A recovered cellphone at the center of a dispute between the families of two Florida teens who went missing during a fishing trip will be examined by its manufacturer, Apple Inc, in an agreement hammered out during a hearing on Friday, according to a local media report.
If Apple is able to retrieve anything from the water-damaged phone that is pertinent to the day the boys disappeared - including photos, texts and social media posts - the data will be given to a judge, who will decide if it is evidence and whether it may be shared with the families, according to a report by WPLG television in Miami.
The agreement puts to rest - for now - a row between the families of Austin Stephanos, 14, who owned the iPhone 6 model cellphone, and his friend Perry Cohen, also 14, who had borrowed it to communicate with his family the day they disappeared in July 2015 off the Atlantic Coast of South Florida, according to the report.
The phone was recovered in March when the boys' abandoned boat was discovered by a Norwegian crew near the Bahamas, WPLG reported.
The phone was inside a locked box and was heavily water damaged, the report said.
Cohen's family wanted the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to treat the phone as evidence in an open missing persons case, but the agency instead returned it to Stephanos' family, the station reported.
Cohen's mother, Pamela Cohen, sued Stephanos' family to have the phone returned to the state and allow her access to the phone's contents, the report said.
In an emergency hearing on Friday, the two sides agreed to turn over the iPhone to Apple and let the judge decide what to do with any data the company is able to retrieve, the station reported.
The two boys, neighbors and fishing buddies in their Palm Beach County hometown, were last seen July 24, 2015, buying gasoline for their 19-foot, single-engine vessel before launching in Jupiter, Florida.
Phone records indicate the phone went offline shortly after 1 p.m. local time and never came back on, the station reported.
(Reporting by Karen Brooks in Fort Worth, Texas, editing by G Crosse)
Google and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV are close to agreeing on a partnership that could break boundaries between Silicon Valley and the auto industry in the race to develop self-driving cars, people familiar with the discussions said on Friday.
The partnership could be announced soon, three people familiar with the situation told Reuters on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. The talks were first reported Thursday by the blog AutoExtremist.com.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, and Fiat Chrysler declined to comment.
Google has said that it does not want to build self-driving vehicles on its own and has explored alliances with auto companies, but none have been finalized. Fiat Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne said this week the company was in talks with an advanced technology company, but offered no details.
Executives at other auto makers, including Ford Motor Co, General Motors Co and Daimler AG, have expressed wariness about alliances with Alphabet or other technology companies that could relegate them to the role of hardware suppliers. Auto executives have said they do not want to stand by while Alphabet reaps richer profits from the data generated by vehicles and their passengers.
GM has signaled that it plans to go its own way on driverless car technology, moving to buy self-driving vehicle startup Cruise Automation.
On a conference call after Fiat Chrysler issued quarterly earnings on Tuesday, Marchionne repeated that he was interested in partnerships with Google or Apple Inc.
"Dialogue continues with people who are interested in exploring their relevance in the automotive world and we will continue to help them find their way out," Marchionne said in response to a question about working with non-traditional automakers.
John Krafcik, a former auto executive who heads Alphabet's self-driving car project, made a public pitch for partners in January at a conference in Detroit in January. Fiat Chrysler officials in Michigan and Italy have declined to comment on speculation that Google's technology could eventually be offered on the new Chrysler Pacifica minivan launched in February. Marchionne and other FCA officials are scheduled on May 6 to visit the Windsor, Ontario plant that builds the Pacifica.
Auto and technology industry executives have said self-driving vehicles, possibly minivans, might hit the roads first in ride-sharing or shuttle fleets.
Among the models that Alphabet has been using in its self-driving project is the Lexus RX450h, a hybrid sport utility vehicle, made by Toyota Motor Corp.
(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Richard Chang)
The Apple Inc employee found dead at the company's California headquarters committed suicide, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, police said on Thursday.
The victim, who was found on Wednesday deceased in a conference room at Apple's campus in Silicon Valley, was identified as 25-year-old Edward Thomas Mackowiak of Santa Clara, California.
"The Medical Examiner determined the manner of death was suicide and the cause was a gunshot to the head," the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office said in a written statement.
An Apple spokesman declined to comment on Thursday or say what Mackowiak did for the company, but a LinkedIn profile that has since been taken down listed him as a software engineer.
There was no immediate word on what might have led Mackowiack to take his own life.
"We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker," the company said in a statement issued late on Wednesday. "Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple."
