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US removes Xiaomi from blocklist of Chinese military companies
A US court has removed Android smartphone maker Xiaomi from a government blocklist of companies with ties to the Chinese military.
US government agrees to lift ban on Xiaomi
The US government has agreed to remove Xiaomi from a Trump administration blocklist after the company filed a lawsuit earlier this year.
Xiaomi files court challenge against US ban
Xiaomi has filed a court complaint challenging the US investment ban, arguing that it's unconstitutional and based on false claims.
US tightens restrictions on Huawei to close trade loopholes
The US is expanding trade restrictions meant to limit Huawei's access to semiconductors.
Huawei reportedly expects steep drop in 2020 phone sales due to US ban
The US government's decision to blacklist Huawei didn't immediately spell calamity for the Chinese tech giant, but it might not be so confident in 2020. The Information sources claim that Huawei is predicting its smartphone sales will drop 20 percent this year due to the US ban forbidding partnerships with Google and other American firms. While the company had a banner 2019 with over 240 million phones sold, it now expects 'just' 190 million to 200 million.
Trump administration may blacklist Chinese firms that routinely copy tech
The US trade war is meant in part to punish China for allowing intellectual property theft, but the Trump administration might not be convinced it goes far enough. Washington Post sources claim that White House advisor Peter Navarro is exploring a presidential executive order that would put Chinese companies on the Commerce Department's entity list if they frequently violate American copyrights and patents. A Chinese firm that routinely copies device designs or software features could find itself blacklisted in the US even if it didn't pose a national security threat.
US gives Huawei another 90 days to serve existing customers
The US government has granted Huawei another 90 days to buy from American suppliers. The "temporary general license" extension will allow Huawei to continue servicing existing US customers before it is fully blacklisted, Reuters reports. The company now has through November 19th to maintain existing telecom networks and provide software updates to existing Huawei handsets.
Huawei and Google scrapped their smart speaker due to US ban
Before the Trump administration declared a 'national emergency' effectively banning Huawei, Google and Huawei were reportedly months away from launching a Huawei-branded smart speaker. The companies allegedly planned to reveal the speaker at a trade show in Berlin this September and to sell it online in the US. But progress came to a halt when the Trump administration blacklisted Huawei, sources told The Information.
Huawei lays off two thirds of its US research division
The rumors of Huawei laying off a large chunk of its US staff have come to pass. The company is cutting over 600 of the 850 jobs at its Futurewei Technologies research wing in the country in response to the "curtailment of business operations" by the US government's trade blacklisting. Simply put, the researchers can't do their jobs now that it's illegal for Futurewei to transfer much of its work to its parent company.
China plans list of 'unreliable entities' in retaliation for Huawei ban
China isn't taking kindly to the Trump administration's de facto Huawei ban. The country has revealed that it's creating an "unreliable entities list" of foreign companies, organizations and people that it believes interfere with Chinese businesses. This includes firms that break the "spirit" of contracts, violate "market rules," block supplies to companies for "noncommercial reasons" and otherwise harm the "legitimate rights and interests" of those outfits.
Google suspends Huawei's Android support (updated)
Huawei was already facing serious trouble following the Trump administration's de facto ban, but it might get considerably worse. Reuters sources claim Google has suspended transactions with Huawei that require transferring proprietary hardware and software, hobbling much of its smartphone business outside of China. It "immediately" loses access to future OS updates beyond the Android Open Source Project, according to the insider, and upcoming phones would have to go without official apps like the Google Play Store and Gmail.
Is it time for a dungeon blacklist?
An interesting question was posed recently on Twitter to Ion Hazzikostas: is there going to be a dungeon blacklist option, like there is with PvP battlegrounds? For those unaware -- when you queue up for a random PvP battleground you can pick two battlegrounds that you don't want to do. The system honors those blacklist selections and you won't be placed in those matches. This is very useful for days when you constantly get Arathi Basin (like I do all the time). The idea of applying this to dungeons is interesting, and one that I think has some merit to it. When running dungeons there's always a few that no one likes to do, or at least that's the perceived opinion. I'm thinking of things like Heroic Deadmines. There were points in there that were a virtually guaranteed wipe in a PuG. And this expansion I'm not a fan of the Stormstout Brewery... it can just be so long at points, with someone always getting stuck behind the doors for the big bad rabbit of carrot death.
