Linked List: October 6, 2017

Friday, 6 October 2017

Apple and Qualcomm’s Billion-Dollar War Over an $18 Part ★

Max Chafkin and Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg Businessweek:

It’s based in part on court documents filed as part of a dispute over one of the most expensive and, arguably, most important parts of the phone: the wireless modem. The story starts two summers ago, at a conference in Idaho, where a senior Apple executive, probably Cook, and a senior Samsung Electronics Co. executive, most likely Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee, shared a quiet word. […]

At the conference in Idaho, according to documents Qualcomm filed earlier this year, Apple saw an opportunity to put itself in front of investigators. Qualcomm claims that at the event — almost certainly the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, which both Cook and Lee attended — the Apple executive urged Samsung to pressure South Korean antitrust regulators to intensify an investigation into Qualcomm that had been open since 2014. “Get aggressive,” the Apple executive said, according to Qualcomm’s filing, adding that this would be the “best chance” to get Qualcomm to lower its prices.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Bruce Sewell to Retire; Katherine Adams Joins Apple as General Counsel and SVP ★

Apple:

Apple today announced that Katherine Adams, formerly senior vice president and general counsel of Honeywell, will join Apple as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

The company also announced Bruce Sewell, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2009, will be retiring at the end of the year.

I wouldn’t read anything into this. I think Sewell really is just retiring to enjoy his wealth. Apple has no outstanding legal issues that I’m aware of other than typical chicken shit patent cases.

The elephant in the room is the ever present threat of a San Bernardino-like standoff with the Trump administration over a request to provide law enforcement with software to “unlock” an iPhone. That was tense under Obama; it’d be a lot worse for Apple under Trump.

Dan Lyons, Jackass; Steve Bannon, Moron ★

From a BuzzFeed investigation into how Steve Bannon turned Breitbart into a hub for white supremicists and misogynists:

Dan Lyons, the veteran tech reporter and editor who also worked for nearly two years on HBO’s Silicon Valley, emailed Yiannopoulos (“you little troublemaker”) periodically to wonder about the birth sex of Zoë Quinn, another GamerGate target, and Amber Discko, the founder of the feminist website Femsplain, and to suggest a story about the public treatment of the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who had been accused of sexual assault in a lawsuit that the plaintiff eventually dropped.

Lyons, you likely recall, wrote the old Fake Steve Jobs website.

Here is an example email written by Steve Bannon:

“Dude—we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!!”

That’s really how Bannon writes, using “u” and “r” as words (and repeatedly using “your” for “you’re”). His emails paint him as barely literate.