Author: Cyrus Farivar

In its final court filing before oral arguments that are scheduled for next week, Apple argued that the government’s interpretation of an obscure 18th-Century law goes too far, and it should not be able to authorize the forced creation of a customized iOS firmware to aid in the opening of a seized iPhone.

In a Tuesday call with reporters, Apple lawyers said that this case is serious and has profound implications. The company largely re-iterated many of its previous arguments in earlier filings, ending with this conclusion:

The government’s position has sweeping implications. Under the government’s view, the state could force an artist to paint a poster, a singer to perform a song, or an author to write a book, so long as its purpose was to achieve some permissible end, whether increasing military enrollment or promoting public health.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order under the All Writs Act, an obscure 18th-century statute, which would compel Apple to assist in the government's investigation. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the phone. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

On Tuesday, San Francisco-based on-demand food delivery SpoonRocket told customers that it had closed its doors over the weekend. The company’s closure is one of the latest signs that there’s been a financial slowdown in Silicon Valley. The startup offered a short list of relatively inexpensive food options (under $10) and could deliver them in under 10 minutes in many parts of the Bay Area.

"Despite our efforts, unfortunately, the downturn of market and lack of interest in on-demand companies like SpoonRocket from the venture community has forced us to shut down prematurely before we are able to grow into a viable business," SpoonRocket wrote.

TechCrunch reported that the company had raised $13.5 million in venture capital through Y Combinator and other angel funds, as well as some Series A funding.

The Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption.

According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that "as recently as this past week," federal officials have been "discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption."

The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal.

In a sign that freewheeling, well-funded Bay Area startups are becoming more cost-conscious, the on-demand grocery delivery service Instacart recently told its couriers that it would be cutting pay rates by as much as 63 percent.

According to the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco drivers who pick up bags at grocery stores, for example, will make $1.50 per drop-off rather than the previous $4. Instacart has also made a 50 percent cut, down to $0.25, on the commission that it pays per item to drivers when they are shopping in-store.

"After these changes our shoppers will earn, on average, an effective rate of $15 to $20 per hour, which is both in line with historical levels and strongly competitive within our markets," Hyeri Kim, an Instacart spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement.

The market for secure messaging has become so crowded that it's hard to tell one provider from another. That's why a new Swiss startup called Wire announced Thursday that its end-to-end encrypted messaging app (also called Wire) would now include secure video calling as well.

Wire has struggled so far to come anywhere close to other widely-used messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The company did not immediately answer Ars’ questions about how many users have installed it. In its marketing materials, Wire "offers itself as an alternative to other companies who seek to monetise users through the sale of customer data." The app is entirely free to use across all platforms.

The open-source app was launched over a year ago on OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android. Founder Janus Friis previously helped create and launch Skype, and he has brought on a number of alumni from that company including CEO Jonathan Christensen and Estonians Siim Teller and Priidu Zilmer.

A Florida county sheriff has threatened to arrest Apple CEO Tim Cook, were a situation to arise similar to Apple's resistance to government pressure in the ongoing San Bernardino terrorism investigation.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order under the All Writs Act, an obscure 18th-century statute, which would compel Apple to help. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the seized iPhone 5C. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday that was published by FOX 13, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd described a recent murder case that his office had worked on. Judd said that the murder suspects took photos of their victim on their smartphones, but then later gave detectives the passcodes to unlock their phones.

Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to impose a sentence of five years against Matthew Keys, who was found guilty last year on three counts of criminal hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That federal law, which was passed in 1984, was what the late activist Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under. Last year, President Barack Obama called for Congress to expand prison sentences for those found guilty under this law.

Keys worked previously as an online producer for KTXL Fox 40, a Sacramento, California-based television station. Prosecutors argued that in December 2010, shortly after his dismissal, he handed over login credentials to a Tribune Media content management system (CMS), which allowed members of Anonymous to make unauthorized changes to a Los Angeles Times story. (At the time, both companies were both owned by Tribune Media.) Those changes amounted to a short-lived prank: they lasted only 40 minutes, and there is little evidence that the prank was widely noticed. Criminal charges were not filed until March 2013.

Even after he was found guilty, Keys continued to deny the government’s narrative. In a brief interview with Ars after his trial concluded, he described the prosecution’s theory as "total bullshit."

As expected, federal prosecutors filed their formal response on Thursday in the ongoing case involving the seized iPhone 5C that was used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December 2015.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order that would compel Apple to assist in the government’s investigation. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the phone. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

In the new filing, Eileen Decker, a United States Attorney, argued that the court order is "modest," and only applies to a single iPhone.

Last fall, a Maryland man’s frequent activities at a local casino resulted in robbers using a GPS tracker to follow him home. Days later, they bound and gagged his two children, then stole $6,000 in cash plus an iPhone 6.

If that wasn't crazy enough, Mario Guzman (a pseudonym) was also followed by someone else less than a week earlier. His wife, Alicia Guzman (another pseudonym), had hired a private investigator to keep tabs on her husband, according to a Montgomery County Police report. (Ars has changed the names of this feuding couple to protect their privacy interests.)

Mario Guzman regularly drove 50 miles, six days a week, from his home in Germantown to a casino in Baltimore, according to a recently-released police report that Ars obtained Tuesday from the Montgomery County Police Department. The report notes that Alicia Guzman suspected her husband of adultery and "gambling with large sums of money."

The man who shot down a drone over his Kentucky home last year has filed a new legal response to an ongoing lawsuit, arguing that the case should be dismissed because the federal court lacks jurisdiction.

William Merideth shot down a drone flying over his home in June 2015. The drone's pilot, David Boggs, filed a lawsuit in January asking the court in Louisville to make a legal determination as to whether his drone’s flight constituted trespassing. Boggs asked the court to rule that he is entitled to damages of $1,500 for his destroyed drone.

"The United States Government has exclusive sovereignty over airspace of the United States pursuant to 49 U.S.C.A. § 40103," Boggs' lawyer, James Mackler, wrote in the civil complaint. "The airspace, therefore, is not subject to private ownership nor can the flight of an aircraft within the navigable airspace of the United States constitute a trespass."