Apple defends its new child safety features

Bloomberg

Apple Inc defended concerns about its upcoming child safety features, saying it doesn’t believe its tool for locating child pornographic images on a user’s device creates a backdoor that reduces privacy.
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant made the comments in a briefing, a day after revealing new features for iCloud, Messages and Siri to combat the spread of objectionable images of children. The company reiterated that it doesn’t scan a device owner’s entire photo library to look for abusive images, but instead uses cryptography to compare images with a known database provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Some privacy advocates and security researchers were concerned after Apple’s announcement that the company would scan a user’s complete photo collection — instead the company is using an on-device algorithm to detect objectionable images. Apple said it would manually review abusive photos from a user’s device only if the algorithm found a certain number of them. The company also said it can adjust the algorithm over time.
Apple said it isn’t breaking end-to-end encryption with a new feature in the Messages app that analyses photos sent to or from a child’s iPhone for explicit material, nor will the company gain access to user messages.
Asked on the briefing if the new tools mean the company will add end-to-end encryption to iCloud storage backups, Apple said it wouldn’t comment on future plans.
End-to-end encryption, the most stringent form of privacy, lets only the sender and receiver see a message sent between them.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Apple is opening a backdoor to its highly touted privacy features for users with the new tools. “It’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for objectionable images sent or received by children,” the EFF said in a post on its website. “As a consequence, even a well-intentioned effort to build such a system will break key promises of the messenger’s encryption itself and open the door to broader abuses.”
Apple said the system had been in development for years and wasn’t built for governments to monitor citizens. The system is available only in the US, Apple said, and only works if a user has iCloud Photos enabled.
Dan Boneh, a cryptography researcher tapped by Apple to support the project, defended the new tools.
“This issue affects many cloud providers,” he said. “Some cloud providers address this problem by scanning photos uploaded to the cloud. Apple chose to invest in a more complex system that provides the same functionality, but does so without having its servers look at every photo.”

Apple escapes 308.5m verdict over patent row
Bloomberg

Apple Inc won a ruling that tossed out a $308.5 million patent-infringement verdict after a federal judge said the iPhone maker was the victim of a company’s plan to milk the tech industry for high royalties on old ideas.
That company, Personalized Media Communications LLC, has a patent for digital rights management that is unenforceable because the company intentionally delayed its application at the US Patent and Trademark Office so it could get more money later, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas, ruled. Gilstrap said that Personalized Media “shall take nothing” and instead will have to cover some of Apple’s legal costs.
Personalised Media’s patent application dates back to ones filed in the 1980s, when the term of a patent would last
17 years, no matter how long the application process took. While the company filed hundreds of applications in the late 1980s and 1990s, no patents were awarded until 2010 — and 101 have been issued since then.
“Are we really going to today allow people to enforce patents claiming technology from 1981?” said Joseph Matal, a former acting director of the Patent and Trademark Office now with Haynes and Boone. “It makes a mockery of the system to allow this kind of stuff. All of this should have been in the public domain as of two decades ago.”
Gilstrap relied on a June ruling from the nation’s top patent court that made it easier to challenge so-called submarine patents, where applicants would delay issuance of a patent until
after an industry had adopted the technology and infringement suits would be more profitable. Since 1995, patent terms last for 20 years from the date of application, making the submarining strategy impractical.