Month: August 2016

(credit: Erik Mörner)

A patent-holding company that won a huge court victory against Apple had its victory wiped out today, and its stock plunged by more than 40 percent.

Nevada-based VirnetX won a jury trial against Apple earlier this year. An East Texas jury ruled that Apple must pay $625.6 million to VirnetX for infringing four patents. The patents are said to cover Apple's VPN on-demand feature, as well as FaceTime.

US District Judge Robert Schroeder, who oversaw the trial, published an order (PDF) on Friday that vacates the verdict and orders a new trial to begin in September.

Apple has a new 30-second ad out for the iPad Pro. The tablet, which it explicitly and repeatedly calls a "computer," has "a keyboard that can just get out of the way" and "a screen you can touch and even write on." Apple stops just short of calling the iPad "a tablet that can replace your laptop," but if you lift the voiceover verbatim (the iPad Pro is mentioned by name in the text but not in the voiceover) and play it over footage of a Surface Pro 4, you have a pretty good ad for a Microsoft product.

Stretching the traditional definition of "computer" has always been part of the pitch for the iPad Pro. Apple CEO Tim Cook calls the iPad Pro "the perfect expression of the future of computing," despite his company's history of downplaying the appeal of convertibles and the convergence between touch and mouse-and-keyboard operating systems. But right now Apple's actions are speaking louder than words.

Since last updating the MacBook Pro, Apple has introduced two different sizes of iPad Pros and a new iPad Mini 4, as well as cutting the price of the still-appealing iPad Air 2. Most of the Mac lineup is as stale as it's ever been, and all but two of those computers are at least one full processor generation behind the rest of the PC industry (and the most recent Skylake chips from Intel are on the cusp of being replaced by something else).

An image sent by DNC staffer Alexandra Chalupa shows a warning message she received from Yahoo Mail. (credit: Alexandra Chalupa)

An e-mail message within the Wikileaks dump of Democratic National Committee data suggests that the Yahoo account of one DNC staffer may have been specifically targeted by Russian hackers. The leaked message from DNC staffer Alexandra Chalupa includes a photo of a screen displaying a pop-up alert in Yahoo Mail warning, "We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors."

"Since I started digging into [Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort, these messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite changing my password often," Chalupa reported in the message. Chalupa was looking into Manafort's work in Ukraine, where Manafort managed the campaign of former Ukraine President Viktor F. Yanukovych (who fled to Russia after violent protests against his regime) and worked with pro-Russian and Communist Party politicians forming an opposition block to the current government.

The detail, spotted by cybersecurity researcher Matt Tait and posted to the Twitter account @pwnallthethings, offers another hint at the scope of the campaign to collect intelligence on DNC operations by what appears to be Russia-based "actors" operating on the behalf of Russian intelligence. Earlier evidence collected by SecureWorks detected phishing attacks against the personal Gmail accounts of some DNC staffers as well as attacks on DNC and Clinton campaign e-mail addresses.

A TP-Link router. (credit: TP-Link.)

Networking hardware vendor TP-Link today admitted violating US radio frequency rules by selling routers that could operate at power levels higher than their approved limits. In a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, TP-Link agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, comply with the rules going forward, and to let customers install open source firmware on routers.

The open source requirement is a unique one, as it isn't directly related to TP-Link's violation. Moreover, FCC rules don't require router makers to allow loading of third-party, open source firmware. In fact, recent changes to FCC rules made it more difficult for router makers to allow open source software.

The TP-Link settlement was announced in the midst of a controversy spurred by those new FCC rules. The new rules for the 5GHz band require router makers to prevent third-party firmware from changing radio frequency parameters in ways that could cause interference with other devices, such as FAA Doppler weather radar systems.