything, relaying phone calls, messages, emails, calendar data, contacts, keystrokes, audio and video feeds, and more back to whomever is controlling the attack.
Source: Wired
You need to update your iPhone to iOS 9.3.5 right now:
Red alert! This is not a drill. Stop what you’re doing and update your iPhone. Now.
Seriously. There are major flaws with Apple iOS that put everything you do on your device at risk, from your emails and text messages to your photos and contacts, and you have to update your device immediately to fix them.
Source: dailydot.com
Apple makes slight progress on diversity while its rivals are making practically none:
Apple is 32 percent female, 9 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic — a single percentage point increase in each category from last year, according to the report.
Source: Washington Post
Apple gets patent for remotely disabling iPhone cameras, raising censorship fears:
If Apple creates a way for third parties to control when certain iPhone features work, how will Apple control who has access to that technology? It’s not hard to imagine a government such as Turkey or Russia using it to blackout social media coverage of a protest.
Apple’s Big Security Upgrades Will Save You From Yourself:
While Apple appears to have delayed some of its bigger security projects—most notably, encrypting iCloud backups so that not even Apple can access them—it’s still showing serious ambition, sometimes in surprising places. The result will be an iOS and macOS experience that trades convenience for protection in a few key ways. Apple will introduce small frustrations now, to prevent large, even unfixable, frustrations down the road.
Source: Wired
It is important to remember that Apple’s initial decision to redesign its products so that even Apple cannot get at a user’s data was in direct response to the Snowden revelations. We learned from Snowden that the US national security system spent the years after 9/11 eviscerating the system of delegated oversight that had governed national security surveillance after Watergate and other whistleblower revelations exposed pervasive intelligence abuses in the 1960s and 70s.
Apple’s design of an operating system impervious even to its own efforts to crack it was a response to a global loss of trust in the institutions of surveillance oversight. It embodied an ethic that said: “You don’t have to trust us; you don’t have to trust the democratic oversight processes of our government. You simply have to have confidence in our math.”
This approach builds security in a fundamentally untrustworthy world.
Source: theguardian.com