Indeed, one of these vulnerabilities was discovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and allegedly used to compromise the devices of activists and reporters. It was stated that it was found out through the installation of spyware called Pegasus, created by NSO Group. The NSO Group’s technology was said to target political activists and reporters, as well as politicians.

By analyzing the iPhone of a Saudi activist infected with Pegasus spyware, Citizen Lab then was able to discover a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage. The vulnerability, named ForcedEntry, targets Apple’s image library and can be exploited with a malicious PDF. It is apparently effective since February.

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Following that revelation, many people starting to criticize the tech giant for its actions. The company then retaliated by declaring that it never compromised the security of its customers and their data and that it was complying with Chinese law about the data storage of its nationals. Yet, it was reported that by doing so, Apple was effectively allowing access to the Chinese government.

This is a rather significant issue as China has always been accused of using technology to track and monitor its citizens. Thus, by storing the data in servers inside the country, the company is putting citizens at risk and removing any privacy they might have.

Apple, however, stated that it complied with the laws of every country it was present. The company added that it still had control of the encryption keys for its users’ data, and every data centre was using Apple’s most cutting-edge hardware and security technologies.

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In the UK, fintech has become especially important and is viewed as a potential economic beacon amid post-Brexit uncertainty, as multiple jurisdictions vie for top fintech hub status. There is both a national fintech initiative and a number of provincial projects aimed at encouraging private sector investment and promoting more academic involvement. And these efforts are being replicated worldwide – from the US to Hong Kong and Singapore.

What’s open banking all about?

Open banking is designed to increase competition in banking and lower the barriers to entry, while the EU’s ‘PSD2’ directive is focused on creating a safer and more innovative European payments landscape. The legislation will give consumers the option to share their bank account data securely with ‘trusted third parties’ through open APIs. Trusted third parties can then access this data to create new insights and innovations for customers based on their transaction behaviour.

This opens up the banking market to a host of new competitors and also paves the way for increased collaboration with all types of organisations – from industry giants such as Amazon to niche solution providers offering complementary services.

In the UK, the nine largest banks have already been told to open up access to customer data to licensed fintechs. Other countries worldwide are also mandating a similar approach.

At the same time, banks are faced with a range of other IT challenges, including the need to:

1. Deliver real-time transactions
2. Digitise front and back-end systems and processes
3. Connect their systems to a wider ecosystem through open APIs
4. Incorporate distributed ledger technology or blockchain – seen by many banks as game-changing technology
5. Move areas of their business to the cloud: to reduce hosting fees, be safe and secure, provide hardware support and maintenance that can scale
6. Innovate and improve customer service using artificial intelligence.

By mandating banks to make their customers’ data accessible to third parties and encouraging the use of open APIs, open banking is designed to encourage innovation and champion collaboration – allowing developers access to banks’ precious customer data and their core systems upon which so many successful fintech apps are built.

The move to platform – on the rise

Platform is the business model of the 21st century. A platform connects consumers with producers in a way that benefits all, quickly and with minimal friction. The company that owns the platform needn’t develop the products or services being sold – it’s all about the connections. Uber’s a great example: it’s the largest ride service in the world but doesn’t own the cars.

Apple was an early adopter of the platform model. The Apple App Store is open to everyone. New apps can be posted rapidly and gain exposure to more than half a billion people from 155 countries. In 2017, iOS developers earned US$26.5billion in this way.

In contrast, financial services have been slow to adopt the platform model. Closed, legacy systems and requirements around availability and security have been major obstacles to innovation. For developers, working with banks has been difficult because the integration processes are so tough, messy and long. But this is changing. People today expect modern apps and services and they’re not seeing them fast enough from their banks, lenders and investors. As a result, we’re now seeing a real appetite from banks to move to a platform model.

To support the move, Finastra is backing a ‘platform-as-as-service’ approach – designed to give banks and developers the optimum environment to collaborate and build new applications. As well as providing connectivity to a standard set of pre-built and fully integrated open APIs, a platform-based approach can also dramatically optimize the software developer environment. For example, giving developers the ability to interact with the open APIs in a sandbox environment will allow them to experiment online in bringing data into their applications and to test the inputs and outputs in a safe environment before they’re deployed to market.

The benefit of the cloud and a platform-based approach is that it allows banks to decouple their APIs from their often-incompatible legacy systems and to create the API testing environment necessary for quality control and ease of collaboration with partners and customers. As a result, new apps can be fully tested and delivered to market much faster – helping banks deliver on the potential of open banking for their customers.

Developers have never had such a great opportunity to present their ideas and innovations to the banking industry. As you consider how best to invest your time – just remember, banks, lenders and investment firms need your help, now. Shall we get started?

