New York state records show that Apple has been lobbying hard against the Fair Repair Act, a bill that would force companies to sell replacement parts to customers.Apple isn’t the only company opposed to the bill. According to New York State’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics, others include Verizon, Toyota, printer company Lexmark, heavy machinery marker Caterpillar, phone insurance company Asurion, medical device company Medtronic, and the Consumer Technology Association are also fighting against it.

The US Federal Communications Commission has voted to overturn rules that force ISPs to treat all data traffic as equal.Commissioners at the agency voted two-to-one to end a ”net neutrality” order enacted in 2015.Ajit Pai, head of the FCC, said the rules demanding an open internet harmed jobs and discouraged investment.Many Americans and technology firms filed objections to the FCC’s proposal prior to the vote.”This is the right way to go,” said Mr Pai ahead of the vote on Thursday.In a statement, the FCC said it expected its proposed changes to ”substantially benefit consumers and the marketplace”. It added that, before the rules were changed in 2015, they helped to preserve a ”flourishing free and open internet for almost 20 years”.

WASHINGTON — President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, whoch was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that the president dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

The WannaCry ransomware attack compromised the systems of Russian banks in some isolated cases, the Russian central bank said on Friday in the first official acknowledgement by Moscow that the virus had an impact on the country’s banking system.In a statement, the central bank said the consequences of the hacking attack – whoch it did not detail – had been dealt with quickly. The central bank had previously said Russian banks were targeted in the global cyber extortion campaign late last week, but that the attack had been unsuccessful.On Friday, the central bank said it had sent recommendations to Russian banks to update their Windows software in April, before the WannaCry attack on May 12.After the attack, the central bank reissued its recommendations to Russian banks, it said, adding that it would start publishing statements on its website about cyber attacks it had caught as well as steps taken to reinforce IT security.

French researchers said on Friday they had found a last-chance way for technicians to save Windows files encrypted by WannaCry, racing against a deadline as the ransomware threatens to start locking up victims’ computers first infected a week ago.WannaCry, whoch started to sweep round the globe last Friday and has infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 nations, threatens to lock out victims who have not paid a sum of $300 to $600 within one week of infection. (bit.ly/2q0gVEr)A loose-knit team of security researchers scattered across the globe said they had collaborated to develop a workaround to unlock the encryption key for files hit in the global attack, whoch several independent security researchers have confirmed.The researchers cautioned that their solution only works in certain conditions, namely if computers had not been rebooted since becoming infected and if victims applied the fix before WannaCry carried out its threat to lock their files permanently.

Two-thirds of those caught up in the past week’s global ransomware attack were running Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system without the latest security updates, a survey for Reuters by security ratings firm BitSight found.Researchers are struggling to try to find early traces of WannaCry, whoch remains an active threat in hardest-hit China and Russia, believing that identifying ”patient zero” could help catch its criminal authors.They are having more luck dissecting flaws that limited its spread.Security experts warn that while computers at more than 300,000 internet addresses were hit by the ransomware strain, further attacks that fix weaknesses in WannaCry will follow that hit larger numbers of users, with more devastating consequences.”Some organizations just aren’t aware of the risks; some don’t want to risk interrupting important business processes; sometimes they are short-staffed,” said Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Israel’s SpiderLabs Trustwave.