Reuters:

A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, on Monday rejected a U.S. Justice Department request to order Apple Inc (AAPL.O) to help law enforcement access data on a locked iPhone, in a ruling that bolsters the company’s arguments in a growing privacy fight with the government.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in Brooklyn ruled that he did not have the legal authority to order Apple to disable the security of an iPhone seized during a drug investigation.

This isn’t the Apple vs FBI case that has garnered so much attention but it is interesting, if not precedent setting, that the judge in this particular case ruled against the government and its use of the All Writs Act, the same law the FBI is trying to use against Apple.

Twisted Sifter:

Simon Beck specializes in making ornate snow murals with just his snowshoes. The murals take at least an entire day to complete, and in order to really see them you have to take to the skies.

Absolutely mind blowing. I am unable to envision “drawing” like this on such a scale, let alone imagine the physical effort of 40,000 steps in the snow and cold. Be sure to check out the links to Beck’s other murals, all equally incredible.

VentureBeat:

I think it was Bill [sic] Schiller who said, “We gotta get this thing on the PC!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll get the team working on it!” We let it sink in. This was like the fourth time it had come up, and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. But enough quarters had passed with nothing really happening. Like I say, it was a critical success, but not a business success.

He finally said, “Okay. But under one condition. We’re going to build these and run it by Mossberg. And if Mossberg says it’s good enough to ship, then we’ll ship it.” He wanted to divorce himself from having to make the decision. But Walt said, “Not bad. I’d ship it.” That’s how we actually shipped on the PC.

All the buzz from this interview is about the effort to get the iPod/iTunes on the PC. It’s an good interview regardless, going through Fadell’s illustrious career. What I find really interesting has been the lack of comment from Walt Mossberg regarding his involvement.

Congrats Dan! Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Re/code is in the best of hands.

Pixelmator is a powerful and easy-to-use image editor for Mac. It lets you enhance your photos, create advanced image compositions with layers, shapes and text, or even draw vector grapchics, and a lot more. Pixelmator is built from the ground up for Mac, taking full advantage of the latest OS X features and technologies.

Congressman Darrell Issa, writing an op-ed piece for Wired:

Just last year, the federal government suffered numerous embarrassing cyber attacks: The Office of Personnel Management’s security breach resulted in the theft of 22 million Americans’ information, including fingerprints, Social Security numbers, addresses, employment history, and financial records. And the Internal Revenue Service’s hack left as many as 334,000 taxpayer accounts compromised‑though just this week, the IRS revised that number to over 700,000 accounts, more than twice their original estimates.

And:

Forcing Apple to manufacture new security vulnerabilities into its phones’ operating system in order to give the government access paves the way for these kinds of breaches to become all the more common. But even more alarming are the implications this decision would have for the online security of Americans for generations.

If the government is successful in forcing Apple to help decrypt the phone in this case, it would create a dangerous precedent that would allow the government to continue coming back again and again to decrypt all kinds of devices in all kinds of circumstances, far beyond national security.

And:

Law enforcement are not ill-intentioned in their attempts to gain access to the information inside this particular phone. In Apple CEO Tim Cook’s open letter, he writes, “We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI and we believe their intentions are good.”

I agree.

Whether tech companies like Apple can be forced to undermine their own products and whether they will have to leave a backdoor open for government—and whoever else may find it—in their products is currently a question left to the courts. But as Congress begins contemplating revisions to the 1789 statue upon which this court order is built, lawmakers must be sure to protect citizens’ right to privacy and preserve the integrity of the online security protocols that help keep us all safe.

Many have painted this as a partisan issue. Note that Congressman Issa is a Republican.

Quartz gathered together a series of videos of Bill Gates being funny. Click through to the Quartz post to read/watch the series.

By far, my favorite is this one, where Connie Chung, a high profile news anchor, gets Bill Gates to jump over a chair. What the what?

Also, be sure to watch this one.

Leo finally won his Oscar. So someone made this.

This appears to be a custom creation by The Flippest, though not certain of that. Really curious about the backstory here.

