Cyberlaw

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).

The Republic of Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has concluded that TikTok has violated various aspects of GDPR as it relates to "child users". The social media giant faces a "reprimand" as well as a multi-million-euro fine for its apparent failure to close loopholes that might have allowed an unsafe level of access to those under 16 on its platform. It also has a three-month deadline to address these failings.

The U.S. FTC has fined Amazon and Microsoft for violating privacy laws. Amazon is being fined over US$30 million over breach of user privacy and COPPA non-compliance with its Ring and Alexa systems. The trade commission also required Microsoft to pay US$20 million for violating COPPA by not being transparent to parents about children's personal information on Xbox being shared with third parties and retaining account creation data for more time than necessary.

Although Sonos sued Google over six patent infringements, the US$32.5 million penalty comes as the result of a single infringement. The judge has ruled that the other five patents were not infringed. However, Sonos has made a statement saying that "Google infringes more than 200 Sonos patents" and made it clear that the war is not over.

Genesis Marketplace, one of the largest marketplaces for selling stolen login credentials, has been seized by the FBI. The takedown involved cooperation between agencies from multiple countries across Europe and North America.

Samsung Display has appealed to the United States FTC to enforce a sweeping ban for all aftermarket/refurbished AMOLED screens in the country. If enforced, such a law runs the risk of gutting the entire independent repair industry, denying consumers the choice for cheaper parts.

A database containing an allegedly "devastating" amount of personal data is reportedly being offered for sale by a "threat actor" that claims to have derived the information from a vulnerability in Twitter's defences. According to a cybersecurity company, the users affected number in the hundreds of millions and include "high profile" individuals such as Ether creator Vitalik Buterin.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, has been arrested and detained in the Bahamas. The entrepreneur, who has now lost his billionaire status, could end up being sentenced to as much as 115 years in prison after being indicted of eight charges that include wire fraud of various types and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

If the words of a prominent Apple analyst are to be believed, Apple could soon introduce sideloading to iOS. This would allow users to install applications on an iPhone without using the App Store, opening the door to applications not officially sanctioned by Apple.

The European Union has set December 28, 2024 as the hard date when most electronics must include USB-C charging in order to be sold in EU member states. Perhaps most notably, this will force Apple to fully abandon its Lightning standard in order to sell iPhones in the EU. Laptops will have to include USB-C charging by 2026.

In a thread posted on Twitter, journalist Matt Taibbi discussed documents and messages he obtained from Twitter employees and Elon Musk that suggest Twitter took an active role in influencing the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The crux of Taibbi's story is the controversial news reporting around Hunter Biden's laptop and the confusion among Twitter employees and executives as to how to handle the dissemination of potential misinformation.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has been fined €265 million (~US$275 million) by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) due to a data breach affecting Facebook during 2019. This breach affected over 500 million Facebook users. This marks the fourth such fine from the DPC since the Fall of 2021.

A new lawsuit alleges that Apple continues to collect user data in stock iPhone apps even when users have opted out of data tracking. This tracking contradicts assurances that Apple safeguards user privacy and can completely disable any kind of data collection in Apple's apps.

Although the timeline is not public yet, UK customers of the Santander bank will no longer be able to acquire crypto in less than a year. As a new move in its fight to protect customers from scams, the bank will block online, mobile banking, in-branch, and telephone banking payments to cryptocurrency exchanges.

An independent game developer is in hot water with Ikea for making a survival-horror game set in a furniture store bearing similarities to the popular chain's retail locations. While the developer says the game is inspired by a piece of horror fiction, Ikea has filed a suit to protect its brand.

Although the decision is not final and Apple will fight back, a Brazilian court has decided to fine the Cupertino-based tech giant with the equivalent of roughly US$19 million for selling phones without chargers. Even more, the court ruled that chargers must be bundled with new iPhones sold in the country.

Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter, once again, for US$44 billion. The Space X CEO’s offer may be a sign that the billionaire sees himself losing the lawsuit if the case goes to trial. Both parties are reportedly in talks to reach an agreement and end the litigation process.

Twitter and Elon Musk will come face to face in court on October 17. Twitter brought the lawsuit against Musk for walking away from the US$44 billion deal because the social site allegedly underreported the number of spam accounts. In his search for answers, the Tesla CEO is now going after two New York-based ad tech companies.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold Tesla stock worth almost US$6.9 billion. The reason for the sale is to finance the Twitter deal if Musk losses the lawsuit. Following the announcement of the sale, Musk asserted that he is done selling Tesla stock for now.

Twitter claps back at Elon Musk over his use of a publicly listed web bot detection tool to measure the number of spam accounts on the platform. For the uninitiated, Musk signed an agreement to acquire Twitter for US$44 billion before backing out of the deal citing concerns that at least 10% of the daily active users are bots.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to settle a lawsuit with the US government. The lawsuit accused the social media giant of operating an ad servicing algorithm that helped housing advertisers discriminate against certain groups.

The ban in the Beidaihe district has presumably been imposed due to an upcoming meeting of high-ranking politicians, who still seem to be afraid that Teslas and their integrated cameras could be utilized to spy on the Chinese government.

Apple has found itself at the other end of a £750 million lawsuit over the company throttling older iPhones in 2017. The lawsuit filed by Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights activist, alleges that Cupertino intended to hide the subpar performance of older iPhone batteries by not warning users about the throttling beforehand.

NVIDIA has settled charges levied against it by the United States Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a part of the settlement, the GPU manufacturer will pay a US$5.5 million penalty. The SEC charged NVIDIA with a failure to disclose that sales to cryptominers made up a significant portion of the company's growth in 2018.

A new directive by CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) significantly changes how VPN services will operate in India. Companies will now be forced to store a treasure trove of user data, including email/IP addresses, names, contact numbers and addresses for up to five years, even after a user has terminated their service.

Chinese gaming giant Tencent will be updating its games speed booster apps to restrict Chinese players from accessing unapproved foreign games. Tencent's move to block access to foreign titles may be the result of tightening regulations by the Chinese authorities.