FOSS Patents: Fortnite users continue to make in-app purchases on iOS that bypass Apple's payment system: court filing says "Epic is stealing money from Apple"

In yesterday's filing, Apple says it has the right to sue Epic not only for breach of contract but also for tort, given that Epic would face tort liability "if [t]c had never executed the contracts with Apple and had instead found another way to smuggle Fortnite and its 'hotfix' payment mechanism into the App Store." Apple argues that a company protecting itself against such behavior through contracts must not be in a weaker legal position than one that doesn't. What Apple does clarify is that it won't seek "multiplicative recovery" if the same conduct on Epic's part constituted both a breach of an agreement and fraud. In other words, Apple would then content itself with only the greater of the two alternative amounts.

It appears that the "hotfix" was just a simple data point on Epic's servers--not program code, but merely a trigger. When the iOS version of Fortnite checked on that data point, it offered an alternative payment mechanism to end users in circumvention of Apple's in-app payment rules.

After the "hotfix" that Apple says became Epic's hot mess, Fortnite was removed from the App Store. That means it cannot be downloaded to iOS devices right now, and Epic has already failed twice (with a motion for a temporary restraining order as well as a motion for a preliminary injunction) to get a court to force Apple to tolerate an iOS version of Fortnite that bypasses Apple's in-app payment system.

Why Apple’s App Store Is Under Siege

Fueling the fire was a report issued last week by House Democrats summing up an antitrust probe into four Big Tech companies — Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google — and urging Congress to enact new laws to curb the companies’ power. The 449-page report called on Congress to enact new laws to curb the companies’ power, including prohibiting companies like Apple from operating “adjacent lines of business” (in other words, preventing it from offering its own apps in the App Store that compete with those from third parties).

“Apple’s monopoly power over app distribution on iPhones permits the App Store to generate supra-normal profits,” the House Judiciary Committee report said.

Microsoft Says Long-Time Deals Executive Brown Leaving Company

Microsoft Corp. said mergers and acquisitions chief Marc Brown is leaving the company after a more than two-decade stint working on deals ranging from LinkedIn to Nokia Oyj’s handset unit.

Brown, vice president of corporate development, reported to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw on Friday confirmed Brown’s departure and declined to comment on a replacement. The company is still conducting a search for a senior business development executive to replace Peggy Johnson, who left in July to become chief executive officer at Magic Leap Inc.

Your brand new Oculus Quest 2 can’t play Oculus Go games, John Carmack confirms [Ed: Digital Restrictions (DRM) in action]

If you bought a new Oculus Quest 2 with the hopes of experiencing games from the now-discontinued Oculus Go, I have bad news: the company has decided not to include support for Go titles on the Quest 2, Oculus’ consulting CTO John Carmack confirms on Twitter.

When the Oculus Quest 2 launched three days ago, some people noticed there was no feature on the UI that allowed users to access Go apps and games, something the original Quest headset featured. Carmack did not go into much detail on why support was not added other than “[he] totally lost the internal debate over backwards compatibility.”

Three npm packages found opening shells on Linux, Windows systems [Ed: The writers at ZDNet are apt at blaming “LINUX” for security threats that have nothing to do with Linux. Now that Microsoft is serving malware ZDNet… blames “NPM” (ssshhhhh… don’t mention Microsoft)]

Facebook is accidentally locking some users out of their new Oculus headsets

                   

As UploadVR reported yesterday, users complained that they had been suspended for unclear reasons while they were trying to set up the Quest 2. One poster on the Oculus subreddit, for instance, described getting banned after creating a Facebook page for the first time and merging it with an existing Oculus account. “I logged into Facebook’s website to lock down my profile, as I had no intention of using the social media site more than was needed, and within minutes of merging accounts and changing profile settings my account was banned without any reason given or cause I can think of,” the user told The Verge in an email — rendering the Quest 2 a “new white paperweight.” Other people in the subreddit chimed in with their own experiences getting locked out.

Games Piracy Scene Reinvigorated, Four Denuvo-Protected Titles Released in One Day

         

Late August the piracy Scene was thrown into turmoil when law enforcement raids took place all around Europe. With few hopes of a significant recovery any time soon, in the space of a few minutes yesterday veteran cracking group CPY released four games previously protected by Denuvo. For many pirates, this is the positive signal they'd been waiting for.

Microsoft ends support for Office 2010, bangs the Office 365 gong

Microsoft is foisting Office web apps on Edge users

Microsoft is no stranger to using Windows and other software to promote more of its own apps and services. The latest way the company is doing this is via Edge.

Accusations of using its products as an advertising tool or as a means of forcing products onto users are nothing new for the Windows maker, and the company's latest move with Edge does nothing to shake them off. The browser has been found to install Microsoft Office web apps without asking for permission.