Written by Mitesh Soni, Senior Director – Innovation, Fintech and Ecosystems at Finastra

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Apple’s ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ in Safari’s web browser will help block social media ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons, as well as comment widgets from tracking users without permission.

‘Simplified system information’

Its new software upgrades will also allow older iPhones to run faster, help parents limit their children’s screen time and make its Siri voice assistant work more like Amazon’s rival feature.

“Safari now also presents simplified system information when users browse the web, preventing them from being tracked based on their system configuration,” said the company at The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

Despite this, industry experts have raised concerns, saying that the move will add tension between Apple and social media companies such as Facebook.

‘Invasion of privacy’ 

Following this, Tim Cook, Chief Executive at Apple, previously described Facebook’s practices as being an “invasion of privacy”because of Facebook “keeping watch over people in ways the might not be aware of”, according to the BBC.

Apple also revealed that its MacOS Mojave will battle advertisers tracking users who delete their cookies by using a technique named “fingerprinting”, which involves identifying computers by the fonts and plug-ins installed among other configuration details.

Written by Leah Alger

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To remove the iOS apps, Apple has sent emails to the developers whose apps don’t comply with the new regulations.

Despite this, it’s not clear whether Apple is moving in response to the new rules or merely tackling a new category of undesirable apps, according to Developer.

App developers must do more than ask permission to take location data in order to stay compliant with the new rules, as well as need to know where the data is being held.

Privacy Impact Assessments

Developers who aren’t compliant with Apple’s guidelines must remove any code or framework that contravenes the directives, then resubmit their app to the App Store to ensure that users trust the App Store and its listed apps.

Apple wrote in its blog post: “As part of our EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) work, we are undertaking Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) of our major products and services and integrating PIAs as we develop new products and services.

“We also fully assess all acquisitions. These PIAs take into consideration how laws affect privacy and assess any associated privacy risks.

‘Providing you with support’

“Apple also regularly engages with a wide range of civil society representatives globally on various privacy issues including privacy by design and encryption.

“To make sure your personal information is secure, we strictly enforce privacy safeguards within the company. This means we use access management and access controls commensurate with the risk to data to ensure access to data is associated with a business need, such as providing you with support.”

The American multinational technology company has also removed more than a million apps, including ones that didn’t support modern 64-bit versions of iOS.

Written by Leah Alger

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Adobe announced in February that it’s planning to end the life of Flash by 2020, due to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly maturing; taking over the capabilities and functionalities that its plugins pioneer.

Despite Adobe’s deadline, it appears that less than 5% of worldwide websites are still using Flash, as most websites favour Javascript for running features instead.

A recent study found that last year, less than 7% of websites use Flash, although, back in 2011, 28.5% of websites were using the tech.

Adobe wrote in a blog post: “Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash.

Animation and video tools

“Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

“Adobe will remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement. This includes continuing to contribute to the HTML5 standard and participating in the WebAssembly Community Group.

“And we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.”

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The vlog included Brooke Amelia Peterson going to visit her father at the Apple campus, where she saw an unreleased iPhone X and recorded it, as well as special employee-only QR codes.

The video was soon noticed by the likes of 9to5Mac and YouTube users.

Apple requested the video was removed, but it was too late as the content had already spread.

Brooke Peterson said to the BBC: “At the end of the day when you work for Apple, it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are, if you break a rule, they just have no tolerance.

“Apple really did like my dad. And they let him go. Because he broke a rule. It was an innocent mistake, and he fully apologises.”

Filming on Apple’s campus is strictly prohibited.

Written by Leah Alger

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The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Mobile Campus solution is the new Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar WLAN products.

New access points, edge switches and network management capabilities are used to create an optimised network infrastructure, and accommodate the digital transformation of businesses; including next-generation mobility services and the Internet of Things (IoT).

OmniAccess Stellar includes integrated guest management and built-in DPI, which can be leveraged for smart analytics and to help better support IoT devices such as surveillance cameras, traffic lights, etc.

OmniAccess Stellar is offered in two modes:

• WiFi Express: Scales up to 64 APs and operates in a simplified cluster architecture, providing plug-and-play deployments and mostly used for SMBs.

• WiFi Enterprise: Used for networks with high scalability, it operates in a controller-less architecture but requires the OmniVista 2500 NMS to provide multiple advanced network services including comprehensive guest management, BYOD, IoT containment, Apple/DLNA devices support and detailed analytics.

The most recent addition to the access switch family is the OmniSwitch 6560 with Multigigabit 2.5Gbps access ports to enable high-speed WiFi and high PoE ports to power IoT devices.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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