Author: Cyrus Farivar

As expected, federal prosecutors in an iPhone unlocking case in New York have now asked a more senior judge, known as a district judge, to countermand a magistrate judge who ruled in Apple’s favor last week.

Last week, US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein concluded that what the government was asking for went too far. In his ruling, he worried about a “virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy.”

The case involves Jun Feng, a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty, and his seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Prosecutors have said previously that the investigation was not over and that it still needed data from Feng's phone. As the government reminded the court, Apple does have the ability to unlock this phone, unlike the seized iPhone 5C in San Bernardino. Moreover, as Department of Justice lawyers note, Apple has complied numerous times previously.

A security research firm announced Sunday its discovery of what is believed to be the world’s first ransomware that specifically goes after OS X machines.

"This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom,” Ryan Olson, of Palo Alto Networks, told Reuters.

The KeRanger malware, which imposes a 72-hour lockout window unless the victim pays 1 bitcoin ($410 as of this writing), appears to have been first discovered via a rogue version of Transmission, a popular BitTorrent client.

If you’ve ever sent an e-mail, you can thank Raymond Samuel Tomlinson for putting the @ symbol there.

On Friday, Tomlinson died of suspected heart failure. He was 74.

Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York in 1941, and he earned a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a company that played a key role in the development of the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet.

A California state lawmaker has come up with a new way to combat what he has defined as "sexting," but what most of us might define as "revenge porn."

Specifically, Asm. Ed Chau’s (D-Monterey Park) new bill would empower public schools to expel students under 18 who engage in the potentially degrading behavior.

According to the draft legislation, which was formally introduced late last month in the California Assembly, sexting is defined as "the dissemination of, or the solicitation or incitement to disseminate, a photograph or other visual recording by a pupil to another pupil or to school personnel by means of an electronic act with the purpose or effect of humiliating or harassing a pupil."

On Friday, lawyers for the Central Bank of Venezuela (CBV) filed a new amended civil complaint against DolarToday, the US-based website that publishes a daily unofficial exchange rate between American dollars and Venezuelan bolivares.

The Venezuelan government has made it a crime to publish the street trading rate as it countermands the "official" exchange rates, which are far more favorable to the government. The recent collapse of the price of oil has exacerbated Venezuela's economic woes; the country is widely expected to default on its international debts later this year.

Late last month, US District Judge Gregory Sleet ruled in favor of DolarToday’s earlier motion to dismiss. In his two-page ruling, Judge Sleet found that the CBV lacked standing and dismissed the case. However, he allowed the CBV to file an amended complaint within seven days, which it has now done.

A Florida congressman has introduced a new bill that would forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the federal court order to assist the unlocking of a seized iPhone 5C associated with the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

In a statement released on Thursday, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) blasted Apple.

"Taxpayers should not be subsidizing a company that refuses to cooperate in a terror investigation that left 14 Americans dead on American soil," he said. "Who did the terrorist talk to? Who did he message with? Did he go to a safe house? Is there information on the phone that might prevent a future attack on US soil? Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, every citizen and every company was willing to do whatever it took to side with law enforcement and defeat terror. It’s time Apple shows that same conviction to further protect our nation today."

While many tech companies, cryptographers, and privacy advocates have lined up publicly behind Apple in its ongoing fight with federal prosecutors, the company now has an unexpected ally: a San Bernardino man whose wife was shot and severely injured during the December 2015 terrorist attack.

On Thursday, Apple published Salihin Kondoker’s letter to the federal judge overseeing the case. In the letter, Kondoker describes how his wife, a San Bernardino County Health Department employee, was shot three times during the attack but survived.

Kondoker describes himself as an IT consultant for Pacific Gas & Electric, a public utility that serves much of California.

A Utah legislator has recently introduced a proposed state law that would allow law enforcement to shoot down drones in certain situations, among other suggested limits to drone activity.

If passed, Senate Bill 210 would firmly establish many limits on the behavior of drones that currently don’t exist at either the federal or state level. As currently written, Sen. Wayne Harper’s bill seems squarely aimed at many drone-related incidents that have occurred across the country.

Specifically, Harper’s bill would establish the concept of aerial trespass—which does not exist elsewhere in the United States. It's likely an attempt to avoid future situations of landowners shooting drones down out of the sky. The bill also would ban the use of drones within 500 feet of correctional institutions, forbid flights within three miles of a "wildland fire," and halt surveillance of gatherings of 500 people or more, and aerial voyeurism.

It’s hard to overstate how much Zynga has collapsed in recent years, and it's struggling to regain its past glory. Since 2008, Zynga has lost nearly $1 billion and has only had one profitable year (2010).

Over the course of 2015, its quarterly average of daily average users (DAU) steadily declined from 25 million during the first quarter to 18 million in the fourth quarter. By comparison, Zynga DAU peaked at 72 million back in Q2 2012.

So what will the tenacious San Francisco startup do now? According to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, founder Mark Pincus has been ousted again—he came back as CEO for the second time in April 2015. On March 7, the job will go to Frank Gibeau, a veteran of Electronic Arts—and he will be paid handsomely for it. Gibeau’s minimum salary will be $1 million and a “guaranteed minimum annual bonus equal to 100% of his annual base salary, pro-rated for the number of days he works for Zynga in 2016.”

A Brazilian judge has ordered the release of a Facebook executive one day after he was jailed in São Paulo for "repeated non-compliance with court orders," according to the Agence France Presse. Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld confirmed to Ars that executive Diego Dzodan has indeed been released.

Dzodan was arrested (Portuguese) after apparently refusing to provide WhatsApp messages that the Brazilian police sought in connection with a drug case. Since late 2014, all WhatsApp messages sent between Android devices are end-to-end encrypted, which means that not even parent company Facebook can access their plaintext contents. (WhatsApp messges that involve an iOS device are not end-to-end encrypted.)

Judge Ruy Pinheiro described Dzodan’s detention as "unlawful coercion," according to the AFP.