Judge dismisses lawsuit over Instagram terms of service

(Credit: Instagram)

A federal judge has dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Instagram over controversial terms-of-service changes announced last year that many feared awarded ownership of users' photos to the popular photo-sharing service.

In a decision issued Friday, Judge William Alsup for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Lucy Rodriguez could not sue Instagram for a number of procedural reasons, including the level of plaintiff's injury and state of residence. Alsup also denied plaintiff's request for leave to file a second amended complaint.

A Facebook representative declined to comment on the ruling.

The lawsuit, which was filed last December, accused the service of breach of contract and trying to "grab for customer property rights" after announcing revisions to its terms of service that many feared gave the service perpetual rights to sell users' photographs without payment or notification. After a user backlash, Instagram soon backpedaled on the changes and announced that the terms would revert to the version in place since the service launched in 2010.

Instagram had said that the new terms of service would go into effect January 19 and that users could not opt out but could delete their accounts before the deadline. The lawsuit took issue with that last point, claiming that customers could cancel but that in doing so would forfeit the right to their photos.

In a motion for dismissal in February, Instagram argued that Lucy Funes -- the original plaintiff in the case -- was not entitled to her claim because she could have deleted her account before the new terms were implemented and continued to use her account on January 19, when the changes in terms of service occurred. Lucy Rodriguez was substituted as the plaintiff in an amended filing in March.

Microsoft doesn't give NSA direct access to email

Microsoft does not give the National Security Agency direct access to its customers’ email or instant messages, contrary to previous news reports, a company executive said.
News reports last week suggested that Microsoft has helped the NSA circumvent the company’s own encryption in order to conduct surveillance on email accounts through Outlook.com, but company General Counsel Brad Smith said Tuesday that’s not true.
“We do not provide any government with direct access to emails or instant messages,” Smith wrote in a blog post. “Full stop.”
The company does not help government agencies circumvent its encryption, he added. “To be clear, we do not provide any government with the ability to break the encryption, nor do we provide the government with the encryption keys,” he wrote. “When we are legally obligated to comply with [government] demands, we pull the specified content from our servers where it sits in an unencrypted state, and then we provide it to the government agency.”
Microsoft on Tuesday asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to permit Microsoft and other communications providers to share “more complete information” about how they handle national security requests for customer information, Smith added.
“We believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees our freedom to share more information with the public, yet the government is stopping us,” he said. The U.S. government has not responded to a June 19 request Microsoft made to publish the number of national security requests it receives, and the company hopes Holder will step in, Smith said.
Microsoft provides government access to data stored in its SkyDrive service and to Skype calls when presented with a legal order to do so, such as a search warrant or national security letter, Smith said. If asked for customer data in enterprise email or document storage, Microsoft attempts to redirect the requesting government agency back to the customer, he said, “and we notify the customer unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.”
Microsoft has never provided any government with customer data from any business or government customers for national security purposes, he said. In 2012, the company complied with four law enforcement requests related to business or government customers, he added.

Apple could integrate projectors directly into iOS devices

(Credit: Apple/USPTO)

Your future iPhone or iPad could come with its own projector.
Granted to Apple on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a patent called "Projected display shared workspaces" envisions a technology that would integrate small projectors into iOS devices and allow you to control a presentation through the use of gestures.
A camera would detect the shadows and silhouettes of gestures aimed at the projected area, giving you an easy way to manage your presentation. The system could even work with multiple displays. Again using gestures, you could swap images among the different displays included in a shared workspace.
The overall technology could also spread to laptops and desktops through a mini projector connected to the device.
As the patent describes it:

In one embodiment, electronic devices each may include a projector that produces a projected display and a camera that detects gestures made with respect to the projected displays. The electronic devices may interpret gestures on the projected displays to identify image sharing commands for sharing images between the projected displays. The electronic devices may be connected through a communication link that allows the electronic devices to share image data for producing images on any of the projected displays included within the shared workspace.

Certain gadgets on the market can turn your iPhone into a mini projector. But Apple's integrated invention could take that a few steps further through the gesture and sharing features

NSA wiretaps Skype video calls

In 2008, Skype told that the service could not be wiretapped. Microsoft no longer stands by that claim, and a National Security Agency document shows analysts can eavesdrop on video calls.

Skype now has a backdoor that permits government surveillance of users' video and audio calls, according to a new report in the Guardian.

The report, based on leaked slides from the National Security Agency, appears to confirm growing suspicions about the popular video chat service -- and indicates calls may be able to be monitored as easily as an old-fashioned phone call.

One document quoted by the newspaper says intelligence analysts began to be able to monitor Skype video calls in July 2012: "The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete 'picture.'"

This is a dramatic change from Skype's previous apparent resistance to eavesdropping.

In 2008, when the company was owned by eBay instead of Microsoft, a Skype spokeswoman told CNET that: "We have not received any subpoenas or court orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request."

CNET asked Microsoft yesterday morning whether that statement was still correct. Microsoft did not respond.