Apple's so-called Infinite Loop campus is the hub for the company's workforce in Cupertino, which numbers 16,000 employees, according to a 2013 report on the company's economic impact. The company is constructing another campus in the city, a massive loop of glass often likened to a spaceship.
Apple on Tuesday reported its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, Julia Love and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Bernard Orr)
Proving that there is nowhere on the Internet that is safe from Trump followers, Motherboard is reporting that Bernie Sanders' Second Life headquarters is under siege from Trump supporters.
Second Life allows its users to purchase property in its virtual world, and after one user established a Sanders headquarters, Trump supporters bought the land next door--and promptly built a huge wall next to it. From the top of the wall, Donald Trump shouts "We have twenty times more traffic! I keep winning! You can't stump the Trump!"
Second Life Newser has been documenting the virtual fight in which Trump supporters are trolling Sanders Support Group member Macaria Wind. Sanders headquarters is in the Second Life region of Caspoli, and the Sanders banner can be seen from satellite.
[caption id="attachment_789014" align="alignnone" width="615"] Screenshot taken from Second Life Newser, https://slnewser.blogspot.com/2016/04/political-feud-between-new-trump-and.html[/caption]
Trump's 180 meter wall features a huge American flag, and fireworks spout from the summit. Wind has tried to laugh off the obnoxiousness, but a lot of it has crossed the line into hate tactics. "[What] is not a laughing matter are the racial slurs and bigotry witnessed by one group member who visited Trump HQ when there were actually people there," Wind told Motherboard.
[caption id="attachment_789042" align="alignnone" width="385"] Screengrab of Trump Swastika taken from Motherboard: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/second-life-donald-trump-bernie-sanders[/caption]
The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday awarded billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX an $83 million contract to launch a GPS satellite, breaking the monopoly that Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co have held on military space launches for more than a decade.
The Global Positioning System satellite will be launched in May 2018 from Florida, Air Force officials said.
The fixed-price award is the military's first competitively sourced launch service contract in more than a decade. It ends the exclusive relationship between the military and United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
ULA did not compete for the GPS launch contract, citing accounting issues, implications of trade sanctions limiting imports of its rockets' Russian-made engines and, according to a former ULA vice president, SpaceX's cut-rate pricing.
"This GPS III Launch Services contract award achieves a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, lowering launch costs, and reintroducing competition for National Security Space missions," Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement.
Between now and 2018, the Air Force plans to solicit bids for contracts covering eight more satellite launches.
ULA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about bidding on future launch contracts.
The $82.7 million fixed-price contract awarded to Space Exploration Technologies, as the company is officially known, covers production of a Falcon 9 rocket, spacecraft integration, launch operations and spaceflight certification.
Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who helped found Tesla Motors Inc and PayPal Holdings Inc , started SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of slashing launch costs to make Mars travel affordable.
SpaceX also said on Wednesday it plans to send an unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018, a first step in achieving Musk's goal to fly people to another planet.
SpaceX holds more than $10 billion worth of launch service contracts for NASA and commercial customers. The company recently made spaceflight history by returning Falcon 9 rockets to landing pads on land and sea - a key step in Musk's ongoing quest to develop a relatively inexpensive, reusable launch vehicle.
SpaceX declined to comment about its first military launch contract until after an Air Force conference call with reporters on Thursday.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
An Apple Inc employee was found dead on Wednesday at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters, police said, with local media reporting that the victim had suffered a head wound and a gun was discovered near his body.
Sergeant Andrea Urena of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office told reporters at a press conference that deputies were called to Apple's main offices in Cupertino at 8:35 a.m. PDT(1535 GMT).
"When deputies responded to the campus they found one individual male down and determined he was deceased," Urena said.
"Further investigation determined that no other individuals were involved. We believe this to be an isolated incident and that nobody else on campus or in the public is at risk," she added.
Urena said that Santa Clara County Coroner's investigators would conduct an autopsy to ascertain the cause and manner of death. She said that authorities were not searching for any suspects.
The San Jose Mercury News, citing emergency dispatch calls, said initial calls to police reported a man with a head wound.
Dispatch audio posted on the newspaper's website also shows that the unidentified victim was found in a conference room on the campus with a gun.
Urena declined to comment on those reports at the press conference.
