Australia’s consumer watchdog carried out a sting operation against Apple whoch it says caught staff repeatedly misleading iPhone customers about their legal rights to a free repair or replacement after a so-called “error 53” malfunction, court documents reveal.Australian authorities lodged a high-profile case against Apple this year, after iPhone and iPad customers experienced a malfunction that rendered phones useless if it detects that a repair has been carried out by a non-Apple technician. The fault occurred between late 2014 until early last year.The case, set to go to trial in mid-December, accuses Apple of wrongly telling customers they were not entitled to free replacements or repair if they had taken their devices to an unauthorised third-party repairer.‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6 Read moreThat advice was allegedly given even where the repair – a screen replacement, for example – was not related to the fault.

US JUDGES have set two different precedents in cases where a suspect has refused to give the PIN to unlock their mobile phone when asked to do so by authorities.The Miami Herald reports that a Hollywood resident has been jailed for 180 days after the number he provided police with did not work.Christopher Wheeler, 41, was being investigated for child abuse and a judge found him in contempt of court, despite insisting he had given the right number.”I swear, under oath, I’ve given them the password,” said Wheeler, who is said to have ’hit and scratched’ his daughter. Wheeler has been told he will be let out on bond, pending an appeal, but only if he provides a working passcode.Meanwhile, elsewhere in Miami, Florida, a separate extortion allegation provided a similar dilemma, but in this case, a judge ruled that there was no way of proving that the accused, Wesley Victor could remember his PIN, a full ten months after his arrest. The accused’s girlfriend, reality TV star Hench Voigt, also implicated in the plot, has ”forgotten” her PIN too and will explain herself to the judge next week. The couple are accused of trying to blackmail a social media celebrity (an oxymoron, surely) called YesJulz (!) out of $18,000 over some alleged sex tapes they may or may not have.

IF YOU ARE AN UNLUCKY SORT OF PERSON YOU MAY HAVE caught a dose of some fresh Chinese malware called Fireball, that will have made you and just under 250 million other people into malware sponges with no control over their search browser.Check Point security is the firm with the warning, and it reckons that Fireball comes out of Rafotech, a large digital marketing agency based in Beijing and that it is being used to hijack browsers for nefarious purposes.The security firm says that once installed, the malware can do two things: allow for third party control and act as ”a prominent distributor” tap for any additional malware”Rafotech uses Fireball to manipulate the victims’ browsers and turn their default search engines and home pages into fake search engines. This redirects the queries to either yahoo.com or Google.com,” it said.”The fake search engines include tracking pixels used to collect the users’ private information. Fireball has the ability to  spy on victims, perform efficient malware dropping, and execute any malicious code in the infected machines, this creates a massive security flaw in targeted machines and networks.”

Those who mistakenly thought 2016 was an anomaly, a series of unprecedented events, should have few remaining doubts. Marine Le Pen may have stuttered but still picked up almost 11 million votes. Her opponent, the “normal” candidate, was leader of a party only one year old. The ongoing terror attacks, fake news panic, Trump’s tweets and James Comey: last year never really ended, it just carried straight on into this one.After decades of exaggerated prediction, the internet is finally transforming politics, but not in the way the digital prophets expected. The 90s, you may recall, were awash with optimism about our online future: limitless information and total connection would make us more informed, less bigoted and kinder citizens. But the internet is an overwhelming mess of competing facts, claims, blogs, data, propaganda, misinformation, investigative journalism, charts, different charts, commentary and reportage. It’s not the slow and careful politicians who have thrived in this busy environment, it’s the people with the shareable cut-through messages. Donald Trump might very well be the first truly social-media politician: his emotion-filled, simplistic blasts are perfect for the medium.

EVERY DAY, A NEW LOW. As Britons turned to social networks to try to get credible information about an unfolding terrorist attack in central London on Saturday night, the President of the United States enraged many by injecting himself into the conversation, and trying to turn the wave of anxiety and fear to his political advantage.Before the nature or scope of the incident was entirely clear even to police officers responding to the rampage, Donald Trump used his personal Twitter account to share unsourced, third-hand speculation about the attack — from an American political blogger — and then lashed out at federal judges for blocking his executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority nations as unconstitutional. A screenshot from Donald Trump’s personal Twitter feed.After pausing for some rest — and, apparently, to block a musician in Manchester who criticized him for retweeting news “like a bloody ghoul” — Trump resumed his role as Pundit-in-Chief early Sunday morning in Washington, by falsely accusing London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, of downplaying the attacks as he attempted to instill calm rather than sow panic.

In 1861 a shopkeeper in Philadelphia revolutionised the retail industry. John Wanamaker, who opened his department store in a Quaker district of the city, introduced price tags for his goods, along with the high-minded slogan: “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” The practice caught on. Up until then high-street retailers had generally operated a market-stall system of haggling on most products. Their best prices might be reserved for their best customers. Or they would weigh up each shopper and make a guess at what they could afford to pay and eventually come to an agreement