Huawei’s smartphone shipments surged 66% year-on-year in the third quarter, according to research published Wednesday by research firm Canalys, capturing a record 42% of China’s overall smartphone market....Sputnik International
The biggest surprise, however, is that China appears to be right. When contacted by Bloomberg, Apple said that, after conducting an investigation, it found the “percentage of dispatch workers exceeded our standards” and that it is “working closely with Foxconn to resolve this issue.” It added that when it finds issues, it works with suppliers to “take immediate corrective action.” Foxconn Technology Group also confirmed the dispatch worker violation following an operational review....Zero Hedge
This is what bringing money back to the United States means. Under the old tax law companies often attributed legal control of profits to foreign subsidiaries, so that they could defer paying taxes on this money. However the money was often actually held in the United States, since Apple could tell the subsidiary to keep the money wherever it wanted.
For this reason the economic significance of bringing the money back to the United States is almost zero. The legal change of ownership is leading to the collection of taxes, but this is in lieu of the considerably larger tax liability that Apple faced under the old law.
It would have been helpful if these points were made more clearly in this NYT piece. It does usefully point out that we don't know the extent to which the expansion plans announced by Apple would have occurred even without the tax cut.Beat the Press
Last month, the Apple exec told Fortune about how the company developed the programming language Swift to encourage students of all ages to learn to code.
“All this curriculum stuff is free. Anybody can have it that wants it around the world. We've done it in multiple languages,” he said.
Researchers working with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept.
The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released.
By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.
The CIA declined to comment for this story....Gets worse.
Read it at ZDNet
For nearly two years, Apple has wooed digital book publishers and authors with its unconditional support of the open EPUB standard. With last week’s introduction of iBooks 2.0, Apple has deliberately locked out that standard. Here’s why you should care.
Antitrust regulators should be taking a long look at this pattern of anti-competitive behavior.See also:
For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:
"Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented."
