This past week had a bit of everything: anti-monopoly lawsuits, open-source software drama, cops want your data, and, of course, hackers. Let's start with everyone's favorite type of litigation: antitrust lawsuits (thanks, Teddy Roosevelt).
The EU has recently put on their not-fuckin-around pants and they're slapping big tech left and right with regulatory fines. Does Apple, a company with a market cap of over 1 Trillion USD, give a shit about almost 2 billion? Probably not, but it's the larger symbolic victory that we're happy about here.
The ruling focused on Apple's practice of anti-steering, stating that it removed the consumer's freedom of choice. Anti-steering is a restriction placed on an app's ability to communicate better deals to the customer outside of the Apple store (aka outside of Apple's closed ecosystem).
Do you like gaming on Linux? Well, the HDMI Forum said fuck you. AMD has been requesting an open-source implementation for HDMI 2.1+, to facilitate AMD's freesync over HDMI connections with higher resolution/rate combinations. The HDMI Forum is a pay-to-play corporate membership forum with over 80 corporate members (including Microsoft) aiming to "drive the development of the latest specification."
A recent Washington Post investigation found over 100 petitions filed in US courts, seeking access to push notification metadata. Court filings in over 14 states including Washington D.C. paint a clear picture: the feds are all up in your business. The thing about push notifications in particular is, they're incredibly valuable to ad agencies, app distributors, and the government. One of the largest push notification analysis companies in the world was recently revealed to be a Russian Honeypot after its app was found to be present on US government officials' devices.
Using the recent Okta exploits, hackers are now targeting FCC employees using copycat SSO (single sign-on) pages to try and gain access. These attacks come with part of a larger campaign of phishing attacks using a kit called CryptoChameleon, which has been used to target several large organizations in the past year.
Well, there you have it. If you're an employee of the FCC, double-check the emails you're receiving. And the rest of you, make sure to keep that Windscribe connection on for an optimum browsing experience.
