Cyberlaw

CheckMag The EU has a solid history of making decisions that actually benefit the consumer and the EU Right to Repair Directive (R2RD) may finally curb environmentally damaging and anti consumer practices employed by tech companies to keep their revenue streams flowing.

Adobe recently stirred up controversy with an update to its terms of use, seemingly demanding unfettered access to user-generated content. The concerns were amplified by fears of Adobe using user content to train its Firefly generative AI. Adobe has now responded, but users remain sceptical, with some already jumping ship.

As a direct consequence of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Google Play alternative Aptoide is now ready to take on iOS as well. The closed launch will take place tomorrow, and new users will need an invitation to join. Between 500 and 1,000 daily invites will be issued in the first stage.

After Epic Games' unexpected win, veteran antitrust US federal judge James Donato is now taking the story one step further by asking Google to calculate the costs incurred by allowing the Epic Games Store inside the Google Play Store, as well as providing catalog access and library porting rights. Google must reply by June 24th.

After missing the mark in its initial response to the damning Gamers Nexus report highlighting major shortcomings in Asus's warranty process for the YouTube outfit's ROG Ally, Asus has responded with more sweeping changes to its RMA process.

In the aftermath of a patent dispute, Motorola and Lenovo are no longer allowed to sell smartphones and laptops with WWAN modules. Although some targeted Lenovo laptops can still be acquired as long as existing stocks last, the brand might appeal the court's decision and revert the ruling.

Asus is back in the news for shady business surrounding warranty repairs. This time, Gamers Nexus is back at the forefront of it all with an Asus ROG Ally that needed warranty repair. Asus subsequently tried to charge GN for unnecessary repairs and completely missed the reason the ROG Ally was sent in for RMA. On top of all that, Gamers Nexus claims to have hundreds of emails from Asus customers recounting similar stories.

TikTok and ByteDance have filed a federal appeal to fight the recently passed TikTok ban. The companies counter that the ban in unconstitutional and unfairly targets TikTok despite prior reports of Chinese employee and government access to US user data.

The founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, has been sentenced to four months in prison for putting profits above the law. The company was found guilty of inadvertently helping fund various criminal activities around the globe. Zhao pleaded guilty on the last day of April and he now has to spend several months in prison in the United States in addition to paying hefty fines.

Dr Viviane Ghaderi, an ex-Amazon executive and lead AI engineer, has revealed in a California lawsuit that she was told to ignore company protocol and copyright law in order to beat the competition in an AI arms race.

(Update: 2024-04-24 11:00 PST President Biden has signed the package into law.) TikTok is now a dead-man walking after the US Senate passed a ban included in a $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. After President Biden signs it into law, ByteDance will have 270 days to leave the American market, face heavy fines, or sell TikTok to an American-friendly company. TikTok will file a lawsuit as soon as the package becomes law.

The U.S. Senate is set to pass a TikTok ban stuffed into an Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine support package that includes the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which itself passed the House Wednesday. The act includes a fine on TikTok of $5,000 per user located in the United States to force ByteDance to divest TikTok or leave the U.S. market. The Senate can vote on the package as early as Tuesday.

The Chinese Government has forced Apple to delist WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store according to a report by Wall Street Journal, resulting in the inability of the Chinese users to download the said apps from the official channels. This can prove to be the final nail in the coffin for WhatsApp in China as the service has been banned since 2017.

Delta, the multi-system console emulator developer by Riley Testut, is now available on the official iOS App Store. The emulator was previously available only through Testut's AltStore service, which would use some iOS trickery to sideload apps onto an iPhone or iPad. Delta is not available in the European App Store; European iPhone users will have to use the AltStore PAL third-party app store.

Starlink users in Zimbabwe face losing access to satellite Internet for an unknown period of time, much like their counterparts in Botswana and South Africa have. The problem appears to be one of a regulatory nature; officials of the African nations are yet to give Starlink a license to operate.

An AI-powered chatbot officially sanctioned by the government of New York City has been advising some business owners to skirt the law or fully violate city ordinances. The chatbot, which was implemented to help businesses navigate New York City's laws and regulations, has responded to some queries with blatantly illegal statements, such as serving customers cheese that has been partially consumed by rodents.

Popular messenger service WhatsApp will soon update its privacy policy and terms of use. Users must agree to the new regulations, or their account may be suspended.

The Apple Watch has evaded Android compatibility for nearly a decade now. Apple claims this was due to technical limitations, but an internal company email from 2019 suggests it was to protect Apple's iPhone sales and the ecosystem.

Suyu, the follow-up to the popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, has been removed from GitLab following a DMCA takedown request issued by a "rightsholder." Suyu's developers' accounts were also blocked. The takedown comes just days after Suyu's first public beta release.

CheckMag For those familiar with sideloading on iOS, AltStore has been a staple for many years. Allowing users to sideload any app onto an un-jailbroken device with the use of a free Apple developer account. Now AltStore is going legit, but only if they can figure out how to work around Apple's draconian "malicious compliance" tactics.

To make life difficult for cyber criminals, Meta is restricting the screenshot function when using WhatsApp. However, the update has not yet arrived on all smartphones.

The US House of Representatives has passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” putting TikTok one step closer to a complete ban in the US. The bill, if passed into law, will force ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to sell its US business in 6 months or risk having the app, among other things, delisted from the app stores in the US.

A recent study exposes a gap in the way many US teens think about their smartphones. Around three quarters feel that they are more peaceful without them, while almost half still complain of separation anxiety.

Apple will soon push an update that will allow software developers to distribute their software to iOS devices directly from their websites. This is in addition to alternative app stores, but this practice will only be available to developers in the EU.