Apple, which on Tuesday reported its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years, did not immediately respond to requests by Reuters for comment.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Alan Crosby)
A strike by nearly 40,000 Verizon Communications Inc workers is in its third week with unions and the company still far apart on contract talks, even as employee healthcare benefits are set to expire on Saturday.
Workers, from network technicians to customer service representatives, in Verizon's Fios Internet, telephone and TV services walked off the job on April 13 in one of the largest U.S. strikes in recent years after contract talks hit an impasse.
A resolution on various issues, including temporary job relocations, pensions and moving call center jobs offshore, has yet to be reached, representatives of Verizon and the Communications Workers of America union said on Wednesday.
Verizon, which said last week that a long-drawn labor dispute would pressure its earnings, remains committed to reaching a fair deal, spokesman Rich Young said in a phone interview.
A meeting between Verizon and union representatives is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, he said.
HEALTHCARE OPTIONS
Verizon has notified striking workers that under federal law their health care coverage was set to expire on April 30, Young said.
Verizon has said it spent over $3.2 billion on healthcare for employees last year. The company offers insurance coverage to those employees who are actively working, Young said.
Striking employees have the option of seeking coverage under the U.S government's Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) health insurance plan to get temporary healthcare coverage.
"They think that this is going to be used as a wedge to break this strike. I assure you it will not," said Ed Mooney, vice president of CWA District 2-13, said in a phone interview.
The CWA also has funds, collected through contributions from affiliated union members and other donors, to help cover healthcare costs of members when needed, Mooney said.
"It's horrible. Most of us are parents, I have a daughter and the prospect of losing our children's healthcare is actually quite disturbing," Fitz Boyce, 45, a field technician at Verizon for over two decades, said in an interview at the picket line in front of the company's Times Square store in New York.
The strike affects Fios Internet, telephone and TV services across several U.S. East Coast states, including New York and Virginia.
Verizon has trained thousands of non-union employees over the past year to ensure no service disruption. The company has fielded over 60,000 requests since the strike began, Young said.
The unions have said that replacement workers do not have the necessary expertise, especially in highly technical jobs such as equipment installations.
(Reporting by Malathi Nayak,; additional reporting by Mir Ubaid in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)
A bug in Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm has been accidentally suspending groups on the social network, sparking anger from the groups’ founders and conspiracy theories from some of their followers.
On Monday night, six pro-Bernie Sanders groups were temporarily suspended by Facebook. A day later, five Facebook groups supporting Filipino presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, with a total membership of more than 3 million people, were also taken down for a short period.
In both cases, supporters and administrators of the groups initially blamed the outages on political opponents. On social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, false reports for spam or abusive behaviour can sometimes be enough to trigger automatic bans, if submitted in large enough quantities. One filipino supporter of Duterte suggested that “It takes over 1,000 reports under 30 minutes for a Facebook page takedown to be triggered,” and called on his opponents to “act like decent people!”
Similar reactions were evident amongst Sanders supporters, who blamed astroturfing by pro-Clinton political action committees.
But Facebook told technology site Recode that the outages were actually due to a glitch in its systems. “A number of groups were inaccessible for a brief period after one of our automated policies was applied incorrectly. We corrected the problem within hours and are working to improve our tools.”
The FBI has provisionally decided not to share an iPhone unlocking mechanism used by a contractor to open the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters because the agency does not own the mechanism, two U.S. government sources said on Tuesday.
The FBI is expected within days to write to the White House explaining why the agency cannot share the unlocking mechanism with other government agencies, Apple or other third parties, said the sources, who asked to remain anonymous.
Several U.S. government sources said the FBI contractor that unlocked the shooter's phone was a foreign entity and did not give U.S. authorities details of the mechanism. Without that, the FBI could not share it even if it wanted to, sources said.
Reuters reported on April 14 that the unnamed contractor had sole ownership of the method it used, making it unlikely that the government could share it.
The White House has an interagency procedure, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, for reviewing technology security flaws and deciding which ones should be made public.
The FBI's provisional decision means that the unlocking mechanism used on the San Bernardino iPhone will not be referred to the interagency procedure for review.
Earlier on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey said his agency was assessing whether the mechanism would go through the review. “We are in the midst of trying to sort that out," Comey said.
Officials have said that the interagency review process leans toward disclosure of technological flaws. But it is not set up to handle or reveal flaws which are discovered and owned by private companies, sources have told Reuters.
Comey's comments appeared to confirm the FBI did not own the method used to crack the county-owned work phone belonging to Syed Farook, who with his wife opened fire in December on a San Bernardino, Calif., holiday party, killing 14 and wounding 22.
