Eff Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

The EFF on Apple's "crystal prison"

by Kelly Hodgkins (May 30th, 2012)

The EFF takes on Apple and its locked down ecosystem in a long essay on its website. The article calls out Apple and Microsoft for imposing "an ugly set of restrictions" on what users and programmers can do with mobile devices. The EFF also accuses the two companies of providing unacceptable ...

EFF petitions to extend legal iPhone jailbreaking

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 27th, 2012)

In 2010, the Copyright Office said jailbreaking a handset did not violate the DMCA and the jailbreak community breathed a sigh of relief. What many people didn't realize was that the exemption covering jailbreaking will expire later this year. When it expires, companies can go after jailbreak ...

Apple makes EFF's Holiday Wish List

by Mike Schramm (Dec 29th, 2011)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released its annual "wish list" for various tech companies and its wishes for their openness, and Apple was only mentioned in one item. The EFF wishes Apple would easily and officially provide a way for users to "get root access" on every Apple device they ...

Apple joins lobby for privacy rights

by Kelly Hodgkins (Sep 23rd, 2011)

Apple has joined the Digital Due Process group, a coalition of privacy organizations like the EFF and companies that are lobbying to reform surveillance laws in the US. The group hopes to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which was enacted in 1986, long before the ...

Humble Indie Bundle 3 announced, includes Cogs, VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves

by Mike Schramm (Jul 26th, 2011)

The Humble Indie Bundle is back at it again, offering five new indie gaming titles for one low choose-your-own price. This time around, they've got Crayon Physics Deluxe, 3D puzzler Cogs, the excellent retro platformer VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and the award-winning puzzler/platformer And Yet It ...

Apple responds to Lodsys patent claims, backs up developers (Updated)

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (May 23rd, 2011)

Update 2: Macworld just posted the complete text of the letter sent by Apple's legal department to Lodsys, as has CNET. You can view the text of the letter below, or see the full-color version on Scribd. The letter asserts definitively that Apple's license for the Lodsys patents covers the ...

EFF takes on Lodsys patent controversy

by Dana Franklin (May 21st, 2011)

Julie Samuels, a Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said Apple should join forces with its developers to dispute patent infringement complaints Lodsys, LLC sent to several independent iOS app-makers last week. On May 13, a number of iOS developers reported being told ...

EFF releases iPhone developer license agreement

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Mar 9th, 2010)

In a step towards transparency, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has made the entire iPhone Developer Program License Agreement available for the general public. This is the document that all iPhone developers must agree to when they become part of the iPhone developer program. As EFF points ...

Macworld 2010: Adam Savage re-enacts the EFF's history

by Mike Schramm (Feb 11th, 2010)

We visited a lot of parties last night (and the TUAW bloggers are nursing hangovers because of it), but the best was undoubtedly the Electronics Frontier Foundation's 20th anniversary bash at the DNA Lounge. It wasn't strictly Mac-related, but Mythbuster Adam Savage was in the house, and he led a ...

Apple says jailbreaking is illegal

by Mike Schramm (Feb 13th, 2009)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted the news that Apple has filed comments with the US Copyright Office stating that the act of jailbreaking your iPhone is a copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal. The EFF says that Apple is claiming that jailbreak apps still ...

iPhone 2.1 SDK Disappointments

by Erica Sadun (Jul 25th, 2008)

Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. Mr. Jobs, TEAR DOWN THIS NDA. If the new iPhone 2.1 beta firmware is anything, it's a perfect excuse to say: "I told you so." It explains why the NDA failed to disappear on schedule. Apple kept its promise -- "Ve shall delivah the 2.0 iPhone und SDK on ...

Song Sender sends iPhone tunes to email and ringtones

by Erica Sadun (Aug 21st, 2007)

Song Sender allows you to pick a song from your iPhone's song library and send it to a friend via email. If you'd like to use a song from your library as a ringtone, you can do that too. Install the package into your iPhone using your favorite installer application. When run, the software reads ...

Asteroid a Hoax?

by Dan Lurie (Jun 10th, 2006)

Anne Onymus (get it? hehe!) over at LowEndMac is hypothesizing that the entire Asteroid fiasco was all part of an evil Apple plan to quash rumor sites. The assumption is based on the fact that two years after the Asteroid leak, Apple still hasn't released a GarageBand breakout box. If Apple had ...

Privacy Watch: Tor

by Jay Savage (Jun 22nd, 2005)

With the nonsense on Capitol Hill this week, and discussion of DMCA revision and funding ramping up, I thought it would be a good time to talk about Tor, the award-winning privacy protocol and software from the EFF. Unlike other anonymizers that work by encrypting or proxying particular services and ...