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Monday, September 2, 2019

China Reportedly Used iPhone Exploits to Target Uyghur Muslims

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Last week we reported on Google's discovery of an old iPhone vulnerability – now fixed by Apple – that enabled malicious websites to steal data from thousands of users over a two-year period.

Google described these attacks in its original blog post as "indiscriminate," however a report over the weekend by TechCrunch suggests the websites were part of a state-backed attack that specifically targeted Uyghur Muslims.

The websites were part of a campaign to target the religious group by infecting an iPhone with malicious code simply by visiting a booby-trapped web page. In gaining unfettered access to the iPhone's software, an attacker could read a victim's messages, passwords, and track their location in near-real time.

According to TechCrunch's sources, the Chinese government was allegedly behind the malicious websites, which also infected non-Uygurs who unintentionally accessed these domains because they were indexed in Google search. The FBI is said to have alerted Google to ask for the sites to be removed from its index to prevent infections.

Beijing has long sought to suppress the ethnic minority Uyghur community in the country's Xinjiang state, with brutal crackdowns in the 1980s and 90s leading to significant numbers of Uyghurs fleeing China to seek asylum.

In the past year, at least one million Uighurs have been detained in internment camps, according to the United Nations human rights committee. Beijing claims the centers across Xinjiang are for "vocational training," but a US Congressional hearing on the camps characterized them as "political re-education" centers.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: China

This article, "China Reportedly Used iPhone Exploits to Target Uyghur Muslims" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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iOS 13 Code Suggests Apple Testing AR Headset With 'StarBoard' Mode, 'Garta' Codename, and More

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Apple has long been rumored to be working on an augmented reality headset or glasses, and despite a recent DigiTimes report claiming the project had been suspended, documentation seen by MacRumors in an internal build of iOS 13 suggests development of a head-mounted augmented reality display has continued.

Apple Glasses concept
Namely, internal builds of iOS 13 include a "STARTester" app that can switch in and out of a head-mounted mode, presumably to replicate the functionality of an augmented reality headset on an iPhone for testing purposes. There are two head-mounted states for testing, including "worn" and "held."

There is also an internal README file in iOS 13 that describes a "StarBoard" system shell for stereo AR-enabled apps, which implies a headset of some kind. The file also suggests Apple is developing an augmented reality device codenamed "Garta," possibly as one of several prototypes under the "T288" umbrella.

Digging further into the internal iOS 13 code, we uncovered numerous strings related to a so-called "StarBoard mode" and various "views" and "scenes." Many of the strings reference augmented reality, including "ARStarBoardViewController" and "ARStarBoardSceneManager."

Multiple sources have claimed that Apple plans to release augmented reality glasses as early as 2020, including analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, CNET, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who in November 2017 reported that Apple's headset would run a custom iOS-based operating system dubbed "rOS" for "reality operating system."

Apple CEO Tim Cook has talked up the prospect of augmented reality several times, saying he views AR as "profound" because the technology "amplifies human performance instead of isolating humans."

Steve Moser contributed to this report.

Related Roundup: Apple Glasses

This article, "iOS 13 Code Suggests Apple Testing AR Headset With 'StarBoard' Mode, 'Garta' Codename, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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