US judge rules Apple violated order to reform App Store | China is still winning the battle for 5G and 6G | Pro-Russia hacktivists bombard Dutch public orgs with DDoS attacks
Plus, how North Korea's coders are infiltrating Western tech jobs
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Apple violated a U.S. court order that required the iPhone maker to allow greater competition for app downloads and payment methods in its lucrative App Store and will be referred to federal prosecutors, a federal judge in California ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said in an 80-page ruling that Apple failed to comply with her prior injunction order, which was imposed in an antitrust lawsuit brought by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games. Reuters
Technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, virtualization, and artificial intelligence will only become more important. The country that leads the transition to 6G, moreover, will be at the forefront of advancements in a variety of applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. Foreign Affairs
Russia-aligned hacktivists persistently target key public and private organizations in the Netherlands with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, causing access problems and service disruptions. The situation was acknowledged via a statement by the country's National Cyber Security Center, part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. Bleeping Computer
Australia
The silence on tech policy is setting off alarm bells
InnovationAus
Joseph Brookes
Days out from a federal election and almost nothing has been uttered on tech policy in a month-long campaign, with political leaders overlooking or undercooking transformative issues like artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and regulation. Voters could be forgiven for not realising that Australia is a contender in the global race to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer, is staring down an expected $26 billion surge in data centre and AI infrastructure investment, and is about to launch an orbital rocket from Queensland.
Genetec partners with Western Sydney University to grow Australia’s tech workforce
CyberDaily
David Hollingworth
Physical security software firm Genetec has announced a newly inked five-year partnership with Western Sydney University to help expand Australia’s technology workforce. Under the partnership, full-time students at the university will be able to undertake semester-long internships at the Genetec Sydney Experience Centre, based in Sydney’s Tech Central Hub. At the Hub, students will be able to work across a selection of departments, including marketing, sales, and tech support, while also being mentored by experienced professionals in their chosen area of expertise.
China
China is still winning the battle for 5G—and 6G
Foreign Affairs
Anne Neuberger
Technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, virtualization, and artificial intelligence will only become more important. The country that leads the transition to 6G, moreover, will be at the forefront of advancements in a variety of applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. If the United States, in cooperation with its allies and partners, adopts and implements the right policies, it can regain the technological initiative and protect its intelligence operations and military communications around the world. But to do so, it must ensure that advanced, trusted, and secure digital infrastructure, designed and produced outside China, remains available—and becomes the technology of choice—both at home and abroad.
The ‘Bullet Curtain’: China’s answer to the growing drone swarm threat
The Diplomat
Ahmad Ali
Imagine a future conflict scenario in which hundreds and thousands of unmanned platforms converge on a shared target in a coordinated manner, able to alter their path autonomously. In a scenario like this, traditional air defenses are unlikely to be able to intercept all the attacking drones due to the overwhelming nature of the attack. Keeping this scenario in view, China’s largest arms manufacturer Norinco has recently unveiled an anti-drone swarm system called Bullet Curtain. The system releases a large number of bullets to clear the sky of drone swarms. It uses 35mm rounds that explode mid-air, releasing hundreds of sub-projectiles to form a lethal cloud that obliterates anything in the target area.
Forget tariffs—the real US-China tech war is over internet freedom
Forbes
Jill Goldenziel
U.S.-China tech competition is about more than tariffs. The future of the Internet is at stake. China is not just exporting hardware—it is exporting laws, standards, and authoritarian control. China is promoting its vision of what cyberspace should look like, which clashes sharply with the U.S.’s vision for a free and open Internet. To do so, China is training other governments in its authoritarian ways. It is fiercely seeking to dominate the little-known international organizations that literally set the standards for global tech, ensuring that Chinese firms have a global edge. China is also exporting its Legal Great Wall, repressive laws related to China’s national security and cybersecurity.
