Apple

A judge in New York ruled Monday in favor of Apple in a case where investigators wanted the court to compel the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, which the company does have the ability to unlock.

This case involves a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty. It pre-dates Apple's current battle with the government over a locked iPhone 5C that belonged to one of the shooters in the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino—that case is due to be heard in court next month in nearby Riverside, California.

Did your Mac’s Ethernet port mysteriously stop working recently? If so, you could have fallen afoul of a nasty bug that was introduced in a recent OS X security update. Here’s how to fix it.

As pointed out on Reddit, a recent OS X security update called “031–51913 Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data 3.28.1” blacklists the BCM5701 driver.

The only problem? Almost every Mac with an Ethernet port depends on that driver. And while Apple has since pulled that update from their servers, there’s a chance you might have been afflicted.

Apple has hired one of the key developers of Signal, the secure encrypted messaging service that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden uses.

Apple has indicated that it plans to upgrade the security on iPhones and its iCloud service so that even it can’t access the data it stores.

It’s just an internship, according to Frederic Jacobs, but it’s a sign that Apple is very serious about locking down its products with encryption. Signal is widely seen in the information security world as the best encrypted messaging app.

Apple TV version 7.2.1 was launched on February 25 and fixes 61 vulnerabilities in 23 different Apple TV components, such as the Kernel component, bootp, CloudKit, Code Signing, WekKit, DiskImages, ImageIO, IOKit, Office Viewer, the Location Framework, and many more.

Twenty-four of the fixed issues were found in the WebKit engine, a component utilized by the TV's built-in browser to navigate the Internet.

In a short interview on NPR's Morning Edition on Friday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said there is a "reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone."

Apple chief executive Tim Cook accused the US government of asking his firm to engineer the “software equivalent of cancer” to help investigators unlock a terrorist’s iPhone.

“This is not about one phone,” Cook told ABC multiple times in an interview, which aired 24 February. “This case is about the future. Can the government compel Apple to write software that we believe would make hundreds of millions of customers vulnerable around the world?”

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.

Many readers have asked for a primer summarizing the privacy and security issues at stake in the the dispute between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, which last week convinced a judge in California to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of assailants in the recent San Bernardino massacres. I don’t have much original reporting to contribute on this important debate, but I’m visiting it here because it’s a complex topic that deserves the broadest possible public scrutiny.

Judge Sheri Pym informed Apple that it must provide specialized software that will allow law enforcement officials to thwart iPhone's built-in security measures, specifically a feature that automatically erases handset data after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts, the Associated Press reports (via ABC News).

Take a 64-bit iOS device—iPhone 5S or newer, iPad Air or newer, iPad Mini 2 or newer, sixth generation iPod touch or newer—laboriously set its date to January 1, 1970, and reboot. Congratulations: you now have a shiny piece of high-tech hardware that's stuck at the boot screen, showing nothing more than the Apple logo... forever.