A photographer set out with the goal of recreating some of the most recognisable images of all time using Midjourney and DALL-E. In a surprise to absolutely no-one, the AI systems were able to surprisingly accurately recreate each of the images, which included the Afghan Girl and Muhammad Ali's triumph over Sonny Liston.

The latest development in the war between Apple and Epic Games sees the tech giant close down Epic's developer account. Supposedly the reason for the account closure? A spicy social media post by Epic CEO, Tim Sweeney, on X (formerly Twitter), among others.

The developers behind Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator, have officially shut the project down after settling a lawsuit filed against them by Nintendo earlier this month. In the proposed settlement, the developers will also have to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages and will not be allowed to maintain or distribute any code used in the Yuzu emulator.

In a statement released on its developer page, Apple announced it has changed its mind regarding Home Screen web apps. While the company earlier said it would no longer allow web apps as of iOS 17.4, the company has backpedaled and will allow Home Screen apps to be installed on EU iOS devices.

EmulationStation Desktop Edition, or ES-DE, was recently made available on the Amazon App Store. However, Amazon has now delisted the application. Interestingly, several emulators are still available on the Amazon App Store, and hard drives that have thousands of retro ROM files and emulators preinstalled are available for purchase on Amazon's site.

Ransomware group Mogilevich has reportedly managed to access 189 GB of Epic Games's customer data in a recent data breach. The group claims to be in possession of emails, usernames, passwords, payment information, and source code, and is selling the data on the dark web. Epic Games has its doubts, though.

The company that owns WordPress and Tumblr is allegedly working out a deal to sell content created on those sites to AI companies for training AI bots. While users will reportedly be given the option to opt out of this program, it appears that this practice could go into effect as early as this week.

Anatsa is a trojan that specifically targets banking use on Android smartphones. Deployed by seemingly innocuous apps on Google Play, the malware has infected more than 100,000 European users.

Intel has lost a patent dispute in Germany and is no longer allowed to sell certain processors in the country. But this may not yet be the end of the matter.

As part of an ongoing investigation that involves German authorities, an unnamed forensic IT company from Munich, and the FBI. Roughly 50,000 bitcoins were seized from two people suspected of money laundering and more. The two individuals allegedly got these funds while in charge of an illegal file-sharing platform.

A growing number of minors are being harmed online, which worries lawmakers. However, some social media companies are supposedly ignoring the problem. Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret to families on the negative effects of social media during a heated Senate hearing.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is planning to institute policies that will charge fees related to apps installed on an iPhone outside the App Store. These new policies would only apply in Europe, per the Journal, in response to the European Union's Digital Markets Act, which goes into effect in March.

Dubbed the "Mother of all Breaches" by Cybernews, a massive leak containing over 12 terabytes of data was recently discovered. The data includes information from billions of accounts and records from large corporations like Twitter, Weibo, and Tencent.

The X account of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees and regulates investments, was hacked earlier this week. The hackers created a false post stating that Bitcoin ETFs had been approved for trading. The hack was confirmed by X.

Apple is now compensating customers who were affected by deliberate processor slowdowns as part of the Batterygate scandal. These are by no means penny amounts.

The lawsuit argues that millions of users who believed they were browsing anonymously had their internet activity covertly monitored by Google.

The recently imposed ban on sale/import of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 has been temporarily lifted by a US Court of Appeals order. While online sale has resumed today, all Apple Stores will have them in stock by December 30. Meanwhile, the ITC will have a chance to argue for reinstating the ban, which follows a lawsuit over the pulse oximetry technology used in the watch.

A Stanford study has discovered thousands of explicit images of child abuse in LAION-5B, the largest image dataset for training AI models, including Stable Diffusion. Following this revelation, LAION has temporarily taken its datasets offline to ensure they are safe before republishing.

In a reversal of its decision to remove Discovery TV from its platform earlier this month, PlayStation will continue to host Discovery TV content. This comes as relief to some users who were informed that Discovery TV content they purchased would be removed from their accounts.

A disturbing Telegram group has been found selling private footage from hacked security cameras placed in bedrooms, dressing rooms, toilets and spas around Vietnam. The hackers offer three tiers of paid access to the camera footage, claiming that “all footage is dark corners and hot scenes from families”. Security experts point to poor password hygiene as being a major cause behind such hacks.

The EU Commission has been placing advertisements on X for planned chat control. To this end, they have been specifically evaluating and contacting users based on political interests. The fact that this is possible on the platform is not compliant with data protection regulations and so a complaint was lodged against X.

23andMe, a company known for tracing ancestry via genetic testing, recently closed an investigation into unauthorized access of user accounts. The investigation revealed that roughly 6.9 user accounts were affected in the breach, largely via automatic data sharing features within the platform.

The cloud business is currently and clearly dominated by US companies. This has various disadvantages for countries outside the US, such possible data protection issues and loss of potential revenue. Now, the EU is finally getting its act together for its own cloud infrastructure.

Under the headline "Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive", non-commercial messenger Signal provides interesting insights into the infrastructure of a messenger app and its costs.

Over a year ago, consumer rights activist Justin Gutmann filed a lawsuit against Apple concerning the alleged throttling of iPhones which occurred in 2017. Last week, Apple failed to stop the case from going to trial. If the Cupertino giant loses, the fine could go up to US$1.9 billion plus interest.

Court documents released from the FTC's case against Microsoft reveal that The Elder Scrolls 6, the hotly anticipated game in Bethesda's popular fantasy franchise, won't release until 2026 at the earliest. Additionally, the game won't be coming to the PlayStation 5 (at least, not at first).