Fatima Wahab, writing for Addictive Tips:

If you own an iPhone model with low storage, it’s likely you cut corners to manage your space better. You likely have to keep space free for the apps you need and thus have to keep fewer photos and music files on the device. One way to conserve space on a device is to use apps like Spotify to fuel your music needs but if you’re mostly working next to or near a desktop, you can use Home Sharing to get music from your PC on your iPhone without needing any extra apps. Here’s how.

First things first, you may have noticed that the article was written from a PC user’s point of view. In this case, it doesn’t make a difference. Enabling Home Sharing works the same way on Mac and PC.

Home Sharing is not just for your iPhone. But if you are on the same network as your Mac and want to save space on your phone, this is an easy way to use your Mac as a music server.

Apple explains the Secure Enclave like so:

Touch ID doesn’t store any images of your fingerprint. It stores only a mathematical representation of your fingerprint. It isn’t possible for someone to reverse engineer your actual fingerprint image from this mathematical representation. The chip in your device also includes an advanced security architecture called the Secure Enclave which was developed to protect passcode and fingerprint data. Fingerprint data is encrypted and protected with a key available only to the Secure Enclave. Fingerprint data is used only by the Secure Enclave to verify that your fingerprint matches the enrolled fingerprint data. The Secure Enclave is walled off from the rest of the chip and the rest of iOS. Therefore, iOS and other apps never access your fingerprint data, it’s never stored on Apple servers, and it’s never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else. Only Touch ID uses it, and it can’t be used to match against other fingerprint databases.

Want to know more? Mike Ash digs deeper.

The full House of Representative Judiciary Committee (as opposed to the Senate version of the same) has scheduled a hearing tomorrow with two key witnesses:

• The Honorable James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Mr. Bruce Sewell, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Apple, Inc.

Also testifying will be Ms. Susan Landau, Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Mr. Cyrus R. Vance Jr., District Attorney, New York County.

You can watch the hearing live on C-SPAN 3. You can also sign up to be notified when the hearing is available on line, via this C-SPAN page.

Wonder if Apple will make this available on Apple TV.

New York Times, reporting on a meeting that took place last month between Tim Cook and other tech executives and FBI Director James Comey Jr., Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and other national security officials:

“With all due respect,” Mr. Cook told those around the table, including Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism chief and the heads of the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, “I think there has been a lack of leadership in the White House on this.”

Denis R. McDonough, the president’s chief of staff, took exception and said so. Law enforcement officials described him as stung by what they called Mr. Cook’s “rant,” although tech executives in the room insisted that Apple’s chief executive was respectful.

Either way, what started as a cordial two-hour discussion about combating Islamic extremism ended with the White House and Mr. Cook agreeing to disagree — foreshadowing a bitter battle between a president long enamored of Apple products and Silicon Valley and a tech titan who has spoken enthusiastically of Mr. Obama.

This divide might have been inevitable, but this looks like a core moment when the discussion moved from amiable to adversarial.

Microsoft has launched a series of ads focusing on login via face recognition, Cortana (Windows equivalent of Siri), and touchscreens, three features on modern Windows machines that are not found on the Mac.

The ads are simple, get straight to the point, and are comedy-free reminders of Apple’s Get a Mac campaign (I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC) that ran from 2006 through 2009.

The touch screen and facial login are fine features, but not groundbreaking. But one feature I truly do miss is Siri on my Mac. Last week, 9to5mac wrote that Siri was reportedly coming to the Mac this fall. Interesting timing, that rumor coming out just before this campaign hit. I wonder if Apple knew this was coming, got the word out to blunt Microsoft’s campaign.

Either way, I suspect getting a proactive version of Siri running on two different platforms (Mac and iOS) is no easy feat. After all, though the objects that make up the iOS and Mac developer soup are similar, they are different enough that they might require one more operating system rev to get them close enough to share Siri properly. Just a thought.

Wirecutter:

One of the biggest complaints people have about their smartphone is that the battery doesn’t last long enough. For many people, just making it through the day can be a challenge, which is why you see so many “How to make your phone’s battery last longer!” articles in your friends’ Facebook feeds. But many of the claims in those articles are specious at best, and some of the tricks they suggest could actually shorten your battery life. So which ones should you try?

