Tag: ‘apple
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Apple Beats an Apple Watch Lawsuit
Security Researcher Allegedly Exploited Internal Apple Tool to Steal Millions
The researcher, Noah Roskin-Frazee, was accused alongside a co-conspirator obtaining over $3 million in products and services through more than two dozen fraudulent orders. That included around $2.5 million in gift cards and over $100,000 in “products and services.”
While Apple is not explicitly named in the court records, an unnamed “Company A” is located in Cupertino, California, and is clearly Apple. The court mentions that one of the perpetrators used gift cards to “purchase Final Cut Pro on Company A’s App Store,” and Apple is the only company that sells the software.
In 2019, Frazee and his accomplice used a password reset tool to gain access to an employee account that belonged to an unnamed “Company B,” which does customer support for Apple. That account led to access to additional employee credentials, and Frazee accessed Company B’s VPN servers. From there, Frazee was able to get into Apple’s systems, placing fraudulent orders for Apple products.
He used Apple’s “Toolbox” program that could be used to edit orders after they were placed, and he changed order values to zero, added products to orders, and extended AppleCare contracts. He abused Apple’s program from January to March 2019.
The defendants remoted into computers located in India and Costa Rica as part of the scheme, the indictment adds. The scam itself involved changing order monetary values to zero, adding products to existing orders without cost such as phones and laptops, and extending existing service contracts, the indictment adds. That included extending a customer service contract that was associated with one of the defendants and his family for an extra two years without paying.
Apple thanked Frazee for in a January support document for finding several bugs in macOS Sonoma, and the document was published less than two weeks after he was arrested. “We would like to acknowledge Noah Roskin-Frazee and Prof. J. (ZeroClicks.ai Lab) for their assistance,” reads Apple’s page in reference to a Wi-Fi vulnerability.
Frazee has been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, and intentional damage to a protected computer. He will be required to forfeit all of the stolen goods, and he could be sentenced to more than 20 years in jail if convicted.
This article, “Security Researcher Allegedly Exploited Internal Apple Tool to Steal Millions” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Apple Now Selling Refurbished 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro
Pricing on the refurbished 14-inch MacBook Pro models starts at $1,359, a $240 discount off of the original $1,599 starting price.
As of right now, Apple appears to be offering only MacBook Pro models with the standard M3 chip, with no M3 Pro or M3 Max machines available for purchase. Apple has several configurations listed with additional storage space.
Some of the entry-level models have already sold out, and availability will fluctuate as Apple restocks the refurbished store. Customers looking for a specific configuration should check back often.
All of Apple’s refurbished Macs are close to identical to new products. They are subject to a refurbishment process that includes full functionality testing, with any defective modules replaced, as well as a thorough cleaning and inspection. Refurbished products are eligible for AppleCare+ and have the same 14-day return period as new Apple devices.
This article, “Apple Now Selling Refurbished 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 188 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
Safari Technology Preview 188 includes fixes and updates for Accessibility, Animations, Browser Changes, CSS, Forms, Loading, Lockdown Mode, Media, Rendering, Scrolling, Storage, SVG, Web API, Web Extensions, WebAuthn, WebGL, and WebRTC.
The current Safari Technology Preview release is compatible with machines running macOS Ventura and macOS Sonoma, the latest version of macOS that Apple released in September 2023.
The Safari Technology Preview update is available through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences or System Settings to anyone who has downloaded the browser. Full release notes for the update are available on the Safari Technology Preview website.
Apple’s aim with Safari Technology Preview is to gather feedback from developers and users on its browser development process. Safari Technology Preview can run side-by-side with the existing Safari browser and while designed for developers, it does not require a developer account to download.
This article, “Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 188 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Judge Rules Against Users Suing Google and Apple Over ‘Annoying’ Search Results
In an order (PDF) granting the tech companies’ motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case — now twice-dismissed — at least partially alive. Under Lin’s order, users will not be able to amend claims that Google and Apple executives allegedly sealed the default search deal on the condition that Apple would not create its own general search engine through “private, secret, and clandestine personal meetings.” Because plaintiffs showed no evidence pinpointing exactly when Apple allegedly agreed to stay out of the general search market, these meetings, Lin reasoned, could just as easily indicate “rational, legal business behavior,” rather than an “illegal conspiracy.”
Users attempted to argue that Google and Apple intentionally hid these facts from the public, but Lin wrote that their “conclusory and vague allegations that defendants ‘secretly conducted meetings’ and ‘engaged in conduct to obfuscate internal communications’ are plainly insufficient.” Sharing bystander photos documenting Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook meeting at a restaurant with a manila folder tucked under Pichai’s elbow did not help users’ case. Lin was also not moved by users demonstrating that Google has a history of destroying evidence, because “they put forth no specific factual allegations that defendants did so in this case.” However, users will have 30 days to amend currently “inadequately” alleged claims that “Google’s exclusive default agreement, under which Apple set Google as the default search engine for its Safari web browser, foreclosed competition in the general search services market in the United States,” Lin wrote. If users miss that deadline, the case will be tossed with no opportunities to further amend claims.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple made an AI image tool that lets you make edits by describing them
Apple researchers released a new model that lets users describe in plain language what they want to change in a photo without ever touching photo editing software.
The MGIE model, which Apple worked on with the University of California, Santa Barbara, can crop, resize, flip, and add filters to images all through text prompts.
MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, can be applied to simple and more complex image editing tasks like modifying specific objects in a photo to make them a different shape or come off brighter. The model blends two different uses of multimodal language models. First, it learns how to interpret user prompts. Then it “imagines” what the edit would look like (asking for a bluer sky in a photo becomes…