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iCloud

Why Jony Ive Left Apple to the ‘Accountants’

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The new arrangement freed Mr. Ive from regular commutes to the company’s offices in Cupertino. He shifted from near daily product reviews to an irregular schedule when weeks would pass without weighing in. Sometimes word would spread through the studio that he was unexpectedly coming to the office. Employees compared the moments that followed with old footage of the 1920s stock market crash with papers being tossed into the air and people scurrying around in a furious rush to prepare for his arrival.

With anticipation mounting on Wall Street for a 10th-anniversary iPhone in early 2017, Mr. Ive summoned the company’s top software designers to San Francisco for a product review. A team of about 20 arrived at the city’s exclusive social club, The Battery, and began spreading out 11-by-17-inch printouts of design ideas in the club’s penthouse. They needed Mr. Ive’s approval for several features on the first iPhone with a full-screen display.

They waited that day for nearly three hours for Mr. Ive. When he finally arrived, he didn’t apologize. He reviewed their printouts and offered feedback. He then left without making final decisions. As their work stalled, many wondered, How did it come to this?

In Mr. Ive’s absence, Mr. Cook began reshaping the company in his image. He replaced the outgoing company director Mickey Drexler, the gifted marketer who built Gap and J. Crew, with James Bell, the former finance chief at Boeing. Mr. Ive was irate that a left-brained executive had supplanted one of the board’s few right-brained leaders. “He’s another one of those accountants,” he complained to a colleague.

Mr. Cook also emboldened the company’s finance department, which began auditing outside contractors. At one point, the department rejected a legitimate billing submitted by Foster + Partners, the architecture firm working closely with Mr. Ive to complete the company’s new $5 billion campus, Apple Park.

Amid those struggles, Mr. Cook began to broaden Apple’s strategy into selling more services. During a corporate retreat in 2017, Mr. Ive stepped outside to get fresh air when a newcomer to Apple named Peter Stern stepped before the company’s top leaders. Mr. Stern clicked to a slide of an X-shaped chart that showed Apple’s profit margins from sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs declining while profit margins rose from sales of software and services like its iCloud storage.

The presentation alarmed some people in the audience. It depicted a future in which Mr. Ive — and the company’s business as a product maker — would matter less and Mr. Cook’s increasing emphasis on services, like Apple Music and iCloud, would matter more.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Apple, Apple Inc, Apple Music, Appointments and Executive Changes, Architecture, Boeing, Business, Computers and the Internet, Content Type: Personal Profile, Cook, Timothy D, Design, Desktop Computers, iCloud, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Ive, Jonathan, Jobs, Steven P, Music, Next, San Francisco, Software

Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Maker NSO Group

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The Israeli government, which approves any sale of NSO’s software to foreign governments and considers the software a critical foreign policy tool, is lobbying the United States to remove the ban on NSO’s behalf. NSO has said it would fight the ban, but the executive set to take over NSO Group quit after the business was blacklisted, the company said.

One week after the federal ban, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected NSO’s motion to dismiss Facebook’s lawsuit. The Israeli firm had argued that it “could claim foreign sovereign immunity.” A 3-to-0 decision by the court rejected NSO’s argument and allowed Facebook’s lawsuit to proceed.

Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life

Those developments helped pave the way for Apple’s lawsuit against NSO on Tuesday. Apple first found itself in NSO’s cross hairs in 2016, when researchers at Citizen Lab, a research institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Lookout, the San Francisco mobile security company now owned by BlackBerry, discovered that NSO’s Pegasus spyware was taking advantage of three security vulnerabilities in Apple products to spy on dissidents, activists and journalists.

And the company is at risk of default, Moody’s, the ratings agency, warned. Moody’s downgraded NSO by two levels, eight levels below investment grade, citing its $500 million of debt and severe cash flow problems.

NSO’s spyware gave its government clients access to the full contents of a target’s phone, allowing agents to read a target’s text messages and emails, record phone calls, capture sounds and footage off their cameras, and trace the person’s whereabouts.

Internal NSO documents, leaked to The New York Times in 2016, showed that the company charged government agencies $650,000 to spy on 10 iPhone users — along with a half-million-dollar setup fee. Government agencies in the United Arab Emirates and Mexico were among NSO’s early customers, the documents showed.