As usual, lots of good info here from Wirecutter. I’m lucky that I don’t have many issues with battery life but lots of folks struggle to get through a whole day without a top up. Hopefully, some of these tips will help. Pay attention to the “Myths” section for info on what doesn’t work.

Business Insider:

Apple’s legendary Cupertino, California campus isn’t especially hospitable to unwanted visitors, as you might expect from a company famous for its secrecy.

There’s really only one place on the Apple campus that welcomes visitors: A small Apple Store, located right at 1 Infinite Loop, and open to the public.

But in addition to the standard selection of Apple gadgets, it’s the only place anywhere on Earth where you can buy a special selection of official Apple merchandise.

I love (and own a bunch of) the stuff at the Apple Campus Store and it’s always confused me why, when Apple knows how much merchandise they sell at that location, Apple doesn’t sell similar items in their retail locations or even online. I once asked Steve Jobs about it and he said, “We don’t sell t-shirts online because it devalues the brand….”

Apple:

If the Ethernet connection on your Mac stopped working recently, check System Information to find out which version of “Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data” is installed. If you have version 3.28.1, you need an update. If you can connect to WiFi, your Mac will update to version 3.28.2 automatically, or you can follow the steps below to restore it manually.

It’s a relatively easy thing to check to ensure compatibility and, if not, to fix.

Sources in position to know tell BuzzFeed News Apple has settled on March 21st as the day it will show off a handful of new products…

This sounds right to me.

The New Yorker:

It is essential to this story that the order to Apple is not a subpoena: it is issued under the All Writs Act of 1789, which says that federal courts can issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Read as a whole, this simply means that judges can tell people to follow the law, but they have to do so in a way that, in itself, respects the law.

The Act was written at a time when a lot of the mechanics of the law still had to be worked out. But there are qualifications there: warnings about the writs having to be “appropriate” and “agreeable,” not just to the law but to the law’s “principles.” The government, in its use of the writ now, seems to be treating those caveats as background noise. If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?

Really well written examination of how the government is trying to use this law to compel Apple to do its bidding.

My thanks to Mighty Deals for sponsoring The Loop this week.

It’s time for another exciting Mighty Deal Exclusive! This super mega bundle from Tom Chalky includes 57 hand-drawn fonts, 230 textures and brushes, and hundreds of extra design elements! If you were lucky enough to snag Tom Chalky’s mega bundle in early 2015, you know how fabulous these design assets can be. You also can take advantage of this year’s Mighty Deal as it contains all new pieces!

NPR:

On Jan. 27, 1986, the former engineer for shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol had joined four colleagues in trying to keep Challenger grounded. They argued for hours that the launch the next morning would be the coldest ever. Freezing temperatures, their data showed, stiffened rubber O-rings that keep burning rocket fuel from leaking out of the joints in the shuttle’s boosters.

But NASA officials rejected that data, and Thiokol executives overruled Ebeling and the other engineers.

“It’s going to blow up,” a distraught and defeated Ebeling told his wife, Darlene, when he arrived home that night.

And it did, 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven astronauts died. Cold weather and an O-ring failure were blamed, and Ebeling carried three decades of guilt.

Heartbreaking to think this guy carried around all that unnecessary guilt for all of these years but wonderful that, upon reporting the story, listeners wrote in to help him get past it.

Reuters:

A U.S. appeals court on Friday overturned a $120 million jury verdict against Samsung, finally handing the South Korean smartphone maker a significant win in its longstanding patent feud with top rival Apple.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., said Samsung Electronics Co Ltd did not infringe Apple’s “quick links” patent, and that two other patents covering the iPhone’s slide-to-unlock and auto-correct features were invalid. The court also said Apple was liable for infringing one of Samsung’s patents.

A spokeswoman for Apple declined to comment, while a representative for Samsung said she did not have an immediate comment on the decision.

This result is incomprehensible to me. Here’s a link to the decision if you want some depressing reading.

