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.

Comments

This lawsuit is pretty silly

[ZorinLynx]

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.

Trolls patented onion routing and p2p in general

[ezdiy]

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).