An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: The tax debate between Apple, Ireland, and the European Union may escalate in the next few months. According to recent reports, the Irish Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, will bring the debate to the EU court, a move that could trigger a years-long court battle. The battle stems from a European Commission finding that Ireland had been giving Apple tax breaks, something that has attracted a number of multinational employers to Ireland. The EU, however, has ordered the practices to change. After a three-year probe into Ireland's relationship with Apple, the European Commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from the company. That is the largest state-aid payback demand in history. The decision has been the subject of criticism, particularly from this side of the Atlantic. The U.S. Treasury Department says the decision is a threat "to undermine foreign investment, the business climate in Europe, and the important spirit of economic partnership between the U.S. and the EU." Apple has also vowed to fight against the EU decision, and those appeals will follow the ones already pending in Luxembourg, where the EU is headquartered. Those pending appeals include cases against Starbucks.

Google has updated its Gmail app for iOS today, which includes a handful of much-welcomed features and improvements. There is now an "Undo Send" button for mobile, a fresh new look, and faster search. Mashable reports: To unsend an email, just tap the "Undo" button in the lower right corner after you've hit the paper plane send icon. But you have to do it fast. You only get five seconds to hit undo before the email sends. And unlike the desktop version, you can't set it to longer intervals up to 30 seconds. You'll also notice Gmail app's got a fresh new look that resembles the Android version, which makes use of Google's Material Design language. Google's also made search faster with autocorrect suggestions and added in swipe gestures for archiving and deleting. In addition, Google has updated its Calendar application for iOS, bringing an overhauled UI and support for Spotlight search.

An anonymous reader shares a NYPost report: For tech-focused scammers, knocking off sneakers and handbags is so last decade. Thieves in the digital age are slamming consumers right in the app. A slew of knockoff shopping apps have quietly infiltrated Apple's App Store in recent months, looking to lure unsuspecting iPhone owners with bogus deals on everything from jewelry to designer duds. The fake apps mimic the look of legit apps -- and have proliferated since this summer, experts said. It didn't help that earlier this month, Apple introduced search ads in its App Store. The fake apps are buying search terms, it would appear, to increase their exposure to consumers. The crooks are looking to tap into the fast-growing market for mobile sales, which last year leaped 56 percent to $49.2 billion, according to comScore.Further reading on NYTimes (NYTimes has opened its paywall till November 9).

Steve Ballmer once said Apple's iPhone would flop because it cost too much -- though he now admits that he failed to anticipate carriers subsidizing the cost of the phone. But that was only the beginning. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The former CEO of Microsoft says he and Gates drifted apart over Microsoft's move into the hardware business in the early 2010s, according to Bloomberg. Ballmer says he was the one who pushed for Microsoft to design smartphones and tablets at a time when Apple was already well established. He says Gates and the board seemed reluctant to do so. "There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business," Ballmer told Bloomberg. "I had pushed Surface. The board had been a little -- little reluctant in supporting it. And then things came to a climax around what to do about the phone business."
Microsoft eventually took a $900 million write down for its first tablet, the Surface RT -- plus most of the value of their $9.5 billion acquisition of Nokia Oyj's handset unit as Microsoft pushed into hardware. "Ballmer's only regret: not doing it sooner," Bloomberg reports, adding that Surface is now profitable and this year will generate more than $4 billion in sales.

