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The battle between the FBI and Apple ended on Monday with “no clear winner,” according to The New York Times. Not so. The clear winner is the American people, and the clear loser is Apple.The FBI had requested Apple’s help in unlocking a cell phone used by the San Bernardino killers--Apple refused. The Justice Department took the dispute to court, arguing that a search warrant required Apple to program a “backdoor” into Syed Farook’s password- protected iPhone5. A judge initially decided in favor of the government, but Apple appealed the ruling; the case was expected to end up at the...

The U.S. Justice Department announced Monday it has successfully accessed data stored on the iPhone that belonged to the San Bernardino gunman without Apple's help, ending the court case against the tech company. The surprise development effectively ends a pitched court battle between Apple and the Obama administration. The government told a federal court Monday, without any details, that it accessed data on gunman Syed Farook's iPhone and no longer requires Apple's assistance.

On Monday, less than 24 hours before the hearing was scheduled to start, the US government asked to cancel its big court date in the Apple vs FBI fight. The judge convened a quick conference with the Department of Justice and Apple attorneys. A transcript shows the judge repeatedly emphasizing that the order to compel Apple to create a backdoor for the government is “unenforceable” and has been so since the court battle began weeks ago.The March 22 hearing was set to be an all-out battle. Both sides planned to call witnesses, with one to two hours of live...

An Obama Administration regulation may require the FBI to hand over the hack developed by what ever company that may succeed in hacking into the San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone 5c, so that Apple can plug that vulnerability. What irony. . . Link only due to copyright considerations: Thank You for Hacking iPhone, Now Tell Apple How You Did It (link only due to copyright issues)

The Associated Press — The Supreme Court has agreed to referee a pricy patent dispute between Samsung and Apple. The justices said Monday they will review a $399 million judgment against South Korea-based Samsung for illegally copying patented aspects of the look of Apple's iPhone. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, and Samsung are the top two manufacturers of increasingly ubiquitous smartphones. The two companies have been embroiled in patent fights for years. The justices will decide whether a court can order Samsung to pay Apple every penny it made from the phones at issue, even though the disputed features are...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The Justice Department moved to cancel a Tuesday hearing over whether Apple should be forced to help investigators break into an iPhone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting, saying it might no longer need Apple’s assistance to extract data from the device. In a new court filing on Monday, Justice Department lawyers wrote that as of Sunday, an outside party had demonstrated a way for the F.B.I. to possibly unlock the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino gunmen. “Testing is required to determine whether it is...

Apple has quickly released a patch for a flaw in its encryption capability for the iOS mobile and OS X desktop operating systems which could allow attackers to unscramble protected iMessage photos and videos. First reported by the Washington Post, a group of researchers led by cryptographer Matthew Green at John Hopkins University discovered they could intercept iMessage content stored in Apple's iCloud by brute-force guessing the encryption key. With the encryption key at hand, attackers could retrieve files from iCloud accounts without users knowing. Attackers would need to be able to bypass Apple’s TLS certificate pinning, which associates the...

Here's Zdziarski's possible explanation ... [Most of the tech experts I’ve heard from believe the same as I do – that NAND mirroring is likely being used to some degree to brute force the pin on the device. This is where the NAND chip is typically desoldered, dumped into a file (likely by a chip reader/programmer, which is like a cd burner for chips), and then copied so that if the device begins to wipe or delay after five or ten tries, they can just re-write the original image back to the chip. This technique is kind of like cheating...

Add another one to the man's list of prudent business decisions. As relates to his previously documented loathing of Fox News, it's now known that the late Steve Jobs backed up his harsh words by wisely withholding Apple's advertising dollars, according to an upcoming book about the 2012 presidential campaign. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg political columnist and contributor to MSNBC, tells of Jobs "personally ordering that Apple ads be removed from Fox News," according to a blog post in the New York Times over the weekend. Alter's book, "The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies," is scheduled...