The method instead belongs to a still-unidentified third party that the FBI said came forward due to the attention received from its public pursuit of a court order to compel Apple's assistance in unlocking the phone.
Apple's refusal to comply prompted a high-profile standoff and fueled a long-simmering debate over security, privacy and law enforcement access to encrypted technology.
The government withdrew its case after it said the hacking method worked. Comey has said the method works on a “narrow slice” of iPhone 5c devices running iOS 9.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Cynthia Osterman and Bernard Orr)
Twitter Inc reported quarterly revenue at the lower end of its forecast as spending by advertisers declined.
Twitter said on Tuesday that it had 310 million average monthly active users in the first quarter ended March 31 compared with 305 million in the fourth quarter.
Revenue rose 36 percent from a year earlier to $594.5 million.
(Reporting by Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
Confronted with information found in emails from Gov. Rick Snyder, as spokesperson for the Michigan State Police admitted her agency is monitoring social media and looking at comments about the Flint water crisis in search of threats.
According to MLive, a State Police senior intelligence analyst highlighted a possible threatening statement following a Detroit Free Press article regarding Flint's water woes that has roiled the Snyder administration with calls for the governor's prosecution.
"It's time for civil unrest. Burn down the Governor mansion, elimionate (sic) the capitol where the legislators RE-INSTATED the emergency dictator law after the PEOPLE voted it down, and tell the Mich (sic) State Police if they use military force, we will return with same," read the alarming comment posted on Facebook.
According to authorities the comment was traced back to a man who was on probation as a result of his involvement in an armed standoff with police in April 2015, after six other counts, including threats of terrorism, were dismissed in that case.
"In the interest of protecting our residents, the MSP monitors any incidents that have the potential to result in criminal activity and/or violence," Michigan State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner explained.
According to Banner, the state maintains analysts at an MSP Intelligence Operations Center where they monitor Facebook and Twitter looking for threats.
A spokesperson for the governor didn't explain why state police were sharing the information with the Snyder, saying the governor's office doesn't "comment on any work or actions by the State Police regarding security issues."
But these smart devices respond to whatever commands they are given: we’ve had security experts demonstrate how cars can be hijacked remotely and medical devices in your body can be hacked and turned into lethal weapons. These risks are now well-recognized by technology developers, and there is a great deal of excellent work going on toward how to avoid them.
But there are other dangers we should be more concerned about that are getting less attention. Your gadgets could be providing a window that any hacker could see right through to spy on you.
Your stuff is surveilling you
Your laptop has a video camera built into it. When it’s recording, a little green light blinks on so you’re aware you’re being recorded. But it can be instructed to videotape your activities without the green camera light being on. And this is not just an in-laboratory warning of a hypothetical danger; it has actually been done, by over-eager school officials and by peeping Toms.
At least you can turn off your laptop: when it is shut, the camera can see only “the other side” of the laptop. But this quick fix doesn’t apply to sound recording devices, like microphones. For example, your phone could listen to conversations in the room even when it appears to be off. So could your TV, or other smart appliances in your home. Some gadgets – such as Amazon’s Echo – are explicitly designed to be voice activated and constantly at the ready to act on your spoken commands.
It’s not just audio and video recording we need to be concerned about. Your smart home monitor knows how many people are in your house and in which rooms at what times. Your smart water meter knows every time a toilet is flushed in your home. Your alarm clock knows what time you woke up each day last month. Your refrigerator knows every time you filled a glass of cold water. Your cellphone has a GPS built into it that can track your location, and hence record your movements. Yes, you can turn off location tracking, but does that mean the phone isn’t keeping track of your location? And do you really know for sure your GPS is off simply because your phone’s screen says it is? At the very least, your service provider knows where you are based on the cellphone towers your phone is communicating with.
We all love our smart gadgets. But beyond the convenience factor, the fact that our devices are networked means they can communicate in ways we don’t want them to, in addition to all the ways that we do.
A bad actor could figure out how to take control of any of these technologies to learn private information about you. But maybe even more worryingly, could your technology provider become, voluntarily or under compulsion, a party to a scheme through which you unwittingly reveal your secrets?