One of the biggest complaints with the new MacBook Pros is the lack of ports. There are between two and four USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) ports depending on the model you select -- that's it. If you need a SD card slot, HDMI, USB, or VGA port, you will need an adapter. In response to the criticism, Apple says they will be cutting prices for all of its USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) adapters: "We recognize that many users, especially pros, rely on legacy connectors to get work done today and they face a transition. We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem. Through the end of the year, we are reducing prices on all USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 peripherals we sell, as well as the prices on Apple's USB-C adapters and cables." The Verge reports: It's a sign that Apple recognizes these dongles are a hassle, and it seems to hope that reducing the prices on them will lessen the pain of this transition. Starting immediately, all of Apple's USB-C adapters and some of its USB-C cables will have their prices cut by $6 to $20: USB-C to traditional USB adapter from $19 to $9; Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter from $49 to $29; USB-C to Lightning cable (1 meter) from $25 to $19; USB-C to Lightning cable (2 meters) from $35 to $29; Multiport adapter with HDMI, USB, and USB-C from $69 to $49; Multiport adapter with VGA, USB, and USB-C from $69 to $49; Only USB-C charging cables aren't being discounted. Apple is also cutting prices by around 25 percent on all third-party USB-C peripherals that it sells. SanDisk's USB-C SD card reader is getting a slightly steeper discount, from $49 to $29. The discounted adapters will be available at Apple's physical and online stores through the end of the year. It still has no plans to ship adapters in the box with the new MacBook Pro.

Apple accounted for over 100 percent of smartphone industry profits in the third quarter of this year, according to estimates published by BMO Capital Markets on Thursday. From a report on MacRumors: Analyst Tim Long, quoted in the Investor's Business Daily, said Apple's staggering 103.6 percent profit share in Q3 2016 came largely as a result of significant losses posted by rival vendors including LG and HTC, and despite Apple continuing to shift fewer handsets year on year. Based on units alone, Samsung accounted for 21.7 percent of all smartphones sold, with Apple coming in second with a 13.2 percent share. In terms of profits however, Samsung came a distant second to Apple, capturing only a 0.9 percent share.

Apple has just received a patent, titled "electronic devices with carbon nanotube printing circuits," that suggests future iPhones may be foldable -- at least to some degree. Geek reports: Based on the language in the patent, it doesn't sound like Apple is specifically talking about a device that has a fully bendable display. It mentions one that can bend "along edges of touch sensors or displays." The carbon nanotube PCBs provide flexibility for some of the phone's internals, but not all of them. Those other parts will likely be covered by other patents if Apple is genuinely working on a seamless foldable device. The usual caveats apply here. For now, this is simply yet another patent padding Apple's already massive portfolio. Could they be planning to release an iPhone that folds in half? Definitely.

Technology critic Marco Arment, who co-hosts an Apple-centric podcast called ATP with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, has shared his take on the design of the recently launched MacBook Pro models. Apple's decision to get rid of USB Type-A ports has irked many, with some saying that the company should have left at least a few USB Type-A ports on the computer, even if what it strives to do is lead the industry in how a computer should look like. Arment shares the sentiment. From a blog post: The new MacBook Pro is probably great, and most of the initial skepticism probably won't age well. But I want to pick on one aspect today. Having four USB-C ports is awesome. Having only four USB-C ports is going to hurt the versatility requirement of pro gear, because there's a very real chance that you won't have the right dongle when you need it. This is going to happen a lot, because even though USB-C is the future, it's definitely not the present. We've had the standard USB plug (USB-A) in widespread use for 18 years, and it's going to take a few more years for USB-C to become so ubiquitous that we can get away without USB-A ports most of the time. A pro laptop released today should definitely have USB-C ports -- mostly USB-C ports, even -- but it should also have at least one USB-A port. Including a port that's still in extremely widespread use isn't an admission of failure or holding onto the past -- it's making a pragmatic tradeoff for customers' real-world needs. I worry when Apple falls on the wrong side of decisions like that, because it's putting form (and profitability) over function."Design for the future, but accommodate the reality of the present," he adds.