Chinese hacking competitions fuel the country’s broad cyber ambitions
Bloomberg
Jamie Tarabay
Dustin Childs can still describe the best demonstration of a winning hack at an international tournament he’s ever seen. It happened almost a decade ago. The participants had to find a way to break into a Windows workstation that was hardened with firewalls and up-to-date software to make it more secure. One member of a team from China typed an IP address into the Windows browser, he said, “and took their hands off the keyboard and that was it.” The address triggered computer code that turned the Chinese team’s access from “guest” to “host,” giving them administrator rights and the ability to install whatever code or software — or malware — they wanted.
USA
US judge rules Apple violated order to reform App Store
Reuters
Mike Scarcella
Apple violated a U.S. court order that required the iPhone maker to allow greater competition for app downloads and payment methods in its lucrative App Store and will be referred to federal prosecutors, a federal judge in California ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said in an 80-page ruling that Apple failed to comply with her prior injunction order, which was imposed in an antitrust lawsuit brought by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games. "Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated," Gonzalez Rogers said. She added: "This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order."
Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
The Wall Street Journal
Rolf Winkler
A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation. “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling late Wednesday that specifically chided Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and alleged that another company executive lied under oath. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” The order is the latest twist in a long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
Why Trump's tariff turmoil is not pushing Apple closer to the US
Nikkei Asia
Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang
When Apple faced the prospect of U.S. tariffs as high as 145% on its Chinese-made devices, its first response was not to rush production home but to quickly double down on Southeast Asia and India. This has included helping suppliers in India buy equipment to boost iPhone production, telling suppliers that the majority of U.S.-bound iPhones, MacBooks and iPads need to be made in India and Vietnam, and rushing more component production to Thailand, Nikkei Asia first reported in mid-April. Whether it changes tack in the long run, Apple's immediate strategy for dealing with President Donald Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs highlights just how far off a "Made in America" iPhone remains, even if Trump and his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, insist otherwise.
Chris Krebs kicked off CBP’s Global Entry program
CNN
Jake Tapper
Chris Krebs’, President Donald Trump’s former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, membership in Global Entry has been revoked. Krebs, who has repeatedly attested to the security of the 2020 election, told CNN he finds it hard to believe this isn’t another act of retribution from the administration. On Wednesday afternoon, Krebs received an email saying that his Trusted Traveler Program status had changed. He logged into the program and learned his Global Entry program membership had been revoked, he told CNN. Global Entry is the US Customs and Border Protection program that gives low-risk travelers expedited clearance when they arrive in the US. Trump earlier this month stripped Krebs of any existing security clearance he may still hold since leaving office and ordered the Justice Department to probe the former official.
White House tech bros are killing what made them (and America) wealthy
The New York Times
David Singer
Basic research conducted by America’s universities is crucial to our world-class entrepreneurial culture. How do we know this? Let’s take a short tour through the White House. The venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures runs the White House’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz is the nominee to run the Office of Personnel Management, and Sriram Krishnan, from the same firm, is a policy adviser on artificial intelligence. They have all successfully financed companies in the digital economy. The infrastructure beneath those businesses — the foundational internet protocols known as TCP/IP — was developed in part by the computer scientist Vint Cerf (Stanford University).
Google CEO criticizes DOJ’s ‘extraordinary’ proposal to break up company
The Wall Street Journal
Jan Wolfe
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday urged a judge to reject the “extraordinary” measures proposed by the Justice Department to curtail its dominance in online search. “It is so far-reaching, so extraordinary,” Pichai said of the government’s proposal to force a sale of Google’s Chrome browser and require that Google provide user data like search histories with rivals. The testimony came during a trial before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, who ruled last year that Google has an illegal monopoly over online search. The judge is now hearing arguments and testimony over what remedy he should impose to restore competition.
Americas
Should Canada target Big Tech in trade war negotiations with the U.S.?
Financial Post
Yvonne Lau
Canadians have been responding to the trade war by putting their “elbows up” and avoiding American products from California oranges to Elon Musk’s Tesla cars. But when it comes time to negotiate the future of the trade relationship between the two countries, some are suggesting targeting another class of United States exports: technology — specifically, the big tech players that have become ubiquitous in the daily lives of Canadians. “We need to be asking difficult questions about the role of (tech) platforms in our democracy, and about the American ownership structures of these platforms,” said Michael Karanicolas, Dalhousie University’s chair in public policy and law, and former executive director of UCLA’s Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.