The recent battle between Apple and the FBI revolved around the feds' request that Apple develop a custom insecure version of iOS, the operating system of the iPhone, to facilitate their hacking into a terrorist’s cell phone. Is breaking into a locked phone just the next step beyond a traditional wiretap in which the government asks an Apple or a Samsung to use its technology to bug the conversations of a suspected terrorist?
But modern phones can be used to do a lot more than listen in on conversations. Could companies be asked to keep location tracking on while indicating to the suspect that it is really off? It would seem to me hard to draw a line between these cases. No wonder some Apple engineers came out as “objectors of conscience” in the Apple-FBI matter. This case was dropped before Apple could be compelled to do anything, so there’s no legal precedent to guide us on how these next-step examples would play out in court.
It is, of course, valuable for law enforcement to monitor criminal suspects, to investigate ongoing criminal behavior and to collect evidence to prosecute. This is the motive behind wiretap laws that allow law enforcement to listen to your phone conversations with no notice to you.
Wiretaps actually got their start in the 1800s as tools of corporate espionage. In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Olmstead v. U.S. that it was constitutional for law enforcement to use wiretaps, and that warrants weren’t required. This decision was superseded only in 1967, by Katz v. U.S., which established a citizen’s right to privacy, and required law enforcement to obtain warrants before bugging a phone conversation. This was long after Congress had passed an act carefully restricting wiretaps, in 1934.
In the early days of wiretapping, there was a physical “tap” – a side connection – that could be applied to a real wire carrying the conversation. Newer technologies eventually permitted the telephone company to encode and multiplex many telephone calls on the same physical wire.
Technology has moved on, but the law isn’t clear yet.
In the United States, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed by Congress in 1994, due to worries about law enforcement’s ability to keep up with new communications technologies. It requires communication companies to provide a way for law enforcement to place a wiretap even on newer communication technologies.
The law explicitly exempted information services, such as email. This legal differentiation between communications technologies and information services means companies are obliged to help the government listen in on your phone calls (with a warrant) but are not obliged to help it read your email messages (at least on account of this specific law).
In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that services such as Voice Over IP (think Skype) were communications services covered by CALEA, and not exempt information services.
Perhaps you don’t care about the privacy of criminals. But note that surveillance is not just of known bad actors, but also of suspected bad actors.
History teaches us that lists of suspects can sometimes be drawn way too broadly. You may remember the McCarthy era and J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI, which infamously included bugging Martin Luther King Jr.’s bedroom. Even today, there are attempts by the British Government Communications Headquarters to monitor everyone who visited the Wikileaks website, even just to browse. Some laws don’t make sense or aren’t fair, so even some “criminals” may still deserve privacy.
And it’s not just law enforcement overreach we have to worry about. Technologies like Finspy are commercially available today to install malware on your computer or phone and “recruit” it to spy on you. Such technologies could be used by anyone, including the “bad actors,” without the cooperation of your device manufacturer or service provider.
Wiretap laws, such as CALEA, apply to explicit communication actions taken by someone, such as actually making a phone call. Wiretaps do not track your movements in the house, they do not listen to your conversations when you are not on the phone, they do not videotape you in your bathroom – but these are all actions our various devices are now capable of performing. With the proliferation of devices in our lives, it is certainly possible to use them for surveillance purposes. There’s no question that by doing so, authorities will catch many bad actors. But there will also be a huge price to pay in terms of privacy and possibly wrongful arrests.
Finally, this may feel futuristic, but I assure you it is not. The FBI was already using a cellphone microphone to eavesdrop on organized crime as long as a decade ago. Commercial interests are not too far behind in doing much the same, with the purpose of targeting a better sales pitch.
Our omnipresent networked devices raise big questions that we should openly debate. How we balance these costs and benefits will determine the type of society we live in.
Hackers associated with the Anonymous collective shut down the official Ku Klux Klan website to combat the group's "blunt racism."
The hacker collective has been targeting the white supremacist group for months with coordinated attacks against its online promotional activities, reported Digital Trends.
"We believe in free speech but their form of beliefs is monolithic and evil,” one of the hackers said. “We stand for constitutional rights, but they want anyone who is not Caucasian removed from earth, so we targeted the KKK official website to show love for our boots on the ground and to send a message that all forms of corruption will be fought. We are not fascist but we certainly do not agree with the KKK movement. They are the fascists and they are the racists.”
Groups such as Anonymous, Ghost Squad and BinarySec have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against the KKK and revealed some of its members online in the past year.
Some of those hackers have also been waging an online campaign against Islamic State militants.
