One of Apple's most senior legal executives, whom the iGiant trusted to prevent insider trading, has admitted to insider trading.

Gene Levoff pleaded guilty to six counts of security fraud stemming from a February 2019 complaint, according to a Thursday announcement from the US Department of Justice on Thursday.

Levoff used non-public information about Apple's financial results to inform his trades on Apple stock, earning himself $227,000 and avoiding $377,000 of losses. He was able to access the information as he served as co-chairman of Apple's Disclosure Committee, which reviewed the company's quarterly draft, annual report and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

Levoff's biggest trade was the sale of $10 million of his own Apple stock in July 2015 – a deal that almost depleted his entire holding and came just before Apple announced worse results than the market anticipated. According to the SEC, this saved him $345,000 in losses.

Levoff was subject to trading blackout periods, and part of his job was to inform other Apple employees subject to the blackout dates about company policy and trading restrictions.

"Despite being responsible for enforcing Apple's own ban on insider trading, Levoff used his position of trust to commit insider trading in order to line his own pockets," said an attorney for the United States, Vikas Khanna, in a canned statement.

Levoff could claim neither ignorance of the sales, nor that he had nothing to do with the shady trades – they were done in his own name. However he did try (and fail) to have the case overthrown last year, by arguing there was no specific criminal law barring insider training.

Levoff's sentencing is scheduled for November. He faces up to 20 years in prison per count and a $5 million fine. ®

Workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland have voted to form a union, making them the first of the iGiant's retail staff to do so in the United States.

Out of 110 eligible voters, 65 employees voted in support of unionization versus 33 who voted against it. The organizing committee, known as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), has now filed to certify the results with America's National Labor Relations Board. Members joining this first-ever US Apple Store union will be represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

"I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," IAM's international president Robert Martinez Jr said in a statement on Saturday. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election."

A crack in Apple's walled garden appeared yesterday as the iPhone vendor opened up an option for alternative in-app payment processing within apps distributed in South Korea.

The commission levied by Apple for in-app transactions, which can be up to 30 percent, has long irked app developers. Epic Games famously went before US courts to protest Apple's rules and lost.

South Korea's lawmakers, however, took matters into their own hands and targeted Google and Apple with a law requiring both to open their app stores to third party payment options. Google made its update at the beginning of the year, effectively cutting its service fee by four percent.

Democrat lawmakers want the FTC to investigate Apple and Google's online ad trackers, which they say amount to unfair and deceptive business practices and pose a privacy and security risk to people using the tech giants' mobile devices.

US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) and House Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) requested on Friday that the watchdog launch a probe into Apple and Google, hours before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for individual states to ban access to abortions. 

In the days leading up to the court's action, some of these same lawmakers had also introduced data privacy bills, including a proposal that would make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

Apple has introduced a game-changer into its upcoming iOS 16 for those who hate CAPTCHAs, in the form of a feature called Automatic Verification.

The feature does exactly what its name alludes to: automatically verifies devices and Apple ID accounts without any action from the user. When iOS 16 ships later this year, it will eliminate the frustrating requirement to select all the stops signs in a photo or decipher a string of characters.

The news was mentioned at Apple's 33rd annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) along with the usual slew of features designed to enhance the functionality of iPhones.

Not many people are talking about Apple's recent WWDC from an enterprise standpoint. But identity and machine management tool maker JumpCloud says a "shim" to connect "the login to the device through to the Safari browser" is a notable development.

JumpCloud provides identity services, which is why chief strategy officer Greg Keller zeroed in on the feature, which his company details further in its latest IT trends report.

The result, said Keller, was "an even more powerful login experience into these devices."

A security flaw in Apple's Safari web browser that was patched nine years ago was exploited in the wild again some months ago – a perfect example of a "zombie" vulnerability.

That's a bug that's been patched, but for whatever reason can be abused all over again on up-to-date systems and devices – or a bug closely related to a patched one.

In a write-up this month, Maddie Stone, a top researcher on Google's Project Zero team, shared details of a Safari vulnerability that folks realized in January this year was being exploited in the wild. This remote-code-execution flaw could be abused by a specially crafted website, for example, to run spyware on someone's device when viewed in their browser.

Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.

This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.

Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.

Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) in Safari has implemented privacy through forgetfulness, and the result is that users of Twitter may have to remind Safari of their preferences.

Apple's privacy technology has been designed to block third-party cookies in its Safari browser. But according to software developer Jeff Johnson, it keeps such a tight lid on browser-based storage that if the user hasn't visited Twitter for a week, ITP will delete user set preferences.

So instead of seeing "Latest Tweets" – a chronological timeline – Safari users returning to Twitter after seven days can expect to see Twitter's algorithmically curated tweets under its "Home" setting.

A woman in the US has been charged with murder after she allegedly tracked down her boyfriend using an Apple AirTag and ran him over after seeing him with another lady.

Gaylyn Morris, 26, found her partner Andre Smith, also 26, at Tilly’s Pub in an Indianapolis shopping mall with the help of the gadget in the early hours of June 3, it is claimed.

A witness said Morris had driven up to him in the parking lot and inquired whether Smith was in the bar, stating she had a GPS tracker that showed he was inside, according to an affidavit [PDF] by Detective Gregory Shue. Morris, the witness said, subsequently spotted Smith within the establishment.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

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