12.30.13
More Reasons to Boycott Apple, Which Abuses Courts, Engages in Competition Crime, and Aids Espionage
Summary: The evil side of Apple explained in light of some recent news, suggesting that choosing Apple can be even worse than choosing Microsoft
THE BRANDING company Apple is considered by some, including Richard Stallman, to be even worse than Microsoft. As we came to discover in recent years, Apple — like Microsoft — is willing to go nuclear in trying to ban Linux devices from the market. Apple itself, ironically enough, is ordering the manufacturing of devices from some of the same companies whose products it tries to ban.
Apple and Microsoft don’t always sue Linux backers directly; they have commonalities in the sense that they back patent trolls and create some of their own. The Apple- and Microsoft-backed Rockstar, for instance, has been suing to hurt Android and Google fights back. As FOSS Force put it: “We also learned this week that Google has taken its first actions in response to Rockstar Consortium’s suit filed on Halloween against Google and a group of Android device manufacturers. According to a report posted Christmas Eve on Gigaom, Google has returned fire by filing a lawsuit against Rockstar.”
How can one sue a troll? What can one sue a troll for? Newegg has spent a lot of time and money fighting with trolls at ITC, so it should know how fruitless a process this can be. For Google, as in the case of Newegg, there’s just too much to lose if the troll gets fed. Gigaom‘s headline says that “Google sues to protect Android device makers from Apple-backed patent hell,” so there’s a matter of loyalty to partners here. In effect, Microsoft and Apple now successfully use proxies like Rockstar (and other trolls they equip with patents, although Nokia is just Microsoft’s proxy, it doesn’t play ball with Apple [1]) to hit Android hard. Apple itself, according to this summary of a report, has a “new bid for Samsung sales ban”. To quote: “Apple is again seeking to ban sales in the US of Samsung products that were at issue in the companies’ first patent trial in California and are now no longer on the market.
“The iPhone-maker asked US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose to bar sales of more than 20 smartphones and tablets, such as the Galaxy S 4G and Galaxy Tab 10.1, that a jury last year found to infringe Apple’s patents.
“While Koh rejected Apple’s bid for a sales ban on the infringing Samsung devices after the 2012 verdict, a US federal appeals court on November 18 cleared the way for it to pursue an injunction targeting some of its rival’s products.”
Coming from a criminal company that engages in price-fixing (and gets fined), Apple’s claim that it’s about justice is ludicrous at best.
Those who are not already boycotting “Apple”-branded products probably just don’t know enough about this company, whose products are in many ways more hostile than PCs with Windows installed. Macbook webcams can be remotely activated without any sign [2,3], for example, and security updates are not a priority [4]. The NSA has been partly involved in Apple’s development, so we should assume, by default, that Apple operating systems have back doors.
The only “amazing” thing at Apple is that the company still finds enough fools who are eager to queue up in expectation of a digital prison. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Nokia pulls Here Maps from the App Store, blames iOS 7
In the wake of Maps-gate, Nokia was one of several outfits that rushed to Apple’s aid with a navigation app of its very own. A year later, however, and that same offering has been yanked from the App Store before it could send a note to its neighbors. When we asked, Nokia responded with the below quote, saying that iOS 7 harms the user experience of HERE, but users can still access the mobile edition of the service. Which is all well and good, unless you were a big fan of the app’s ability to cache offline data.
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Macbook webcams can be remotely activated without any sign
In a paper called iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED, security researchers Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway explained a method for remotely operating the Isight webcam in Apple’s Macbook laptops.
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Software Allows Hackers to Activate MacBook Webcams Without Green Warning Light
A recently resolved criminal case shows how a man was able to hack a high school classmate’s laptop in order to take nude photographs with her computer’s camera without her knowledge, before attempting to use the images to extort her, reports The Washington Post.
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Mavericks: The end of Macs in the enterprise?
Macs have never been that popular in business. But if Apple is indeed no longer supporting security updates for older Mac OS X versions, Macs won’t have any place left in the enterprise office.
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