Canadian carriers launch centralized database of stolen phones
In the latest installment of Grand Theft Mobile (TM): Canadian phone thieves face a major hurdle now that several carriers in the country have launched a centralized blacklist of stolen devices. Canada's Protect Your Data initiative combines collections of pilfered gadgets' IMEIs -- a unique identifier that most phones have -- not only from each participating carrier in the country, but also from the US carriers' unified database. The joint effort will allow the companies to cross-check against everyone's rosters and refuse to activate any GSM, HSPA, HSPA+ or LTE device that appears in them. While only phones reported stolen or lost starting September 30th will automatically be listed, carriers have the option to add devices lost before that. While only phones reported stolen starting September 30th will automatically be listed, carriers have the option to add anything lost before that. It might not bring people's phones home, but at least those no-good snatchers will wish they'd stolen something simpler instead, like wallets, or cars. [Thanks, Mackenzie]
Mists of Pandaria Beta: A first look at Battleground blacklisting
Following on from today's Breakfast Topic on your favorite Battlegrounds, we're really excited to bring you the latest news from Pandaria: Battleground blacklisting is live in the beta! This long-anticipated feature allows the world-weary PvPer to go through the list and click a thumbs down icon to the right of a highlighted Battleground. You can see what the icon looks like before it is selected on the highlighted Arathi Basin on the header image. Once the little icon is red, as you can see in the header image on Alterac Valley and Strand of the Ancients, those Battlegrounds are blacklisted. When you queue for a random Battleground, those two will be excluded from your random list. It should be noted that the weekly Call to Arms Battleground cannot be blacklisted -- the "thumbs down" icon doesn't appear next to it. However, as you probably know, the Call to Arms changes every week, so the Battleground in question can go back onto your blacklist straight after the Call to Arms is over. You can blacklist a maximum of two maps at a time. To un-blacklist, simply uncheck the symbol. Being a crafty PvPer, I immediately begged a favor from the lovely Anne Stickney to see if we could blacklist more than two Battlegrounds by joining as a group. It turns out that Blizzard had already thought of that, believe it or not, and the the join as group function is currently disabled. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
'Activision doesn't blacklist journalists,' working on resolution with Gameblog
Earlier this week, France's Gameblog posted a screenshot of Amazon France's premature listing for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a story that we and other gaming sites picked up immediately. We later found further support for the claim in a Treyarch employee's resume.A new Call of Duty title -- or a second Black Ops -- wasn't particularly surprising, but apparently Activision wanted to keep the news quiet, and it called the site to take down the story, Gameblog wrote in a follow-up post. Gameblog said the reporter refused and that Activision took a strangely extreme route, "blacklisting" the site, uninviting it from events, declining to send it any more review titles and removing all advertisement.Activision has now publicly responded to Gameblog's claim: "Activision doesn't blacklist journalists. We believe this was a misunderstanding and are working towards a resolution." That sounds like a more reasonable response than the all-out journalistic warfare Gameblog reported; then again, this is all about a Call of Duty title, so maybe "warfare" was the angle they were comfortable with at first.
Telex anti-censorship system promises to leap over firewalls without getting burned
Human rights activists and free speech advocates have every reason to worry about the future of an open and uncensored internet, but researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo have come up with a new tool that may help put their fears to rest. Their system, called Telex, proposes to circumvent government censors by using some clever cryptographic techniques. Unlike similar schemes, which typically require users to deploy secret IP addresses and encryption keys, Telex would only ask that they download a piece of software. With the program onboard, users in firewalled countries would then be able to visit blacklisted sites by establishing a decoy connection to any unblocked address. The software would automatically recognize this connection as a Telex request and tag it with a secret code visible only to participating ISPs, which could then divert these requests to banned sites. By essentially creating a proxy server without an IP address, the concept could make verboten connections more difficult to trace, but it would still rely upon the cooperation of many ISPs stationed outside the country in question -- which could pose a significant obstacle to its realization. At this point, Telex is still in a proof-of-concept phase, but you can find out more in the full press release, after the break.
