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(credit: Ruben Molina)

Apple said Friday that it won't go to court to demand the Federal Bureau of Investigation to inform the gadget maker how the feds broke into the phone of Syed Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in a San Bernardino County office building in December.

An Apple attorney, who asked that he not be identified by name, told reporters in a conference call that Apple did not know how the authorities unlocked the 5C running iOS 9. The Apple attorney asked that he be paraphrased and not quoted directly, but he suspected that the hack won't last long as Apple continues to fortify its security.

Apple said it was unclear whether the FBI employed a software or hardware hack, and the company did not understand why it would only work on a 5C, as the government said. The Apple lawyer said the government has not come forward to Apple to explain the workaround.

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A deal between Lyft and lawyers representing some drivers, in which the ride-hailing app would pay $12.25 million to end a lawsuit, has been thrown out by the federal judge overseeing the case.

In a 21-page order (PDF), US District Judge Vince Chhabria says that the $12.25 million payment seriously shortchanges the proposed class of drivers—and the state of California. Plaintiffs' lawyers said the $12.25 million was a reasonable cut for the $64 million that drivers deserved for mileage reimbursements they would have received as employees. But Chhabria's calculation of that reimbursement, using the drivers' own methodology, was that it's worth more than $126 million.

"The drivers were therefore shortchanged by half on their reimbursement claim alone," he concludes.

The website of Total Call Mobile, which is accused of defrauding the Lifeline program. (credit: Total Call Mobile)

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to collect a $51.1 million fine from a phone company accused of using “widespread enrollment fraud” to collect improper payments from a program designed to help poor people.

Since 2014, Total Call Mobile (TCM) has requested and received $9.7 million in payments by signing up tens of thousands of duplicate or ineligible consumers “despite repeated and explicit warnings from its own employees, in some cases compliance specialists, that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud,” the FCC said in an announcement yesterday.

The alleged fraud targeted the Lifeline program, which provides discounted phone service to people with low incomes. Lifeline, part of the Universal Service Fund, is paid for by US residents through surcharges on phone bills.

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(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

The Justice Department told a federal judge Friday that it would continue to pursue a court order demanding Apple extract data from a seized iPhone at the center of a New York drug probe.

The move comes weeks after the government withdrew a similar request in an unrelated terror investigation in the Southern California county of San Bernardino. Authorities abandoned their San Bernardino intentions after the feds informed the magistrate presiding over the case that the FBI no longer needed Apple's assistance in unlocking the 5C model because it had done so with the help of an "outside" party. However, it became increasingly clear two days ago that authorities would likely forge ahead with this bid in the New York case after James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the workaround purchased in the San Bernardino case was exclusive to the 5C and not other models like the 5S involved in this New York drug probe.

"The government’s application is not moot, and the government continues to require Apple’s assistance in accessing the data that it is authorized to search by warrant," the Justice Department wrote (PDF) in a letter to the federal judge presiding over the case.