Those revelations led to the discovery of NSO’s spyware on the phones of human rights activists in the Emirates and journalists, activists and human rights lawyers in Mexico — even their teenage children living in the United States.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Apple, Apple Inc, Business, Cameras, Children, Citizen Lab, Cloud Computing, Computer Security, Computers and the Internet, Espionage and Intelligence Services, Facebook Inc, Foreign policy, Government, Human rights, iCloud, Industrial Espionage, iPhone, Lobbying, Lookout Inc, Mexico, mobile, New York, NSO Group, Policy, Privacy, Research, San Francisco, Software, State, Suits and Litigation (Civil), Surveillance, Surveillance of Citizens by Government, United Arab Emirates, United States, University of Toronto, York

Apple’s Compromises in China: 5 Takeaways

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Apple proactively removes apps to placate Chinese officials.

Apple has created an internal bureaucracy that rejects or removes apps the company believes could run afoul of Chinese rules. Apple trains its app reviewers and uses special software to inspect apps for any mention of topics Apple has deemed off limits in China, including Tiananmen Square, the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, and independence for Tibet and Taiwan.

Apple said it removes apps in China to comply with local laws.

Apple banned apps from a Communist Party critic.

In 2018, China’s internet regulators ordered Apple to reject an app from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire who had broadcast claims of corruption inside the Communist Party. Top Apple executives then decided to add Mr. Guo to Apple’s “China sensitivities list,” which meant software would scan apps for mention of him and app reviewers would be trained to reject his apps, according to court documents.

When an app by Mr. Guo later slipped by Apple’s defenses and was published to the App Store, Chinese officials contacted Apple wanting answers. Apple’s app review chief then sent colleagues an email at 2:32 a.m. that said, “This app and any Guo Wengui app cannot be on the China store.” Apple investigated the incident and later fired the app reviewer who had approved the app.

Apple said that it had fired the app reviewer for poor performance and that it had removed Mr. Guo’s app in China because it had determined it was illegal there.

Tens of thousands of iPhone apps have disappeared in China.

Since 2017, roughly 55,000 active apps have disappeared from Apple’s App Store in China, with most remaining available in other countries, according to a Times analysis.

More than 35,000 of those apps were games, which in China must get approval from regulators. The remaining 20,000 cut across a wide range of categories, including foreign news outlets, gay dating services and encrypted messaging apps. Apple also blocked tools for organizing pro-democracy protests and skirting internet restrictions, as well as apps about the Dalai Lama.

Apple disputed The Times’s figures, saying that some developers removed their own apps from China.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Apple, Apple Inc, Apps, Censorship, China, Cloud Computing, Communist Party of China, Computer Security, Computers and the Internet, Dalai Lama, Data Centers, Dating, Falun Gong, Games, Guizhou (China), Guizhou Cloud Big Data Industry Co Ltd, Guo Wengui, iCloud, Internet, iPhone, Regulators, Software, Taiwan

Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China

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On Chinese iPhones, Apple forbids apps about the Dalai Lama while hosting those from the Chinese paramilitary group accused of detaining and abusing Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group in China.

The company has also helped China spread its view of the world. Chinese iPhones censor the emoji of the Taiwanese flag, and their maps suggest Taiwan is part of China. For a time, simply typing the word “Taiwan” could make an iPhone crash, according to Patrick Wardle, a former hacker at the National Security Agency.

Sometimes, Mr. Shoemaker said, he was awakened in the middle of the night with demands from the Chinese government to remove an app. If the app appeared to mention the banned topics, he would remove it, but he would send more complicated cases to senior executives, including Mr. Cue and Mr. Schiller.

Apple resisted an order from the Chinese government in 2012 to remove The Times’s apps. But five years later, it ultimately did. Mr. Cook approved the decision, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Apple recently began disclosing how often governments demand that it remove apps. In the two years ending June 2020, the most recent data available, Apple said it approved 91 percent of the Chinese government’s app-takedown requests, removing 1,217 apps.

In every other country combined over that period, Apple approved 40 percent of requests, removing 253 apps. Apple said that most of the apps it removed for the Chinese government were related to gambling or pornography or were operating without a government license, such as loan services and livestreaming apps.

Yet a Times analysis of Chinese app data suggests those disclosures represent a fraction of the apps that Apple has blocked in China. Since 2017, roughly 55,000 active apps have disappeared from Apple’s App Store in China, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by Sensor Tower, an app data firm. Most of those apps have remained available in other countries.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Apple, Apple Inc, Apps, Business, Censorship, China, Cloud Computing, Computer Security, Computers and the Internet, Cook, Timothy D, Cue, Eddy, Dalai Lama, Data Storage, Gambling, Government, Guizhou Cloud Big Data Industry Co Ltd, Guo Wengui, iCloud, Inner Mongolia, iPhone, Maps, Mobile Applications, National, National Security Agency, Pornography, Privacy, Software, Suits and Litigation (Civil), Surveillance, Surveillance of Citizens by Government, Taiwan, Uyghurs

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