Apple's new MacBook Pro models have upset many people for many different reasons. Some are unhappy with the inability to get more than 16GB of RAM, some are upset with the high-price, some are unhappy about the missing physical Escape and function keys, and many are unhappy because Apple didn't put an SD card slot in the MacBook Pro. But Apple has an explanation. From a report on The Verge: Speaking to The Independent (paywalled), Apple exec Phil Schiller said the company had dropped the SD card slot as it was "cumbersome" and because wireless transfer technology for cameras is "proving very useful" as an alternative. Schiller said, "Because of a couple of things. One, it's a bit of a cumbersome slot. You've got this thing sticking halfway out. Then there are very fine and fast USB card readers, and then you can use CompactFlash as well as SD. So we could never really resolve this -- we picked SD because more consumer cameras have SD but you can only pick one. So, that was a bit of a trade-off. And then more and more cameras are starting to build wireless transfer into the camera. That's proving very useful. So we think there's a path forward where you can use a physical adaptor if you want, or do wireless transfer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It's a common assumption among tech geeks, and even cybersecurity experts, that if you are really paranoid, you should probably use an iPhone, and not Android. But the man responsible for securing the more than one billion Android users on the planet vehemently disagrees -- but of course he would. "For almost all threat models," Adrian Ludwig, the director of security at Android, referring to the level of security needed by most people, "they are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities." In a short interview after a talk at a security conference in Manhattan on Tuesday the talk, Ludwig said that, "for sure," there's no doubt that a Google Pixel and an iPhone are pretty much equal when it comes to security. Android, he added, will soon be better though. "In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place," he said, without mentioning that Android has already been around for more than eight years at this point. During his talk at the O'Reilly Security Conference Ludwig said that Android's built-in security product called "Safety Net" scans 400 million devices per day and checks a stunning 6 billions apps per day. The result of these security checks, coupled with the exploit mitigation measures baked into Android, mean that a really small number of Android devices has malware or, as Google calls it, "Potentially Harmful Applications" or PHAs, according to Ludwig. In fact, Ludwig said showing a graph, less than 1% of Android smartphone contain malware.

itwbennett quotes a report from CSO Online: Following similar decisions by Mozilla and Apple, Google plans to reject new digital certificates issued by certificate authorities WoSign and StartCom because they violated industry rules and best practices. The ban will go into effect in Chrome version 56, which is currently in the dev release channel, and will apply to all certificates issued by the two authorities after October 21. Browsers rely on digital certificates to verify the identity of websites and to establish encrypted connections with them. Certificates issued before October 21 will continue to be trusted as long as they're published to the public Certificate Transparency logs or have been issued to a limited set of domains owned by known WoSign and StartCom customers. "Due to a number of technical limitations and concerns, Google Chrome is unable to trust all pre-existing certificates while ensuring our users are sufficiently protected from further misissuance," said Chrome security team member Andrew Whalley in a blog post Monday. "As a result of these changes, customers of WoSign and StartCom may find their certificates no longer work in Chrome 56. Sites that find themselves on the whitelist will be able to request early removal once they've transitioned to new certificates," Whalley said. "Any attempt by WoSign or StartCom to circumvent these controls will result in immediate and complete removal of trust."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Instagram influencers have long tried to hack the app to make money by putting "purchase link in bio" when they photograph something you can buy. The company has noticed, so now it's making it easier for users to make purchases from within the app -- but only for certain brands. Starting next week, select iOS users will see shoppable photos with a white icon displayed on the lower left corner. Tapping it reveals the items in the photo that are available for purchase, and clicking it takes you to the product's description page. To buy, you'll have to click another link that leads you to the retailer's website. Instagram currently allows brands to promote products using an ad format, but the new shopping feature can be applied to regular posts as well. It's partnering up with 20 retail brands like J.Crew, Kate Spade, and Warby Parker at launch, and plans to expand globally. No word on whether that means non-retailers like celebrities and influencers will be able to take advantage of the feature, which opens up big monetization potentials for Instagram.

Montreal police have reportedly spied on La Presse journalist Patrick Lagace, tracking his cellphone calls, texts, and locations. According to Legace, the police department "obtained the court-authorized search warrants because they believed the target of one of their investigations was feeding him information." However, he said "the story in question was actually first reported on by a competitor, leading him to believe the investigation was actually a thinly veiled attempt to learn the identity of the sources within the police department." CBC.ca reports: La Press reported Monday at least 24 surveillance warrants were issued for Patrick Lagace's iPhone this year at the request of the police special investigations unit. That section is responsible for looking into crime within the police force. The warrants were used to track Lagace's whereabouts using the GPS chip in his iPhone. The warrants also allowed police to obtain the identities of everyone he spoke to or exchanged text messages with during that time. It's part of a "culture shift" among law enforcement and judges that began with the passing of Bill C-51 under the previous Conservative government, he said. Henheffer pointed to other recent cases where law enforcement has been spying on journalists or fighting for them to turn over the names of anonymous sources in court. In September, the Surete du Quebec seized Journal de Montreal reporter Michael Nguyen's computer because they believed he illegally obtained information cited in a story he wrote. At the same time, the RCMP has been trying to get a reporter from Vice News to hand over background materials used for stories on a suspected terrorist. Last May, CBC News revealed that a rogue group of Mounties investigating the leak of a secret document spied on two Canadian journalists for more than a week without any authorization.

