Tag: Million

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Apple fined $27 million in France for throttling old iPhones without telling users

France’s competition watchdog DGCCRF announced earlier today that Apple will pay a $ 27.4 million (€25 million) fine due to an iOS update that capped performance of aging devices. The company will also have to display a statement on its website for a month.

A couple of years ago, Apple released an iOS update (10.2.1 and 11.2) that introduced a new feature for older devices. If your battery is getting old, iOS would cap peak performances as your battery might not be able to handle quick peaks of power draw. The result of those peaks is that your iPhone might shut down abruptly.

While that feature is technically fine, Apple failed to inform users that it was capping performances on some devices. The company apologized and introduced a new software feature called “Battery Health”. It lets you check the maximum capacity of your battery and if your iPhone can reach peak performance.

And that’s the issue here. Many users may have noticed that their phone would get slower when they play a game for instance. But they didn’t know that replacing the battery would fix that. Some users may have bought new phones even though their existing phone was working fine.

France’s DGCCRF also notes that iPhone users can’t downgrade to a previous version of iOS, which means that iPhone users had no way to lift the performance capping feature. “Failing to inform consumers represented a misleading business practice using omission,” the French authority writes.

Apple accepted to settle by paying a €25 million fine and recognizing its wrongdoing with a statement on its website.

Apple addresses why people are saying their iPhones with older batteries are running ‘slower’

Gadgets – TechCrunch

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Samsung shipped more than 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones in 2019

Samsung Electronics announced today that it shipped more than 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones in 2019, surpassing expectations set by the company earlier.

In September, Samsung Electronics vice president JuneHee Lee suggested that more than two million Samsung 5G smartphones had already been sold during remarks at IFA, and that the company expected to double that number by the end of the year.

The company also said today that its devices made up 53.9% of the global 5G smartphone market, according to a report by Counterpoint Research. It will release its next 5G device, the Galaxy Tab S6 5G, in South Korea during the first quarter of 2020.

Let’s talk Samsung Galaxy S11

The company is expected to launch Galaxy S11 models with 5G in February. While no iPhones currently have 5G support, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo forecast in July that all three versions of the device expected to be unveiled by Apple this year will support 5G. The release of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 and 765 means more manufacturers will be able to offer mid- and high-tier smartphones with 5G support this year, and that may help revive sluggish sales.

What we know about Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon 865 and 765 chips

Gadgets – TechCrunch

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Google will now pay up to $1.5 million for very specific Android exploits

When Google first introduced its bug bounty program for Android, the biggest reward you could get for finding and reporting a potential exploit was $ 38,000.

The cap grew over time, as Android grew in popularity, more security researchers got on board and more vulnerabilities were unearthed. This morning, Google is bumping up its top reward to $ 1.5 million dollars.

They’re not going to pay out a million+ for just any bug, of course.

For this new reward category, Google is looking for “full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices.” In other words, they’re looking for an exploit that, without the attacker having physical access to the device, can execute code even after a device is reset and breaks into the dedicated security chip built into the Pixels.

Reporting an exploit that fits that bill will get researchers up to $ 1 million. If they can do it on “specific developer preview versions” of Android, meanwhile, there’s a 50% bonus reward, bumping up the maximum prize up to $ 1.5 million.

Google first introduced the Titan M security chip with the Pixel 3. As Google outlines here, the chip’s job is essentially to supervise; it double-checks boot conditions, verifies firmware signatures, handles lock screen passcodes and tries to keep malicious apps from forcing your device to roll back to “older, potentially vulnerable” builds of Android. The same chip can be found in the Pixel 4 lineup.

Indeed, $ 1.5 million for a single exploit sounds like a lot… and it is. It’s roughly what Google paid out for all bug bounties in the last 12 months. The top reward this year, the company says, was $ 161,337 for a “1-click remote code execution exploit chain on the Pixel 3 device.” The average payout, meanwhile, was about $ 3,800 per finding. Given the potential severity of persistently busting through the security chip on what’s meant to be the flagship form of Android, though, a wild payout makes sense.


Android – TechCrunch