HUA HIN, Thailand - Apple's
patent battle with Samsung continued in a US court
this week, with the fruity company now claiming
that Samsung copied the design of its icons. Apple
called up a former employee and graphic designer
who stated that the icons on a Samsung phone that
identify applications such as e-mail, messaging,
contacts and other programs are "substantially
similar" to those patented designs on an iPhone.
When asked by Samsung's legal team if
consumers could tell the difference between the
handsets produced by the two companies,
the witness stated that she
wasn't a consumer expert and considered the
question outside her area of expertise.
Samsung is still claiming that Apple has
no hard evidence that it has suffered a loss of
sales or market share due to Samsung's products
supposedly being confused with its own.
Meanwhile Apple has stepped up its battle
with Google by removing the application for the
world's most popular video-sharing website from
the next version of its mobile operating system,
iOS 6.
Apple stated this week that YouTube
will not be available as an application on the new
OS, a clear indication that it wants nothing
whatsoever to do with Google. It also recently
dropped Google Maps in favor of its own mapping
application.
Apple is blaming the end of a
five-year licensing deal for the exclusion of
YouTube, but Google may not be too concerned;
during the period of the agreement, Apple had sole
development rights for the application and
prevented Google running any ads on it. The search
giant can now monetize the app and tap into the
20% of people who view YouTube on mobile devices,
Apple can also get a larger chunk of the
advertising pie by pushing its own tightly
controlled services.
Security Major exploits in Apple
and Amazon's security protocols resulted in the
hacking of a Wired reporter's digital accounts
this week, spurning the tech giants to look closer
at their own security measures. The hacker
infiltrated Mat Honan's AppleID via his iCloud
account and from there managed to access the
reporter's Google and Twitter accounts and wipe
data from the reporter's iPhone and iMac, which
were all linked to the same service.
The
perpetrator made a couple of calls to Apple and
Amazon pertaining to be Honan himself, and the
attack was less of a technical incursion and more
of a socially engineered scam to fool customer
service representatives at the companies.
As a result, Apple ordered its support
staff to stop processing AppleID password changes
requested by phone. Amazon also closed a loophole
in its customer services systems that gave people
the ability to gain control of a client's account
as long as they knew the name, e-mail address and
mailing address of the victim.
Hardware Taiwanese computer
maker Acer lashed out at Microsoft this week for
potentially hurting the PC industry. "On one hand
Microsoft is our partner, but on the other,
Microsoft’s move makes them compete not only with
us but all PC makers. We think that Microsoft’s
launch of its own-brand products is negative for
the whole PC industry," Acer said.
The
comments by a spokesman for the world's
third-largest computer manufacturer were made in
reference to Microsoft's hybrid Surface
tablet/netbook device, which was unveiled in June
and is due to hit the shelves on October 26.
Lenovo doesn’t appear phased by
Microsoft’s hardware foray and has embraced
Microsoft's Windows 8 system with the announcement
of a new Intel-based, 10 inch ThinkPad Tablet 2
this week. The device succeeds the original
ARM-based ThinkPad Tablet, which ran Google’s
Android. Hewlett Packard, Dell, Acer and Asus will
also release Windows 8 tablets with Intel's Clover
Trail and Ivy Bridge chips.
Internet Another victory was
notched up by anti-piracy advocates this week when
Ukrainian authorities shut down Demonoid.com, one
of the world's largest peer-to-peer file sharing
websites. The data center hosting the website's
servers was raided by the country's Ministry of
Internal Affairs, putting an end to yet another
bit-torrent sharing portal that allows users to
download music, video and software.
The
move follows the US's closure of Megaupload and a
number of European ISPs blocking access to
Sweded-based Pirate Bay. A US government document
about "notorious market" websites noted that
Demonoid "recently ranked among the top 600
websites in global traffic and the top 300 in US
traffic".
The process of file sharing is
unlikely to be affected by the closure of the big
boys as new torrent sites rapidly spring up in
their place and users become more savvy in the
circumvention of government web filters.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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