Similar to the smartwatch market, the tablet market is in rough shape. According to estimates provided by IDC, the tablet market has been in decline for eight quarters in a row, and no company managed to ship more than 10 million units. VentureBeat reports: Q3 2016 saw a 14.7 percent year-over-year decline: 43 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 50.5 million units in the same quarter last year. Both Apple and Samsung saw their shipment numbers fall once again, though Apple gained share, up 1.9 points to 21.5 percent market share. Samsung slipped 0.9 points to 15.1 percent, but still shipped more than double the units than those behind it. This is the third time that Amazon has placed in the top five in a non-Q4 quarter -- typically, the company only shows up due to the holiday season. The company's low-cost Fire tablet has propelled the company to the top, though the growth shown is skewed by the fact that IDC did not include the 6-inch tablets offered by Amazon in Q3 2015. Lenovo shipped fewer units but grew 0.3 percent to 6.3 percent share, while Huawei shipped more units and gained 1.9 points to 5.6 percent. Both companies have maintained their positions for many quarters now and don't look like they will be displaced.

One of the first big secrets regarding Apple's upcoming smartphone has been spilled. According to a report from Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn, the firm responsible for assembling iPhones, is testing wireless charging modules for the iPhone 8. TrustedReviews reports: Citing 'an industry source familiar with the matter,' the report states the wireless charging feature could appear on the next Apple handset, but it depends whether the company can produce enough satisfactory units. The source told Nikkei: "Whether the feature can eventually make it into Apple's updated devices will depend on whether Foxconn can boost the yield rate to a satisfactory level later on." The yield rate refers to the 'number of satisfactory units in the production of a batch of components,' and if it's found to be too low, the wireless charging feature could be left out of the iPhone 8 according to the report. It's also claimed the wireless tech could make it into some versions of the iPhone 8 and not others. Nikkei is also reporting that Apple's next gen smartphones are expected to arrive in three different sizes -- 4.7-inch, 5-inch and 5.5-inch -- all of which will come with glass-backed bodies. The Next Web reports: "Nikkei further suggests out of the three new iPhones will be a premium model with a curved edge-to-edge OLED display; the other two models will likely have standard LCD displays. Here's what Nikkei's source said: "Apple has tentatively decided that all the 5.5-inch, 5-inch and 4.7-inch models will have glass backs, departing from metal casings adopted by current iPhones, and Biel and Lens are likely to be providing all the glass backs for the new iPhones next year.

Linux distributions have emerged as one of the beneficiaries in the aftermath of the MacBook Pros launch. Many people aren't pleased with the offering and prices of Apple's three new laptops and some of them are resorting to Linux-powered laptops. From a report on BetaNews: Immediately after the Apple Keynote, famed Ubuntu laptop and desktop seller, System76, saw a huge jump in traffic from people looking to buy its machines. The traffic was so intense, that it needed to upgrade servers to keep up, it said. "We experienced much more traffic than we had prepared for, the website didn't go hard down but experienced slowness. We had to scale up to return to normal. It was a pretty big surge, I don't have the details in front of me at the moment but I've not really heard of anything like this before. People being so underwhelmed by a product that immediately following a new product release they actively seek out competitor's products," says Ryan Sipes, Community Manager, System76. I decided to compare specifications and pricing on my own, so I headed to both Apple.com and System76.com to compare. Apple's new 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,400. This machine has a Quad-core Sklyake i7, maxes out at 16GB of RAM, has an NVMe 256GB SSD, and a Radeon Pro 450 with a paltry 2GB memory. Alternatively, I headed to System76 and configured its 15-inch Oryx Pro. I closely matched the MacBook Pro specs, with a Quad-core Sklyake i7 and NVMe 256GB SSD. Instead of 16GB of RAM as found on the Apple, I configured with 32GB (you can go up to 64GB if needed). By default, it comes with a 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060. The price? Less than $2,000! In other words, the System76 machine with much better specs is less expensive than Apple's.