JACK2 Audio Server Rolls Out Better Windows + macOS Support - Phoronix

JACK2 1.9.15 released on Thursday as the newest version of this professional-minded sound server focused on real-time, low-latency connections.

JACK2 1.9.15 brings a number of bug fixes, improvements to various JACK tools, deprecates JACK-Session, and makes other improvements. JACK1 continues to be in a bug-fix mode while JACK2 continues advancing slowly and incorporating all of its functionality.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

After only one public Git commit this year, penguinstas think: Fork it, we don't need Cupertino. The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019.

Microsoft cloud issues continue with more global outages

The most recent disruptions seem to be primarily affecting US users, with some individuals noting that they are struggling to access their admin centre dashboards. There were also reports that a number of Microsoft 365 services, as well as Azure Active Directory and Azure Networking services, were experiencing issues.

Quickpost: 4 Bytes To Crash Excel

When you create a text file with content “ID;;”, save it with extension .slk, then open it with Excel, Excel will crash.

A CrowdSec Primer: A Modern Replacement for Fail2Ban

This tells me they’re thinking big and long-term with this thing, and not just as a replacement for a local banning tool.

So the bottom line—at the very miniumum—is that we seem to have a modern replacement for Fail2Ban, and over time that may turn into something more.

Microsoft Took 10 Days to Remove Leaked XP Code From its Own Site

Last month there was excitement when the source code for Windows XP was leaked online. The big question, however, was how quickly Microsoft would act to have it disappeared from the web. The partial answer is that the company took 10 days to have one public repository taken down. And that was hosted on Github, a platform owned by Microsoft itself.

Coronavirus cases 'lost' in test and trace blunder

More than 15,000 positive Covid cases have become “lost” in Britain’s tracking systems, resulting in long delays being passed on to Test and Trace handlers.

It means that tens of thousands of people who should have been told to self-isolate after coming into close contact with an infected case are only now being contacted – in some cases 10 days after transmission occurred.

The Government blamed “computer issues” for a blunder which saw the number of daily cases appear to double overnight, and has been accused of “shambolic” handling by Labour.

Shock and despair follow revelations that ‘world-beating’ Test and Trace system is being run on Excel

News that Britain’s ‘world-beating’ Test and Trace system is being run on Excel has been met with shock and despair today.

The weekly rate of new Covid-19 cases soared in dozens of areas of England, following the addition of nearly 16,000 cases that went unreported by because of a technical error with the spreadsheet.

John McAfee has been arrested in Spain and is facing extradition

John McAfee, who built a fortune selling cybersecurity software and has in recent years become a cryptocurrency evangelist, has been indicted on charges of tax evasion by the Department of Justice (DOJ). He has been arrested in Spain and is awaiting extradition, the DOJ said.

Kaspersky finds UEFI images that could be used for malware transport

Microsoft used one feature in the UEFI to introduce what it called secure boot in Windows 8 in 2012, in a manner that effectively prevented easy booting of other operating systems on machines which had secure boot enabled.

Secure boot was designed so that an exchange of cryptographic keys took place at boot-time; a system could verify the operating system attempting to boot was a genuine one, and not malware. There were further key exchanges along the way.

But four years later, two researchers cracked the technology when they found a so-called golden key that was protecting the feature.

Lechtik, Kuznetsov and Parshin wrote: "A sophisticated attacker can modify the firmware in order to have it deploy malicious code that will be run after the operating system is loaded. Moreover, since it is typically shipped within SPI flash storage that is soldered to the computer’s motherboard, such implanted malware will be resistant to OS reinstallation or replacement of the hard drive."

Microsoft puts lipstick on a pig to avoid scrutiny over security

In what appears to be a bid to try and pretend that it is making no big contribution to the abysmal security environment in the tech sector, Microsoft has put out one of those reports, titled Microsoft Digital Defence Report, that aims to quell criticism of its role, at the same time trying to insinuate that security is in a bad state because of every single player.

Ransomware attack on Philadelphia firm hits COVID clinical trials

Several companies, including IQVIA, the firm managing AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine trial, and Bristol Myers Squibb, which is leading a group of companies in developing a quick coronavirus test, have been affected by a ransomware attack on Windows systems at Philadelphia firm eResearchTechnology.

Four Malicious Packages In The NPM Repository With Names Similar To Popular Packages Were Phoning User Data Home

Be careful what you npm install. Four packages in the NPM repository, published by a single author, where caught sending device fingerprint information, IP and geo-location data to a public GitHub page upon installation. All of them used package names similar to popular and widely used NPM packages.

[...]

The malicious packages where published to NPM between August 17th and August the 24th. The typesquatting trick fooled more than 400 users into downloading and installing these packages before the software analysis company Sonatype detected it using their automated tools.