UPDATED 08:09 EDT / DECEMBER 06 2012

Tim Cook Talks TVs and US Manufacturing for Macs

In today’s mobile news roundup:  Mac production returning to the US; Apple and Samsung return to settle a billion dollar verdict; iTunes Russia shows porn; and BlackBerry 10 bans moronic passwords.

Mac production returning to the US

A lot of people were surprised and delighted when they saw that their new iMac was “Assembled in USA.”  Here’s even better news, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, next year, they will be spending more to shift manufacturing from China to the US.

“Next year we’re going to bring some production to the U.S.,” Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.”

The company will be spending more than $100 million to shift manufacturing stateside but the CEO did not disclose information as to where the manufacturing would happen and the percentage of production moving to the US.  He did, however, hint at Apple’s next big thing – TVs.

Apple and Samsung returns to settle $1B verdict

Once again, Apple and Samsung are back in court to settle the previous $1.05 billion verdict handed down by US District Judge Lucy Koh.

Apple wants Samsung to suffer even further by permanently banning more than two dozen Samsung devices, as well as add $500 million to the $1.05 billion judgement due to willful patent infringement.

Samsung is hoping to throw things off by calling for jury misconduct, stating that jury foreman Velvin Hogan, who had a past incident with Seagate –  a company partially owned by Samsung, influenced the outcome of the trial.  According to Samsung, Hogan was a former Seagate employee that the company sued and filed for bankruptcy because of the litigation.  Samsung claims that Apple had knowledge of Hogan’s past, and they are now demanding that the Cupertino company divulge information as to when they learnt of Hogan’s history.

Apple disclosed in a filing that they knew about Hogan’s bankruptcy after jury selection back in July, but they did not pull the bankruptcy records.  Apple claims that they did not know about Hogan’s court history with Seagate until Samsung brought it up during post-trial briefs.

Patent experts are doubtful that Judge Koh would overturn the verdict, but there could be a possibility that the fine Samsung has to pay would be lowered. With further analysis is Contributing Editor John Cassaretto, who discussed the matter with NewsDesk host Kristin Feledy this morning:

iTunes Russia shows porn

Apple recently introduced the iTunes Store in 56 new countries including Russia.  But the launch was not without a hitch, as the Russian iTunes Store mistakenly showed porn images when users searched for movies to rent.

According to Top F Secure, though users saw the porn images, they weren’t able to actually rent porn–what they got were the actual movies they’d searched for.  It’s like renting a movie in real-life but the content is different from the cover.  Luckily, the faux porn did not contain malicious codes or links to malicious websites that could have affected the iTunes users.  Still, it was a bad move for the notoriously strict Apple to not thoroughly test it before launch.

“It’s sloppy of Apple not to have tested their software thoroughly and properly before rolling it out to the masses, but it could have been much worse,” Top F Secure IT researcher Mikko Hypponen said.  “If the webpages had contained malicious code, for instance, then it might have been possible for unsuspecting users to click on dangerous links or have had their computers infected by malware.”

BlackBerry 10 bans moronic passwords

Many are eagerly awaiting the release of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry 10 device on January 10, 2013.  And now, they have a lot more to be excited about as RIM allegedly buffed their security offerings for BB10 devices – they will not be accepting moronic passwords from users.

BlackBerry 10 will not accept over 100 obvious, guessable passwords such as password, 123456, BlackBerry, and ABCDE.  This is an effort to encourage users to be more creative and put more thought in creating passwords for their devices so others can’t easily tamper with a user’s device.


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