Archives for September 2021

Over the past week or so, Apple has eased some longstanding restrictions that helped make its App Store into a big moneymaker for the company. The company has long required app developers to pay high commissions to Apple on the sales of paid apps as well as purchases of subscriptions or digital items inside their apps.

Apple is facing some significant pressure to open up the App Store further. A federal judge is soon expected to return a verdict in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, that seeks to strike down much of Apple’s commission system. And earlier this week, the South Korean legislature passed a law that would allow developers to sidestep payment systems run by both Apple and Google — and the commissions of 15% to 30% they charge.

But Apple hasn’t always explained its moves very clearly, leaving some iPhone users with unanswered questions as to what exactly Apple is doing and whether and how they’ll be affected.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS APPLE DOING?

Late Wednesday, Apple agreed to App Store changes starting next year to resolve an investigation by Japanese regulators. For the first time, Apple will allow Spotify, Netflix and other apps that sell digital subscriptions to music, video, magazines, newspapers, books and audio to include an in-app link to their own sites, where users can sign up outside Apple’s payment system.

Apple took a more limited step in the same direction last week when it agreed to let app developers email their users about ways to sidestep Apple when signing up for subscriptions. Such efforts could previously have gotten apps kicked out of Apple’s store. That change resulted from a preliminary settlement in a class-action lawsuit that still requires court approval.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek applauded the Wednesday move as a “step in in the right direction” in a Thursday tweet. But he lamented that Apple isn’t granting the same freedom to all apps, including those that make video games.

“Our goal is to restore competition once and for all, not one arbitrary, self-serving step at a time,” Ek tweeted.

WILL THIS MAKE APPS CHEAPER FOR USERS?

Probably not.

In theory, subscription apps could lower their prices, although there’s little reason to think they will. Netflix, for instance, has been steadily raising prices for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple’s commissions. The video streaming service says the price increases help it pay for a steady stream of new original programming.

But the changes could make life easier for some users of services like Spotify and Netflix, which had simply blocked sign-ups in their iPhone apps because they didn’t want to share that revenue with Apple. Instead, users have had to visit the companies’ websites to start a subscription they could then use with their iPhone app.

WHY DOES APPLE RUN ITS APP STORE WITH AN IRON HAND?

The company maintains the fees it charges help it recoup the more than $100 billion it has spent on its iPhone ecosystem. And it notes that most of the 1.8 billion apps on its store pay nothing because they rely on ads instead of subscriptions and other user purchases.

Apple also insists that control over its app ecosystem helps protect the privacy and security of its customers. Critics, however, say that’s just a pretext for preserving a commission system that unexpectedly turned into a gold mine, even though company co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t envision making money from the store when it opened. Apple doesn’t disclose the app store’s financial performance in its financial results but it is major component of the company’s services division, which generated $54 billion in revenue the last fiscal year.

WILL APPLE’S ACTIONS AFFECT THE RULING IN THE EPIC LAWSUIT?

It’s unlikely, although Apple’s changes appear to address one of the key concerns that U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers raised during the Apple-Epic trial in May.

During the trial, she had seemed troubled by a provision that forbids in-app notifications pointing out that purchases can also be made through web sites and other means, not just within the app. Such notices, she mused, wouldn’t be much different than a merchant’s display of the different credit cards — Visa, Mastercard, America Express or Discover — that has long been a staple at cash registers.

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BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Apple is indefinitely delaying plans to scan iPhones in the U.S. for images of child sexual abuse following an outcry from security and privacy experts who warned the technology could be exploited for other surveillance purposes by hackers and intrusive governments.

The postponement announced Friday comes a month after Apple revealed it was getting ready to roll out a tool to detect known images of child sexual abuse. The tool would work by scanning files before they’re uploaded to its iCloud back-up storage system. It had also planned to introduce a separate tool to scan users’ encrypted messages for sexually explicit content.

Apple insisted its technology had been developed in a way that would protect the privacy of iPhone owners in the U.S. But the Cupertino, California, company was swamped criticism from security experts, human rights groups and customers worried that the scanning technology would open a peephole exposing personal and sensitive information.

“Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” Apple said in an update posted above its original photo-scanning plans.

Apple never set a specific date for when the scanning technology would roll out, beyond saying it would occur some time this year. The company is expected to unveil its next iPhone later this month, but it’s unclear if it will use that event to further discuss its change in plans for scanning the devices in the U.S.