Claud Xiao, writing for Palo Alto Networks:

Apple’s official iOS App Store is well known for its strict code review of any app submitted by a developer. This mandatory policy has become one of the most important mechanisms in the iOS security ecosystem to ensure the privacy and security of iOS users. But we recently identified an app that demonstrated new ways of successfully evading Apple’s code review. This post discusses our findings and potential security risks to iOS device users.

The app we identified is named “开心日常英语 (Happy Daily English),” and it has since been removed by Apple from the App Store. This app was a complex, fully functional third party App Store client for iOS users in mainland China. We also discovered enterprise signed versions of this application elsewhere in the wild. We had not identified any malicious functionality in this app, and as such we classified it as Riskware and have named it ZergHelper.

Dave Verwer, who linked to this post in his latest edition of iOS Dev Weekly], wrote this:

Claud Xiao wrote about an app released late last year which presented one of two sets of functionality based on your location. When launched outside China it showed a fully featured app to help you learn English, but inside China it showed an App Store style app that (ab)used enterprise certificates to install pirated apps.

App Store review is (and always has been) fundamentally flawed in this respect and there’s no easy solution. This time it was the user’s location that was used as the gate to the alternative functionality, but it could have used any number of other checks to appear well behaved during the review process. Unfortunately the way that app review currently works makes situations like this almost impossible to prevent. Even if it were possible, these kind of gates are used by all sorts of apps for completely innocuous, or even user beneficial reasons as well. Trying to shut this kind of hole down isn’t the answer.

I get the sense that this is, at least in part, Apple being a victim of its own success (a success that continues to expand as Apple moves into China, India, etc.) The App Store is beyond huge and, perhaps, beyond manageable using Apple’s existing mechanisms.

Look at how freaking huge that wombat is. I’ve got to get me to Australia to see these critters for myself.

Steven Petrow, writing for USA Today:

“How did you know I was a reporter?” I asked while we started walking.

“Are you interested in the Apple/FBI story?” he responded, ignoring my question.

“Kind of. Why are you asking me that?” I thought he was some kind of creepy mind reader.

Then he dropped the bombshell.

“I hacked your email on the plane and read everything you sent and received. I did it to most people on the flight.” He had verbatim detail of a long email that he repeated back to me essentially word for word.

Pretty incredible story.

UPDATE: Via Daring Fireball, read this post from Errata security for some debunking on the above.

As mentioned in the previous post, Apple filed a motion yesterday to vacate the FBI’s recent court order. There’s a hearing on this motion scheduled for March 22nd.

Here’s a link to the motion. If you want to dig in to the motion just a bit, follow the link and scroll down to the table of contents, to the section labeled ARGUMENT.

The two prongs of Apple’s argument are laid out there. They are:

• The All Writs Act does not provide a basis to conscript Apple to create software enabling the government to hack into iPhones. You can read more about this in this post: The cost of what the FBI is asking Apple to do.

• The Order would violate The First Amendment and The Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. You can read more about this argument here [AUTOPLAY].

The motion also brings up the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, referred to as CALEA. John Gruber wrote about CALEA here:

What Apple is arguing is that the All Writs Act is intended only to fill the gaps covering scenarios not covered by other laws, but CALEA (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) is a law that was passed specifically to cover exactly this sort of scenario. This strikes me as a very compelling argument.

You can find CALEA here. One additional piece of CALEA also cited in the motion:

A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.

It should be noted that a version of CALEA that would have required a backdoor, known as CALEA II, was proposed and, ultimately, was not pursued.

Yesterday, Apple filed a motion to vacate he FBI’s recent court order. The motion itself is complex, but one of the arguments at its core is the extreme effort required to build what the FBI is asking for:

The compromised operating system that the governnment demands would require significant resources and effort to develop. Although it is difficult to estimate, because it has never been done before, the design, creation, validation, and deployment of the software likely would necessitate six to ten Apple engineers and employees dedicating a very substantial portion of their time for a minimum of two weeks, and likely as many as four weeks. Members of the team would include engineers from Apple’s core operating system group, a quality assurance engineer, a project manager, and either a document writer or tool writer.