Your iPhone probably isn't calling home, just might not want you up in its Core Location
It appears we can all breathe a big sigh of relief when it comes to our iPhone apps. According to John Gruber (Daring Fireball), that suspicious looking URL discovered in firmware 2.x which appeared to be set to deactivate applications may be something slightly more innocuous. According to Gruber -- via "an informed source at Apple" -- the "clbl" in the aforementioned URL stands for "Core Location Blacklist" and is actually used to stipulate that specific pieces of software don't have access to... you guessed it... Core Location. Gruber argues that this makes sense, as the API is covered by fairly strict rules in Apple's SDK. So it looks like (at a glance) this was much ado about nothing -- thanks to a little misinterpretation by Jonathan Zdziarski -- though we are considering getting hot under the collar that Apple reserves the right to deny Core Location access. How dare they?[Thanks, Paul]
iPhone hacker says the device 'calls home' to Apple, allows apps to be remotely disabled
According to iPhone Atlas and iPhone hacker-extraordinaire Jonathan Zdziarski, Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your device. Apparently, the new 2.x firmware contains a URL which points to a page containing a list of "unauthorized" apps -- a move which suggests that the device makes occasional contact with Apple's servers to see if anything is amiss on your phone. In Jonathan's words: "This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down. I discovered this doing a forensic examination of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep inside CoreLocation." Now honestly, we don't expect the folks in Cupertino to suddenly start turning off apps that you've paid for and downloaded, but if Apple is indeed monitoring iPhones or touches (even passively) for applications it doesn't want or like, it signals a problem deeper than a company simply wanting to sign-off on software for the device. Even on platforms like Symbian -- which calls for apps to be signed and traceable -- the suggestion that a process of the OS would actively monitor, report on, and possibly deactivate your device's software is unreasonable, and clearly presents an issue that the company will have to deal with sooner or later. Oh, and Apple -- we're not going to buy the "for your security" angle, so don't even bother.[Via Mac Rumors] Read - iPhone can phone home and kill apps?Read - Apple's URL with "unauthorized applications" string
Apple voiding warranties, blacklisting hacked iPhones?
We don't foresee Apple chasing folks down that have modified their iPhone or anything, but at least one case has proven that you may want to return your handset to stock before attempting to have it serviced. According to a recent report, a handset running "some third-party apps" and operating on T-Mobile was flat out rejected when it entered an Apple store for service. More specifically, the employee reportedly said that "the warranty was voided," and added that the mobile was "blacklisted" against future service or return. 'Course, the owner did manage to coerce the Apple store manager to allow a return (albeit with a 10-percent restocking fee added on), but we'd highly recommend reverting your iPhone to AT&T mode before begging for service just in case.[Via Digg, image courtesy of HamptonRoads]
Spamtrap automatically prints, shreds spam for ultimate satisfaction
Watching the digits in front of your dedicated spam folder grow isn't entirely enthralling, and to be honest, witnessing just how much junk email you receive on a daily basis can actually be somewhat infuriating. The Spamtrap provides a much more tactile and satisfying way to demolish said waste, as it disregards the delete command and gets straight to the dirty work. The installation interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses, and once any spam is received, the Pentium II-based machine "automatically prints and shreds" the garbage so you can really tell the spam whose boss. Subsequently, the system then feeds blacklists with the information it receives in an attempt to further clean up the web for other individuals without such extreme means of purging their inbox. And for those environmentally conscience folks who are on the edge of irate, yes, the creator does go the extra mile by recycling the paper that inevitably gets wasted. Hit the read link for a video demonstration.[Via BoingBoing]