The intense backlash to the scanning technology was particularly bruising for a company that has made personal privacy a marketing mantra. Apple contends it is more trustworthy than other major technology companies such as Google and Facebook that vacuum up information about people’s interests and location to help sell digital ads. Apple CEO Tim Cook is known to repeat the catchphrase “Privacy is a fundamental human right.”

The photo scanning technology was “a really big about-face for Apple,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the most vocal critics of the company’s plans. “If you are going to take a stand for people’s privacy, you can’t be scanning their phones.”

Cohn applauded Apple for taking more time to reassess its plans and urged the company to talk to a broader range of experts than it apparently did while drawing up its scanning blueprint in its typically secretive fashion.

Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University and another outspoken critic of Apple, also supported the delay. He suggested the company talk to technical and policy communities and the general public before making such a big change that threatens the privacy of everyone’s photo library.

“You need to build support before you launch something like this,” Green said. “This was a big escalation from scanning almost nothing to scanning private files.”

When Apple announced the scanning technology last month, Green warned that the system could be used to frame innocent people by sending them seemingly innocuous images designed to trigger matches for child pornography. That could fool Apple’s algorithm and alert law enforcement.

Not long after Green and privacy advocates sounded warnings, a developer claimed to have found a way to reverse-engineer the matching tool, which works by recognizing the mathematical “fingerprints” that represent an image.

Apple traditionally has rejected government demands for data and access to devices that it believes are fishing expeditions or risk compromising the security of its customers or devices.

In a highly publicized act of defiance, Apple resisted an FBI demand in 2016 that the company crack the code protecting an iPhone used by one of the killers during a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. It argued at the time that it would be opening a digital backdoor that could be exploited by hackers and other unauthorized parties to break into devices. In that instance, Apple was widely praised by civil rights and privacy groups.

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this story from London.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The nation’s highest court has allowed a Texas law banning most abortions to remain in effect, marking a turning point for abortion opponents who have been fighting to implement stronger restrictions for nearly a decade.

The Texas law, pegged a “fetal heartbeat bill,” bans abortions at the point of the “first detectable heartbeat,” which could happen around six weeks into pregnancy, although that timeframe isn’t specified in the measure. Medical experts say the heart doesn’t begin to form until the fetus it is at least nine weeks old, and they decry efforts to promote abortion bans by relying on medical inaccuracies.

Nonetheless, at least 13 other states with Republican-dominated legislatures have adopted similar bans, although courts have blocked them all from being implemented. Democrats call the new Texas law an unconstitutional assault on women’s health.

The growing anti-abortion campaign is intended to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Abortion opponents hope the conservative coalition assembled under President Donald Trump will end the constitutional right to abortion as established by the high court in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

THE TERM ‘FETAL HEARTBEAT’ TWISTS THE SCIENCE

Advanced technology can detect a first flutter of electric activity within cells in an embryo as early as six weeks. This flutter isn’t a beating heart, it’s cardiac activity that will eventually become a heart. An embryo is termed a fetus after the eighth week of pregnancy, and the actual heart begins to form between the ninth and 12th weeks of pregnancy.

“It’s not a heartbeat, it’s the motion of the neural cells going up and down tubes in an embryo,” said Dr. Michael Cackovic, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, where some 5,300 babies are born each year.

Cackovic said ultrasound technology significantly advances each year, allowing physicians to provide better information to their patients, but he’s alarmed that such advances in medicine have been used to promote misinformation.

“We’re using technology to detect early cardiac motion, basically it’s a reflexive moment,” Cackovic added. “But now people are using this technology to forward their agenda.”

In 2013, a pioneering University of Leeds study found that while four clearly defined chambers appear in the human heart from the eighth week of pregnancy, they remain “a disorganized jumble of tissue” until around the 20th week, much later than previously believed.

ANTI-ABORTION ACTIVIST TAPS INTO EMOTION

The notion that abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy “stops a beating heart” is a concept originated by Ohio activist Janet Folger Porter, one of the nation’s fiercest advocates for banning the procedure.

Porter found that hearts were easy to market and punctuated her decade-long lobbying efforts by distributing heart-shaped balloons and teddy bears, all while side-stepping whether the packaging of the proposal was medically true.

She’s a polarizing figure, even among Republicans, due to her lobbying stunts and other controversial actions she’s exercised over the years. Notably, she arranged “testimony” via ultrasound by an in utero fetus. She also questions President Barack Obama’s citizenship and more recently served as spokeswoman for Senate candidate Roy Moore, of Alabama, who has denied allegations that he molested a 14-year-old girl.

