Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Claims Apple Forced Users To iOS 7 By Breaking FaceTime (appleinsider.com)
According to Apple Insider, a class-action lawsuit has been filed in California that claims Apple broke FaceTime in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. The lawsuit says Apple forced users to upgrade so it could avoid payments on a data deal with Akamai. From the report: When FaceTime launched in 2010, Apple included two methods of connecting one iPhone to another. The first, a peer-to-peer technology, transferred audio and video data over a direct connection, while a second "relay method" used third-party servers run by Akamai to shuttle data back and forth. Initially, calls routed through Akamai's relay servers only accounted for only 5 to 10 percent of FaceTime traffic, but usage quickly spiked. On Nov. 7, 2012, a jury found Apple's peer-to-peer FaceTime call technology in infringement of patents owned by VirnetX. Along with a $368 million fine, the ruling meant Apple would have to shift away from peer-to-peer to avoid further infringement. Apple began to incur multi-million dollar monthly charges from Akamai as a result of the change. Testimony from the 2016 VirnetX retrial pegged relay fees at about $50 million between April 2013 and September 2013, rates that according to today's lawsuit were of concern to Apple executives. After eating rising relay service charges for nearly a year, Apple saw a chance to slow down or completely negate the fees in iOS 7. Among other system improvements, the next-generation OS included a method of creating peer-to-peer FaceTime connections without infringing on VirnetX patents. The only problem, according to the lawsuit, was that users continued to operate devices running iOS 6. Citing internal emails and sworn testimony from the VirnetX trial, the lawsuit alleges Apple devised a plan to "break" FaceTime on iOS 6 or earlier by causing a vital digital certificate to prematurely expire. Apple supposedly implemented the "FaceTime Break" on April 16, 2014, then blamed the sudden incompatibility on a bug, the lawsuit claims.
Apple would never do anything to force you to upgrade your iOS version, right?
They just pull shit like this as often as they can. My new favourite one is them forcing iOS 9 on iPhone 4S users when they need a new battery- if you take the device into the service centre, you're getting upgraded whether you want it or not. Enjoy your new slow ass phone with a replaced battery.
When people say "Apple doesn't force you to upgrade", it's pure bullshit. Sooner or later they'll fuck you somehow. Either with their complete and utter lack of backwards compatibility (just wait until 64-bit iOS builds become mandatory and they flush all the 32-bit arm compilers down the drain), or at the service centre, or with shenanigans like this.
Remember folks, Apple isn't in the business of making hardware worth upgrading to. They're in the business of planned obsolescence. That's how they keep the ball rolling these days.
All devices capable of FaceTime supported iOS 7. Apple didn't leave any devices behind when they did this.
Not only that, but a company cannot be expected to support unnecessary legacy infrastructure forever.
so they are sore at apple, for what??? being apple? when you buy apple products you better know that you are at their mercy. it is the entire point of an apple product.
If these people (somehow) win, the precedent could be insane.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period. If this lawsuit wins, Sony and Microsoft could both be on the hook in a big way. I'm sure many other devices are similar.
http://www.google.com/patents/... is the patent supposedly infringed, and https://search.rpxcorp.com/lit... is the court litigation.
Basically, both Microsoft and Apple got hit by a patent troll, hard. It sounds like random gibberish of somebody vaguely trying to implement p2p relaying similiar to Tor (and from the looks of it, naively broken and not-anonymous too). With a lot of odd features on top of it which do not make much sense from engineering perspective as well. Possibly put in there just to make the patent as broad as possible. It's basically impossible to explain how this is related to any p2p system, much less facetime, what is clear that the patent is some sort of p2p (among dozens of other things).
It's worth noting it is explicitly linked to TARP - https://betanews.com/2010/03/1...
Now, the fun part is that both patents describe routing header encryption, possibly with onion layers (its hard to tell from the gibberish), for both of which there is ton of prior art (onion was patented by darpa in 1998 in fact).
Damn, $50 million for filing some vague patent and not creating or innovating anything. How is this legal again? Oh yeah, the big companies use the patent system to keep out all small competition, so it's not going away any time soon.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I'm the last person on earth to upgrade my iPhone since I fear each new release more. I actually am utterly unable to navigate the music app since the introduction of Apple Music since it seems it's only goal is to sell you something all the time. I would kill for a version of iOS where I could disable the Apple Music like "If you're not a subscriber, we'll let you just see the music you actually purchased instead".
The primary question I have is what the grounds for the lawsuit are?
Were any users harmed in any way by this decision? Is this a lawsuit specifically designed to make a lawyer money? If they win this lawsuit against Apple, what impact will it have? Will Apple actually change their business because of it? Will the users receive anything that would actually be worth their efforts? Class action suits usually pay lawyers about 30% of the winnings making them millions but the users get a payment of $10 after filling out a cryptic form that takes 30 minutes of your time.
Can I as a user that was affected by this choice of Apple's sue the lawyer after the case for using me as an excuse to give Apple a reason to charge me more for their products and services which I have grown dependent on?
If you pay for an overpriced pocket computer loaded with proprietary everything, you should fully expect the abuse that is headed your way because you went in knowing it was proprietary. Whenever you invest in proprietary technology, you willing ensnare yourself on the leash of corporations. This has always been true but the advent of ubiquitous connectivity has made this leash yanking quite pronounced.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Currently the only way to update included apps when you purchase a new phone is via an iOS upgrade.
As such this whole drama could be prevented by being able to upgrade a single included app via the AppStore instead of via an (i)OS upgrade.
bash$
I remember clearly that Podcasts were having problems as well. And several of us upgraded just to get that fixed.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period.
For one thing, game consoles tend to be more usable offline than smartphones and tablets running a smartphone-derived operating system are. They can play disc games in single-player or same-screen multiplayer, and they can play games downloaded from the store to your console in single-player or same-screen multiplayer. For another, updates to a game console's operating system tend not to dramatically expand its RAM footprint to the point where basic operations take seconds instead of tenths of seconds, with the only remedy being "Replace your PS4 with a PS4 Pro" or "Replace your Xbox One with an Xbox One S".
forgot to add, you need to buy a rediculous data recovery device if you want to retrieve data from the new macbook pro with the soldered on SSD.
obviously this device is only available to apple authorised repair centers and prevents the end user from doing yet another thing...
No target disk mode either.
or imaging the machine from deploystudio, that will kill the retarded touch bar.
Apple needs to be sued. bad. they are out of control with their bullshit, time for some punishment.
The problem with waiting out essential patents on cellular is that by the time they expire, carriers have retired service in the air protocol that they cover in favor of more capable protocols whose patents happen to subsist.
What I don't understand is why Apple even bothered with the deception. All they had to do is say that as a result of previous patent lawsuits, Facetime on ios 6 would be disabled as of yadda yadda date, and anyone who wanted to continue using the technology could move to IOS7.
Then this whole mess wouldn't have even happened, no?