This summer the FCC convened a "Robocall Task Force" to help consumers fight unwanted automated telemarketers, and Wednesday the coalition finally delivered a report recommending a "Do Not Originate" list so carriers could spot spoofed numbers which should be blocked. A trial of the "DNO" list that's been running for the last few weeks on some IRS numbers has resulted in a 90 percent drop in the volume of IRS scam calls, officials from AT&T, which leads the strike force, said during the FCC meeting Wednesday. The carriers on the strike force, which include Sprint, Verizon, and many others, plan to continue testing the DNO list in the coming months, with the intent to fully implement it some time next year...

The strike force members also are working on a system to classify calls into categories, such as political or charity, as a way to give consumers more information before they answer calls from unknown numbers. And, the group said it has developed a working solution for authentication between VoIP applications and traditional landline networks as another way to defeat spoofing from callers in foreign countries.
Early next year they're planning larger tests -- and the strike force has also created a new site describing how to block and report robocalls.

"Please know that Apple will continue its work with law enforcement," reads an email from Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, who reports directly to CEO Tim Cook, according to new documents this week on WikiLeaks. An anonymous reader writes: In the email the Apple executive writes "we work closely with authorities to comply with legal requests for data that have helped solve complex crimes. Thousands of times every month, we give governments information about Apple customers and devices, in response to warrants and other forms of legal process. We have a team that responds to those requests 24 hours a day." The email was addressed to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

But the context is missing, and could show a larger attempt to soften Hillary Clinton's position on encryption. While Jackson writes that at Apple, "We share law enforcement's concerns about the threat to citizens," she later writes "Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple's ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data."
The email also compliments Clinton for her "principled and nuanced stance" on encryption in a December debate against Bernie Sanders. Clinton had said "maybe the backdoor is the wrong door, and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that. But I also understand, when a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attack...well, if we can't know what someone is planning, we are going to have to rely on the neighbor... I just think there's got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out."

In June Google's task-force against zero day exploits "identified a coding exploit in the underlying kernel of Apple's OSX and it's mobile operating system iOS, which could allow for root-level escalation of privileges for an attacker in a non-updated version of the OS," according to The Stack.

An anonymous reader writes that Google "initially refused Apple's request for sixty days' grace, but eventually settled on September 21st for disclosure. But when Apple's last-minute September fix turned out to be ineffective, Project Zero agreed to keep quiet, eventually granting Apple nearly five months of silence about the task_t bug -- which has now been fixed in the latest updates to Mac OS and iOS." The fix was released Monday, the Stack reports: Since the task_t bug allows the user to gain any entitlements they may want, it could also nullify kernel code signing, which would allow unauthorized programs to run with elevated privileges on a Mac system. Any current OSX or iOS user who has applied the latest system updates is not susceptible to the task_t vulnerability.

A Phoenix teenager mistakenly tweeted a link to JavaScript exploit which forced iOS devices to automatically dial and re-dial 911. An anonymous reader quotes Softpedia: The teenager created several weaponized versions of this bug which would constantly dial a phone number, or show annoying popups. The teenager says he wanted to prank his friends, thinking it would be "funny," but when he shared the weaponized link online, he shared a version that instead of showing annoying popups, redialed a phone number, which in this case was 911.
In September researchers calculated just 6,000 smartphones can take down an entire state's 911 system, while more than 1,849 people clicked on this link, according to the article. Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office searched the teenager's home -- "several items were seized" -- and they've charged him with three felony counts for computer tampering.