OTHER STATES JUMP ON BOARD

It took Ohio nearly a decade to sign off on the abortion ban backed by Porter, but other states eventually got on board, after advocates for similar bans mirrored her tactics lobbying lawmakers and using emotive phrases such as “take heart” or “have a heart.”

Arkansas and North Dakota were among the first states to pass these types of bills in 2013. Iowa became the third in 2018. About two dozen states have since introduced similar measures inside their legislatures, but only Texas’ version has been enacted.

NOT THE FIRST TIME ABORTION HAS SPARKED WAR OVER WORDS

Plenty of battles have taken place over politically charged, inaccurate or vague terminology over abortion laws.

“Dismemberment abortion” is a term abortion opponents use to describe dilation and evacuation, a common second trimester abortion method. Others used “partial-birth abortion” to describe what is medically called intact dilation and extraction.

In the fight over fetal cardiac activity, anti-abortion advocates counter that using medical terminology dehumanizes the unborn.

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VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — A privately designed, unmanned rocket built to carry satellites was destroyed in an explosive fireball after suffering an “anomaly” off the California coast during its first attempt at reaching Earth’s orbit.

Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket was “terminated” over the Pacific Ocean shortly after its 6:59 p.m. Thursday liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, according to a base statement. Video from the San Luis Obispo Tribune showed the explosion.

Firefly said an “anomaly” occurred during the first-stage ascent that “resulted in the loss of the vehicle” about two minutes, 30 seconds into the flight. Vandenberg said a team of investigators will try to determine what caused the failure.

The rocket was carrying a payload called DREAM, or the Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission. It consisted of items from schools and other institutions, including small satellites and several demonstration spacecraft.

“While we did not meet all of our mission objectives, we did achieve a number of them: successful first stage ignition, liftoff of the pad, progression to supersonic speed, and we obtained a substantial amount of flight data,” Firefly said in a statement. The information will be applied to future missions.

Austin, Texas-based Firefly is developing various launch and space vehicles, including a lunar lander. Its Alpha rocket was designed to target the growing market for launching small satellites into Earth orbit.

Standing 95 feet (26 meters) high, the two-stage Alpha is designed to carry up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload into low orbit. The company wants to be capable of launching Alphas twice a month. Launches would have a starting price of $15 million, according to Firefly.

Firefly will have to catch up with two Long Beach, California-based companies that are ahead in the small satellite launch sector.

Rocket Lab has put 105 satellites into orbit with multiple launches from a site in New Zealand and is developing another launch complex in the U.S.

Virgin Orbit has put 17 satellites into space with two successful flights of its air-launched LauncherOne rocket, which is released from beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747.

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DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. government’s road safety agency has added another fatality involving a Tesla to the list of crashes it is probing due to the use of partially automated driving systems.

A special crash investigation team was dispatched to a July 26 crash on the Long Island Expressway in New York in which a man was killed by a Tesla Model Y SUV, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday.

The death brings to 10 the number of fatal crashes to which the agency has sent a team, nine of which involved Teslas. A total of 12 people were killed. The only fatal crash in which a Tesla wasn’t involved was in March of 2018, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle ran down a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.

The New York crash is on an updated list of those under investigation by NHTSA that was released on Friday.

The New York Police Department said that early on July 26, a 52-year-old man was hit by a Tesla and killed while changing a flat tire on his vehicle, which was parked on the left shoulder of the Long Island Expressway in Queens. The Tesla driver remained at the scene, and the department identified the victim as Jean Louis of Cambria Heights, New York. On Friday, police said they’re conferring with NHTSA in the continuing investigation, and no arrest has been made.

The additional fatality was revealed about three weeks after NHTSA opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s partially automated driving systems and how they have crashed into parked emergency vehicles. The probe comes as the agency has become more aggressive in looking at automated driving systems since President Joe Biden took office. For years NHTSA has been reluctant to regulate the systems, which have tremendous potential to save lives.

A message was left Friday seeking comment from Tesla, which is based in Palo Alto, California. In the past the company has said Autopilot is a driver-assist system and that drivers must be ready to intervene at all times. Tesla has been criticized by the National Transportation Safety Board and others who say it needs a stronger system to watch drivers to make sure they are paying attention.

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Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report.

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