Apple’s refusal to help the FBI unlock an iPhone 5c used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, California attack on Dec. 2 has prompted the Maricopa County attorney’s office in Arizona to ban providing new iPhones to its staff.“Apple’s refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety,” Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said in a statement on Wednesday.MORE: iPhone7 Rumor RollupTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple CEO Tim Cook has asked the U.S. government to withdraw its court action demanding tools that will allow the FBI to hack the passcode of an iPhone, and instead set up a commission of tech, intelligence and civil liberties experts to discuss "the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms.""We have done everything that’s both within our power and within the law to help in this case. As we’ve said, we have no sympathy for terrorists," Cook said in an email Monday to Apple employees. Apple said it would gladly participate in the commission.The FBI has sought help from Apple for a workaround to the auto-erase function in an iPhone 5c, running iOS 9, which was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino, California, attack on Dec. 2. The FBI is concerned that without this workaround from Apple it could accidentally erase data, while trying to break the passcode by "brute force" techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
FBI Director James Comey claims the agency doesn't want to break anyone’s encryption or set loose a master key to devices like the iPhone.The comment Sunday by Comey on Lawfare Blog comes as both Apple and the government last week appeared to have pulled out all the stops to defend their stands on an FBI demand in a court that Apple provide the technology to help the agency crack the passcode of a locked iPhone 5c used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists involved in the attack in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2.The FBI is concerned that without the workaround from Apple, it could accidentally erase data, while trying to break the passcode, because of the possible activation on the phone after 10 failed tries of an auto-erase feature. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly,” Comey wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The White House said it is not the aim of the government to compromise the security of Apple's iPhone, as it only wants the company to help in the case of one phone that was used by a terrorist in the San Bernardino, California attack on Dec. 2.Google, Mozilla and some other tech organizations and civil rights groups have meanwhile supported Apple's stand.An order by a judge in California on Tuesday triggered off a furious response from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who said the government wanted the company to provide a backdoor to its phones. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ordered Apple to provide assistance, including by providing signed software if required, to help the FBI try different passcodes on a locked iPhone 5c running iOS 9, without triggering off the auto-erasure feature in the phone after 10 failed attempts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple's CEO Tim Cook has reacted sharply to a federal court order in the U.S. that would require the company to help the FBI search the contents of an iPhone 5c seized from Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, California, attack on Dec. 2.The U.S. government "has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers," Cook wrote in an open letter to customers posted on Apple's website on Wednesday. He added that the moment called for a public discussion and he wanted customers and people around the country "to understand what is at stake."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple's CEO Tim Cook has reacted sharply to a federal court order in the U.S. that would require the company to help the FBI search the contents of an iPhone 5c seized from Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, California, attack on Dec. 2.The U.S. government "has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers," Cook wrote in an open letter to customers posted on Apple's website on Wednesday. He added that the moment called for a public discussion and he wanted customers and people around the country "to understand what is at stake."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple was ordered Tuesday by a federal judge in California to provide assistance to the FBI to search a locked iPhone 5c that was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists said to have been involved in an attack in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2.The government's request under a statute called the All Writs Act will likely give a boost to attempts by law enforcement to curb the use of encryption by smartphone vendors.Apple is fighting in a New York federal court a similar move by the Department of Justice to get the company's help in unlocking the iPhone 5s smartphone of an alleged methamphetamine dealer. On Friday, it asked the New York court to give a final order as it has received additional similar requests from law enforcement agencies, and was advised that more such requests could come under the same statute.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM has unveiled its new z13s mainframe, which it claims offers encryption at twice the speed as previous mid-range systems, without compromising performanceThe company, which sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, continues to invest in new designs of its mainframe to handle new compute challenges. It launched in January last year, the z13, its first new mainframe in almost three years, with a new processor design, faster I/O and the ability to address up to 10TB of memory. The design of the z13 was focused on real-time encryption and embedded analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. federal transport safety regulator is coming around to the view that rules could be updated so that computers in autonomous cars can be considered as drivers, but added that the rule-making could take some time.The move by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could be a major boost for Google and a number of companies including traditional car makers that are working on partially or fully autonomous vehicles."If no human occupant of the vehicle can actually drive the vehicle, it is more reasonable to identify the driver as whatever (as opposed to whoever) is doing the driving," Paul A. Hemmersbaugh, chief counsel of the NHTSA, wrote in a Feb 4 letter in reply to a Google proposal relating to its self-driving cars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies are finding some of the oddest locations for data centers these days.Facebook, for example, built a data center in Lulea in Sweden because the icy cold temperatures there would help cut the energy required for cooling. A proposed Facebook data center in Clonee, Ireland, will rely heavily on wind energy locally available. Google's data center in Hamina in Finland uses sea water from the Bay of Finland for cooling.Now, Microsoft is looking at locating data centers under the sea.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies are finding some of the oddest locations for data centers these days.Facebook, for example, built a data center in Lulea in Sweden because the icy cold temperatures there would help cut the energy required for cooling. A proposed Facebook data center in Clonee, Ireland, will rely heavily on wind energy locally available. Google's data center in Hamina in Finland uses sea water from the Bay of Finland for cooling.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 10 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make admins happier
