Displaying items by tag: Apple

Two days ago we reported on the iCloud controversy which involved an attack on Apple’s Cloud based Find My iPhone application. This attack (which appears to have been a dictionary attack) resulted in the release of nude images of a number of celebrities posted on the internet for all to see. Apple immediately jumped to the defensive and released a statement saying they were not “hacked” and it is not their fault. Now on the surface this is true as there was not a full breach of their security, but it is about as wrong as you can get.

Over the weekend a number of articles broke describing a “hack” that allowed nude photos of celebrities to be stolen and then reposted on the internet (4chan). Although the story held minimal interest at the time of its release we did not see it as big news since phone and cloud service hacks are far too common these days, just because it happened to be someone famous did not make it anymore news worthy. If anything it made it less as you should not be storing nude or explicit images of yourself on your phone or in any cloud service these days.

Apple has made a decision about the data that is stored in their borrowed HealthKit API. The decision is to ban developers from sharing any of the data that the service collects to ad agencies. This move will be in effect the day that iOS 8 and will run until Apple changes their mind. This move is actually a very good thing and does cover some concerns about the amount of personal information that mobile devices are starting to amass.

Right now the going rumor is that Apple will unveil the world’s first true smart watch on September 9th (yes sarcasm). Just exactly what this new product will do has many blogs up all night in a lather of love for Apple. These sites comb through patent filings, rumors and even developer code to see if they can be the first to identify what Apple will really do when they finally get around to joining the rest of the world with a wearable product.

According to recent rumors it seems that TSMC and Samsung will be able to push out 14nm full node and 16nm half node FinFET products earlier than anticipated. This is certainly going to be good news for many customers of the two foundry companies including Apple and nVidia.

Over the years Apple has surprised the world by taking old tech, optimizing it and then pushing out to the world as their own. They can do this thanks to having one of the best marketing teams in the world and until recently having a leader that believed his own legends. This has led to a string of patents that are built in the ideas and often inventions of others. To say that the US Patent and Trademark Office simply rubber stamps these is an understatement. In some cases there is no way that they could not know that the patent in question was covered in prior art.

There is a perception that to enjoy brilliant tablet gaming you have to pay big bucks – but that is not the case. There are tablets at every price that can give you this; you just need to find the right specs at the right price for you.

There is a lot of information flying around the internet about security this month. Much of this is due to the looming Black Hat and DEF CON conferences that kick off in August. While many of the articles hitting the net are malware centric we are hearing about a few more that punch more than a few holes in the security of some very popular devices. We have seen Blackberry poke at Samsung and their Knox secure phone layer and vice versa. The biggest one that we have seen is the 58 page document published by security expert Jonathan Zdiarski about the iPhone.

Well, with all of the news about Apple’s next round of products we thought we would chime in with our take on this. Warning Apple fans the following article is not based on analyst WAGs (wild ass guesses), but on information that is available publicly and, well through other means. Right now far too many analyst firms are looking to bolster their portfolios by talking up products from Apple that do not even have firm or realistic specifications attached to them. We are talking about Apple’s rumored iWatch, 12.9-inch iPad and large screen iPhone. All three of these are rumored to hit the market in September as Apple tried to catch up to the rest of the world and offer the same style of product that is already out there.

Have you ever heard of a PAE? No? Well it stands for Patent Assertion Entity, Still not sure what they do? You might recognize them if we call them patent trolls. PAEs are companies that own the rights to patents through contracts with inventors or that buy them from others with the sole intent to file law suits against anyone that might be infringing on any patent they currently own. It is a big business and one that costs the market millions of dollars each year.