Part of the case law surrounding the All Writs Act has produced this precedent language:

An order pursuant to the All Writs Act must not adversely affect the basic interests of the third party or impose an undue burden.

When someone says, Apple should just give them the number, or turn off the encryption, they clearly do not understand the level of effort and cost required on Apple’s part. This is a reasonable argument, especially when you consider that the FBI could have prevented all this if they came to Apple before they changed the iCloud password, thus preventing the phone from continuing to back itself up.

Using the All Writs Act to force an uninvolved, third party company to develop custom software for the government seems to be an overreach and would potentially set a dangerous precedent.

ASCII version of the local weather. You can also visit a specific city by appending the city name to the URL, like this:

http://wttr.in/london

Nicely done. Very retro.

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple currently plans to use its next major release of the Mac operating system, known as OS X 10.12, this fall to continue to expand Siri across its product lines. Last year, Apple implemented Siri as cornerstone features of both the Apple Watch and new Apple TV, and for 2016, Siri is planned to finally make its way to the Mac.

Apple had been testing versions of OS X internally with Siri integration since at least 2012, but sources now say that Apple has a clear vision for Siri on the Mac along with a polished user-interface and is nearly ready to launch the feature publicly. Apple is expected to introduce OS X 10.12 in June at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Fantastic! I use Siri all the time, especially to create reminders and add appointments to my calendar. I would absolutely love the ability to tap a command key and use Siri to do the same thing on my Mac. This has long been a missing feature for me.

Orin Kerr has been writing for the Washington Post about the All Writs Act, the law that the FBI is using to order Apple’s assistance. If you are interested, start with Part One.

From Part Two, this quote:

As I mentioned in my first post, I don’t know which side should win. Part of the reason is that I’m waiting on development of the facts. But as this post has showed, part of the problem is that the scope of authority under the AWA is just very unclear as applied to the Apple case. This case is like a crazy-hard law school exam hypothetical in which a professor gives students an unanswerable problem just to see how they do.

We are definitely exploring unknown territory.

Seth Weintraub, writing for 9to5Google:

At around noon today, our ads stopped working. They run through both Google’s Doubleclick/Ad Exchange network and Adsense. We’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with Google’s ads department, so when these type of issues do come up every few months, a few panicked calls and emails to the account rep of the moment can fix things. (And because our network does well into 6 figures/month, if we are vigilant we usually get to talk to a human!)

But this time was different. We have learned that Google’s Public Policy Team has decided that, after 5 years of publishing under the 9to5Google name, we have been violating their trademark. Sure we’re on Google+, News, Apps, Ads and just about everything else Google as 9to5Google but I guess something changed.

We are a news site dedicated to covering Google, not trying to masquarade as Google, so we’re appealing this decision (and if you know anyone at Google please have them run this up the ladder). But there is a big chance we’ll have to change our name.

From Google’s email, notifying them of the decision:

I want to start by apologizing for the abrupt and confusing way that this issue was brought to your attention. This has been really frustrating – for both of us – as these issues are normally communicated internally in advance so that I am able to give you warning and clarify the issue. As you know, that did not happen in this case, and I apologize for that.

My Team Lead (—-, CC’d here) and I had a lengthy conversation about why this happened immediately and without an internal warning. Evidently, because this is a legal trademark violation, the policy team is required to act immediately. We still expected there to be a notification from our Policy Team, and we’re sorry on behalf of their team that it was not communicated more clearly.

With that said, we were not able to argue an appeal for this violation since it’s an explicit policy in the AdSense Ts&Cs. This was my first time encountering this violation, so I had assumed I could make a case for appeal, but it’s actually coming from the Legal Trademark team, above the Policy Team, and there isn’t any grey area for us to make an appeal.

Lots of drama and upheaval, terribly handled and, in my opinion, terribly unfair.

Then, suddenly, this from Google:

Our Policy Team has taken another look at this and decided to reinstate ad serving to your site. No further action is needed.

The mind reels. Glad this got resolved, but what a terrible way to conduct business.