Category: Technology

For those not following Tim Cook’s tenure at Apple, things are still imploding at technology’s me too company.

5G

Remember Apple’s lack of 5G phones in 2019? The explanation finally came to light and Apple found a path forward. After being backed into the corner, Apple buried the proverbial hatchet with Qualcomm and as a result, Intel cancelled their research and development of 5G technology. So Apple will now be sporting the same Qualcomm 5G technology as Android phones only selling it for their usual high mark-up.

Apple’s settlement with chipmaker Qualcomm means it can fire up the engines on 5G iPhones.

Apple on Tuesday reached a settlement in its gnarly legal fight with Qualcomm. The dispute revolved around a royalty dispute over Qualcomm’s premium modem chips. The settlement included an undisclosed payout from Apple to the chipmaker.

Previously Wall Street analysts had voiced concerns that Apple was lagging in the race to faster 5G phones, in part due to its fight with Qualcomm.

Soon after news broke that the companies had settled, Apple’s chosen supplier for its future 5G smartphones, Intel, announced it was pulling out of the 5G modem race entirely. “It has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns,” said CEO Bob Swan.

Link: Apple’s blockbuster legal settlement paves the way for a 5G iPhone

Sales

Apple phone sales, year-over-year were down 30 percent. No wonder they don’t want to talk about phones any more.

Apple’s iPhone sales in China were down 30 percent during the first quarter of 2019, according to new shipment estimates shared today by Canalys.

Link: Apple’s iPhone Sales in China Down an Estimated 30% in Q1 2019, Huawei Continues to Dominate

Apple announced its financial results for its fiscal Q2 of 2019, the company’s revenue was down 5% over the previous year. Apple did not reveal how many iPhones it sold in the quarter.

According to a recent report from IDC, iPhone sales are down some 30% over the same time last year, with an estimated 36.4 million iPhones sold.

In its Mobile Phone Tracker for the first calendar quarter of 2019, IDC estimated that Apple only shipped 36.4 million iPhones, which it stated was a 30.2 percent annual drop, whittling down Apple’s share to just 11.7 percent of a total of 310.9 million global smartphones shipped in the quarter.

That figure put Apple in a distant third place behind Samsung’s nearly 72 million units and Huawei’s almost 60 million units. Because Apple sells only premium phones—as most analysts define as selling for about $400 or more—it’s not surprising that high-volume vendors of mostly lower-end phones would be outselling Apple in terms of unit sales.

However, IDC’s portrayal of more than a 30 percent drop in iPhone units over the previous year is nothing short of shocking. It’s also, as Cybart noted on Twitter, not just “embarrassing” but “impossible to achieve given Apple’s stated iPhone revenue.” Cybart stated that “IDC isn’t close with their iPhone unit sales estimate for the quarter that Apple just reported.”

Link: Editorial: Latest IDC estimate of Q1 2019 iPhone sales ‘highly inaccurate’ to the point of ’embarrassing’

Battery

In addition to being busted throttling battery life in their old phones, Apple has now been busted overstating the battery capabilities of their new phones.

Link: Apple’s 11 million replaced iPhone batteries demonstrates impact of iPhone planned obsolescence

Link: Apple exaggerating iPhone battery life by up to 51 percent, report says

Summary

Living for the 90-day cycle has its drawbacks and they are on full display for anyone willing to open their eyes. Clearly excellence and innovation take a backseat when you are a slave to churning-out dividends every quarter just to stay alive for the next financial report.

In our age of technology, many are used to streaming videos, music, and other content. Amazon has been selling eBooks for its Kindle devices for many years. Folks like the convenience of content being delivered to their electronic devices; however, there are some drawbacks. I have mentioned some of these before but two more examples have surfaced lately that are worth noting.

If you have ever bought a Blu-ray or DVD movie, you often will see a sticker on the box that says free digital copy included. OK, so what happens when the digital copy company goes away?