Now, Microsoft is looking at locating data centers under the sea.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marvin Minsky, a professor emeritus at MIT who pioneered the exploration of the mind and its replication in a computer, died on Sunday from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88, according to MIT Media Lab.In his prologue to his seminal book, Society of Mind, Minsky wrote that the book tries to explain how the mind works, and "that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself."+ ALSO: Notable 2015 deaths in technology, science & inventions +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook is setting up a data center in Clonee, Ireland, which will be its sixth in the world and its second outside the U.S.The new data center will be equipped with servers and storage from the Open Compute Project, a Facebook initiative that shares designs as open source with other data center operators to standardize and drive down the costs of equipment."We will outfit this data center with the latest OCP server and storage hardware, including Yosemite for compute," Facebook's Vice President of Engineering, Jay Parikh said in a post on the social networking website. Yosemite is an open source modular chassis for high-powered microservers, designed by Facebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fight for privacy is moving to U.S. states with 16 states and the District of Columbia introducing legislation on Wednesday that address issues such as requiring permission before student data is shared for non-educational purposes and the requirement of warrants before using cell site simulators to track phone users.“A bipartisan consensus on privacy rights is emerging, and now the states are taking collective action where Congress has been largely asleep at the switch,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which coordinated the initiative, in a statement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pakistan has lifted a ban on YouTube in the country after Google offered a localized version, which the government claims will allow it to ask for the removal of material considered offensive from the website.YouTube was ordered blocked in Pakistan in 2012 after a controversial video, called the "Innocence of Muslims," created a controversy in many countries for mocking the Prophet Muhammad.Pakistan authorities told a court that they were blocking the whole domain because it was not technically feasible for them to block specific links to the video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla's login system Persona will be shut down on Nov. 30 as its usage is low and has not grown over the last two years.The foundation's decision to take persona.org and related domains offline follows a move in March 2014 to transition the running of the project from full-time developers to a community of long-time volunteers and former paid contributors.Mozilla said at the time that it had no plans to decommission the little-known service, which allowed users to sign in to websites that support Persona using their verified email ids. The key attraction of the service, according to Mozilla, was that users didn't have to trust a website with their password, preventing its theft if one of the websites got hacked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber has agreed to pay a penalty of US$20,000 in a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman for delaying in reporting to drivers the data breach of their personal information in 2014.The ride-hailing company has also agreed to tighten employee access to geo-location data of passengers, following reports that the company's executives had an aerial "God View" of such data, the office of the attorney general said in a statement Wednesday.Uber notified Schneiderman's office on Feb. 26, 2015 that driver names and license numbers were accessed by an unauthorized third party in a data breach that was discovered as early as September 2014. The fine has been imposed on the company for its delay in providing timely notice of the data breach to the affected drivers and the office of the attorney general.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyatt Hotels has asked customers to review their payment card account statements closely, after it detected malware on the computers that run its payment-processing systems at locations it manages.The hotel chain did not provide more details on the breach, including the number of customers that might have been affected, but it appears from the alert to customers that hackers may have obtained critical credit card information.Hyatt is the latest in a number of companies in the hospitality industry, including Hilton Worldwide, Mandarin Oriental and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide that were affected by hacker attacks. A number of retailers like Target also had their point-of-sale systems targeted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a strong defense of encryption, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that there was no trade-off between privacy and national security when it comes to encryption."I think that's an overly simplistic view. We're America. We should have both," he told Charlie Rose on CBS' 60 Minutes program on Sunday, according to a transcript of the interview posted online.Cook said that people should be able to protect their personal data on their smartphones, such as health and financial information, intimate conversations with family and co-workers, and possibly business secrets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived in the U.S., following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.A proposed rule that would require companies to report vaguely defined "terrorist activity" on their platforms had been included as section 603 in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016.But Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, removed a hold on the bill only after the controversial provision was deleted from it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
John Ribeiro