It's possible for companies to create communications systems using strong end-to-end encryption believed to be proof against government snoops. Silent Circle, Off-the-Record Messaging for instant messages, and e-mail messages encrypted with PGP do precisely that.

But few companies take that step, which can be a significant engineering expense and complicated for customers to use. Another classified document, citing collaboration between NSA and FBI, said: "Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete. Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the PRISM system."

After buying Skype, Microsoft dramatically overhauled its architecture, replacing peer-to-peer "super nodes" with thousands of servers run by Microsoft -- a more centralized approach that may have made it easier for government eavesdroppers. Around the same time, Microsoft would no longer stand by Skype's earlier claim to be wiretap-unfriendly.

Matthew Kaufman, Skype's principal architect, said in a message on an e-mail list last month that the server change was due to the increasing use of mobile apps, which interact with Skype differently than desktop machines and often run in the background or get evicted from memory:

 How do we solve that for our users? Servers. Lots of them, and more and more often in the Windows Azure cloud infrastructure. In the case of instant messaging, we have merged the Skype and Windows Messenger message delivery backend services, and this now gets you delivery of messages even when the recipient is offline, and other nice features like spam filtering and malicious URL removal. For calling, we have the dedicated supernodes already, and additional services to help calls succeed when the receiving client is asleep and needs a push notification to wake up. And over time you will see more and more services move to the Skype cloud, offloading memory and CPU requirements from the mobile devices everyone wants to enjoy to their fullest and with maximum battery life.

There is no evidence that encrypted Skype calls can be passively monitored by the NSA or FBI without the assistance of Microsoft. In other words, the intelligence agency's vast eavesdropping apparatus can't vacuum up and use Skype calls in the same way it reportedly can intercept unencrypted e-mail or Web traffic by using fiber taps.

Instead, the federal government would serve an order on Microsoft, using a Title III wiretap order or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order, requiring it to divulge the contents of a Skype call.

Microsoft's most recent transparency report says the company did not divulge any Skype audio or video content to police in 2012. But the report refers only to "law enforcement requests," and does not appear to include requests made under FISA's separate procedures.

Apple and Samsung finish closing arguments, jury to decide their fate

It's just one among many, but the headlining case in the Apple v. Samsung global war is finally drawing to a close. Today, each party attempted to persuade the jury of nine one last time with their closing arguments, and with the rebuttals complete, it is time for deliberation. Starting at 9AM tomorrow morning, the jury's job is to sift through the mountains of evidence proffered by each side, decipher the verdict form provided and reach a unanimous decision on the patent and trade dress claims at issue. Will Apple emerge victorious or will Samsung's arguments carry the day? Could a hung jury and a mistrial be the result? Tune in tomorrow (and maybe the next day, and the next...) to find out.

Microsoft licensed design patents at issue in Apple vs Samsung, Surface lovers breathe sigh of relief

Last week, we found out about Apple's offer to license a bundle of IP -- including its iPhone and iPad design patents -- to Samsung back in 2010. Today, Reuters reports that Apple proposed a similar deal to Microsoft, and the folks in Redmond took them up on the offer. Details of the license itself are scarce, but the deal did, naturally, include an provision expressly prohibiting iDevice copies. So, for folks figuring that Microsoft might face a litigious future similar to Samsung's, think again. Looks like Ballmer and friends had the foresight to buy the rights to those rounded corners, edge-to-edge glass and black bezels on their forthcoming Surface tablets.

Apple seizes on Samsung internal document as proof of mimicry

As much as Apple would love for Kwon Oh-hyun to turn up at court and tearfully confess to being a copycat, that's probably not going to happen. Instead, Cupertino's lawyers are burrowing through Samsung's history in search of a legal smoking gun, and one of their latest submissions has been presented as just that. It's a 132-page document written in 2010 by Sammy engineers that directly compares the iPhone against the Galaxy S and makes recommendations about how the latter should be more like the former. The excerpt shown above, which focuses on the aesthetics of icons on the rival handsets, even appears to contain advice about how Samsung should copy Apple without appearing to copy them so much, whereas the full document embedded after the break reveals how all-encompassing the internal guidance was. On the flip-side, Samsung may well argue that any responsible company should compare itself to its competition in this manner, and you can bet there's an army of lawyers beavering away right now to make that sound convincing.

Apple reveals 'Purple' phone prototype in court filing, to prove it didn't copy Sony

The previous batch of sketches revealed during Apple v Samsung suggested the iPhone may have actually borrowed ideas from Sony, but a new filing goes back even further into history to show that's not the case. The Verge spotted that the latest raft of paperwork includes a "Purple" prototype [above left] that was made around August 2005 and bears several hallmarks of the iPhone that finally appeared. The Sony-styled prototypes came later, and were apparently just an "enjoyable side project." AllThingsD has also drawn together around 100 prototypes from Apple's deposition, which offers some interesting insights into what the iPhone could have looked like.