The go to service for many years has been UltraViolet but UltraViolet is going away in July. So you can either transfer your digital content to one of three other providers or let your library expire. Since the physical disks have DRAM encryption on them, you can’t just rip your own copy to your computer.

If this is true of physical media with a digital counterpart, what about people that purchased a digital only copy of something? What happens when your eBook company draws its last breath or decides to get out of the business?

Enter exhibit number two, Microsoft.

It will come as little surprise to our readers that Microsoft is exiting another consumer market.
Today Microsoft posted a rather brutal announcement regarding the US-only ebook Store which they launched in 2017, saying “The books category is closing.”
Microsoft is not giving users a lot of time to ponder – the decision is effective today, with Microsoft writing “Starting April 2, 2019, the books category in Microsoft Store will be closing.”
More worrying is the second bit, however.
“Unfortunately, this means that starting July 2019 your ebooks will no longer be available to read, but you’ll get a full refund for all book purchases.”
Presumably, due to some DRM scheme, Microsoft will be remotely deactivating books readers already purchased and downloaded.
Microsoft says they will be giving full refunds, and if you used Microsoft’s much-touted inking feature to make notes, Microsoft will still be burning your book, but will give you a $25 store credit.

So just like that, the “velvet sweatshop” as its employees call Microsoft, just clicks a button and kills all you digital content. What if Apple or Amazon decides to kill your music library or eBooks?

If you dig into the terms of use and legal nonsense for such things, you paid money for the content but surprise, you don’t really own your copy! Thus they can keep your money and kill your content later. Please note that this is not just a matter of killing future downloads but they can click a mouse and kill the existing content of all your devices.

The truth is that Amazon has done this in the past with certain eBook titles. Just because something is on your phone, PC, or Kindle does not mean that it stays there. Oh this also means that existing eBook content can be edited on the fly to add, alter, or remove content. Talk about ‘Big Brother.”

So next time you think I’m old fashioned because I actually prefer physical media, at least I own what I paid for.

For the second time in less than a month, media reports have surfaced of Tesla cars have been hacked. This time the autopilot—which isn’t really an autopilot—got hacked.

One series of hacks was with stickers. Yes, stickers like your children like to use instead of crayons in those kid’s meal booklets. Here’s the story:

Autopilot Hack #1

Elite hackers from China have found a way to trick a Tesla Model S into going into the wrong lane by strategically placing some simple stickers on the road.
Keen Labs, widely regarded as one of the most technically ingenious cybersecurity research groups in the world, developed two kinds of attack to mess with the Tesla autopilot’s lane-recognition tech.
First, the researchers sought to make alterations to lane markings, first by adding a large number of patches to the line to make it appear blurred. It worked, but as the patches looked much too conspicuous, the Keen hackers decided that it’d be too difficult to carry out in the real world.

Autopilot Hack #2

So the researchers tried to create a “fake lane.” They discovered that Tesla’s autopilot would detect a lane where there were just three inconspicuous tiny squares strategically placed on the road. When they left small stickers at an intersection, the hackers believed they would trick the Tesla into thinking the patches marked out the continuation of the right lane. On a test track, their theory was proved correct, as the autopilot took the car into the real left lane.

Tesla Hacked, Vehicle Operated By Remote Control

In other attacks, the Keen crew claimed to have the ability to remotely control the steering wheel and start up the windscreen wipers. In the former, via a complex series of steps that broke through some of the security barriers put up around the onboard network, Keen discovered a way to control the steering wheel with a gamepad, though they were in the vehicle at the time. While that initially sounds serious, the attack didn’t work when a car had been taken manually from reverse to drive mode at any speed above 8 km per hour. However, when in cruise control, the attack worked “without limitations.”

Link: Hackers Use Little Stickers To Trick Tesla Autopilot Into The Wrong Lane

Tesla Display Hacked

Two weeks ago, Tesla was hacked in a much different way.

