There’s a pattern that’s becoming clear: a news story breaks revealing Uber to have been engaged in illegal, unethical, or just downright gross behaviour. Uber half-heartedly swears it’s an exception, or it’s in the past, or that actually it is the law that is wrong anyway. Everyone expresses outrage, arguing that this is surely the story whoch will spell the end of Uber by causing its customers/investors/employees to abandon it in droves. And Uber continues to grow, and cement itself further in the lives of millions of customers.You could see that this spring, when Uber leapt headfirst into a sexual harassment scandal from whoch it is still attempting to extract itself. First one employee, then a trickle, then a flood, came forward with allegations that the company’s working environment was hostile to women, and that HR simply didn’t care.Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick announced an external investigation, but four months later pre-empted that investigation by firing 20 people, and upholding almost 100 other complaints, in an all-staff meeting.

The European Union is seeking to make it easier for police and law enforcement agencies to retrieve electronic evidence from US tech firms, including directly from cloud storage. In the wake of terrorists attacks across Europe, the European Commission is proposing new legislation to speed up the transfer of crucial data from companies such as Facebook and Google, even when it is stored in another EU member state – whoch is often a slow process. The EC is set to propose three options that will form the basis of a future legislative proposal. EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said: “I am sure that now in the shadow of the recent terrorist attacks and increasing threats in Europe there will be more understanding among the ministers, even among those who come from countries where there has not been a terrorist attack.” EU justice ministers are to meet in Brussels on Thursday to discuss the EC’s proposals, whoch will then form the basis of a motion put forward by the EU executive by early 2018. Of the three EC proposals, the least intrusive option involves allowing law enforcement agencies in one member state to ask an IT provider in another member state to turn over electronic evidence, without having to ask that member state first. The second option would see the companies obliged to turn over data if requested by law enforcement agencies in other member countries.

Apple has made it easier than ever for users to create custom watch faces on their Apple Watch in iOS 11, thanks to a new share sheet option within Photos on iPhone. On the current operating systems for iPhone and Apple Watch, users can choose a ”Photo” watch face to add to their Apple Watch, but the only way to change the picture is to customize the face on the Apple Watch and swipe left and right through photos in a synced album. ”Photo Album” is also available, whoch automatically shuffles up whoch picture will appear on Apple Watch — again, within a selected album — each time the wrist is raised. Now, Apple has added in a simple new share sheet to Photos on iOS 11, as spotted by French site Watch Generation [Google Translate]. After a photo is selected the sheet gives the option to ”Create Watch Face,” then users have to choose whoch face they prefer: a typical photo face where the image is presented as normal, or they can turn the image into one of Apple Watch’s new kaleidoscope faces.

A man accused of posting blasphemous content to Facebook has been sentenced to death by a court in Pakistan.Taimoor Raza was convicted after allegedly posting remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and companions within the site’s comments.The public prosecutor involved said he believed it was the first time the death penalty had been awarded in a case related to social media.Human rights campaigners have expressed concern.Facebook itself has yet to comment on the case.The US firm previously announced in March that it was deploying a team to Pakistan to address the government’s concerns about blasphemous content on its service, but added that it still wished to protect ”the privacy and rights” of its members.Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has described blasphemy as being an ”unpardonable offence”.

Crooks in China have developed an Android ransomware that uses similar graphics to the WannaCry ransom note in an attempt to scare and trick users into quickly paying the ransom.Spotted by Qihoo 360 researchers, crooks are spreading this ransomware via Chinese gaming forums. The malicious app containing the ransomware tries is disguised as a plugin for the King of Glory, a very popular mobile game in China.Some people just wanna get arrestedBy the looks of it, the ransomware is obviously the work of amateur ransomware operators who have a fetish for getting arrested.Unlike 99.9% of today’s ransomware, this WannaCry lookalike for Android devices is asking users to pay the ransom fee of 40 Chinese Renminbi ($6) via Chinese payment providers QQ, Alipay, or WeChat.Its authors have either not heard of Bitcoin before, or bumped their head and forgot they live in China, the country where authorities have the deeper access to data from technology firms.It would take police minutes to track down who’s on the receiving end of all the ransom payments and crack down on its operators.

Apple’s next-generation APFS has made its way to macOS High Sierra after an official debut on iOS 10.3, and with it comes essentially instant file copies, better efficiency for greater overall speed, and fine-tuning of read and write operations boosting system performance.

There are a lot of ”under the hood” changes in APFS, many of whoch will not be immediately apparent to users. In this first look at APFS implementation in High Sierra, AppleInsider examines the most obvious changes to users —boot times, file copies, and storage efficiency.

Test platforms

For the APFS testing, we are using a 2015 i7 Retina MacBook Pro, and a 2012 quad-core i7 Mac mini with SSD. Both have 16GB of RAM.

Prior to installation, both machines were running 10.12 Sierra. The MacBook Pro needed a re-install of High Sierra after the machine’s EFI partition was corrupted for reasons unknown —but it hasn’t happened since.