Pwn2Own is a competition aiming to highlight the vulnerabilities of modern day systems and products, and since the Model 3 is one of the most digitally advanced cars in the world, it was a natural target for the organizers of the event and the hackers attending it.

Most of the goals set by the organizers were not met by the competing teams, but one of them reached their goal: Fluoroacetate, a duo comprising hackers Richard Zhu and Amat Cama.
To get the prize, the two had to launch the attack from inside the car and “achieve code execution by browsing to malicious content.”
Zhu and Kama were able to hack into the car’s Internet browser and have it display a message of their choice on the car’s screen: pwned by Fluoroacetate.
For their achievement, Richard Zhu and Amat Cama were awarded a $35,000 prize, but most importantly got to drive away in the Model 3, complete with the hacked browser.

Link: Duo Hacks Tesla Model 3, Walk Away with the Car and $35,000

Folks what you need to understand about hacking the display of the Tesla is this, there are no instrument panels or gauges in this particular car. The display screen (liquid crystal touch screen) is the only information that the driver has on the car. This is also where everything is controlled by the driver. If the screen can be hacked, it can be used to trick the driver by providing false info to the driver. Could this be used for malicious purposes? It may only be proof of concept for now but…

Folks I’m just gonna excerpt two paragraphs and commend that you look at the source article for more.

The social network is heading to court in Belgium on Wednesday, Bloomberg reports. Its goal is to fight a court order that would force it to stop using cookies and other tracking technology to follow its users as they navigate around the internet to serve them ads–at least until Facebook explains exactly how and why it collects data and what it does with the information. The original court order required the social media giant to stop tracking users, delete all data it had gathered illegally on Belgian citizens–including people who were not Facebook users themselves–or face fines of up to €250,000 ($281,625) a day.
It may be a tough slog, as Facebook’s tracking technology is applied not only to people who willingly signed up for the site, but also to millions of people who aren’t signed up or have closed their accounts. Belgium’s court order, meanwhile, may be bolstered by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which allows penalties as large as 4% of a company’s annual revenue.

Link: Facebook fights for the right to follow users–and nonusers–around the web

More bad news following a very bad week, last week which was capped-off with a live Facebook broadcast of the shooting in New Zealand

Link: Zuckerberg’s bad week gets worse with FB live of Christchurch shooting

now emerges a story that Facebook has stored your password in plain text available to any employee and anyone with access to the house that Mark built. This has been their practice since 2012 and at least 600,000,000 passwords are involved.

“Security rule 101 dictates that under no circumstances passwords should be stored in plain text and at all times must be encrypted,” said cybersecurity expert Andrei Barysevich of Recorded Future. “There is no valid reason why anyone in an organization, especially the size of Facebook, needs to have access to users’ passwords in plain text.”
Facebook said there is no evidence its employees abused access to this data. But thousands of employees could have searched them. The company said the passwords were stored on internal company servers, where no outsiders could access them. But the incident reveals a huge oversight for the company amid a slew of bruises and stumbles in the last couple of years.
The security blog KrebsOnSecurity said some 600 million Facebook users may have had their passwords stored in plain text. Facebook said in a blog post Thursday it will likely notify “hundreds of millions”…

Facebook leaves millions of passwords readable by employees

Apple has no plans for a 5G phone in 2019. We have reported that several times on this blog but recently more information has come to light. The truth is Apple has no supplier for the technology. Why, because they have burned bridges with everyone.

Apple has four choices for 5G

1. Qualcomm – Apple has disputes with this competitor. Source
2. Intel – Apple is dropping Intel as chip supplier. Source
3. Samsung – Apple’s direct competitor in cell phone mfg. Samsung #1 in the world, Apple #3
4. Make their own – starting from scratch and not running afoul of existing intellectual property and patents is problematic and years from concept to production

As we have documented elsewhere, Apple has already bought folding screen prototypes from Samsung and now they might need their 5G chips too; and you wonder why I say Apple is the Me Too company?