Brazil is going after social media sites to keep its kids safe
Rest of World
Pedro Nakamura
Child social media influencers like Guilherme are growing globally, and 83% of Brazilians aged nine to 17 have social media and WhatsApp accounts. Many check them daily. There is also a growing number of “kidfluencers” in Brazil who promote online get-rich-quick schemes to other children. Some are paid by TikTok and the short-video app Kwai. Others receive free products and services, or do affiliate marketing and advertise to their followers. Rest of World found scores of teenagers on Instagram in Brazil advertising courses on how to become rich as an influencer. The courses were sold on the digital marketing platforms Cakto and Kirvano for commissions. Rest of World is not revealing the identity of any minors, and pseudonyms are used in this story to protect their privacy.
North Asia
North Korean IT worker scam is now a threat to all companies, cybersecurity experts say
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
North Korea’s ability to surreptitiously slip thousands of its workers into Fortune 500 companies was a main focus for cybersecurity professionals at this year’s RSA Conference. Recorded Future News spoke to and heard from dozens people on every side of the issue — from incident responders helping companies that hired them to researchers embedded in the chat rooms where DPRK workers provide updates to senior officials. While many initially thought the issue was confined to the crypto industry or even tech firms, multiple experts said it has grown far beyond that.
South & Central Asia
Inside the spectacular rise and crash of India’s largest EV company
Rest of World
Atul Dev
When he was shopping for a scooter a few months earlier, Panda, short on funds, chose to go electric to save on gas. He was one of the founders of a small food-delivery app, for which he sometimes made deliveries. Affordable, stylish, and loaded with features, the Ola S1X Plus was a natural choice. It offered a range of 150 kilometers (93 miles), a top speed of 90 kilometers per hour, and a novel keyless start system that could wake the scooter up when he entered a password on his phone. At just 96,000 rupees ($1,125), it was cheaper than the alternatives.
Europe
Pro-Russia hacktivists bombard Dutch public orgs with DDoS attacks
Bleeping Computer
Bill Toulas
Russia-aligned hacktivists persistently target key public and private organizations in the Netherlands with distributed denial of service DDoS attacks, causing access problems and service disruptions. The situation was acknowledged via a statement by the country's National Cyber Security Center, part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. "This week, several Dutch organizations have been targeted by large-scale DDoS attacks," reads the NCSC announcement. "The DDoS attacks are directed at both Dutch and other European organizations. Within the Netherlands, both public and private entities are being attacked."
Exclusive: TikTok plans to build 1 bln euro data centre in Finland, spokesman confirms
Reuters
Supantha Mukherjee and Anne Kauranen
TikTok plans to invest 1 billion euros ($1.14 billion) to build its first data centre in Finland as it moves data storage for European users to the continent, a TikTok spokesman confirmed on Wednesday. The spokesman declined to give further details as he confirmed the plan revealed to Reuters by two sources familiar with the matter. Finland's Prime Minister's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok, owned by China-headquartered Bytedance, has been trying to address concerns over whether the Chinese government could access the data of European citizens who use TikTok. In 2023, it launched a new data security regime, nicknamed "Project Clover," with plans to invest 12 billion euros over 10 years amid growing pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
NZ & Pacific Islands
Exclusive: Popular Fijian hardware store listed by Qilin ransomware
CyberDaily
David Hollingworth
The Qilin ransomware operation has claimed to have successfully exfiltrated almost 150 gigabytes of data from the Fijian hardware chain R.C. Manubhai. The hackers listed the store in a 26 April post to their darknet leak site. After a short description of R.C. Manubhai, Qilin claims to have stolen “financial data, personal data, and confidential internal data”. The gang has also published a dozen documents allegedly stolen during the attack, which include passport scans belonging to high-level employees of R.C. Manubhai, employee pay slips and loan data, tax documents, and invoices. No ransom deadline or amount was listed as part of the post, and the exact amount of data allegedly exfiltrated is 148 gigabytes.
Big Tech
Meta lawsuit poses first big test of AI copyright battle
Financial Times
Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy
Meta will fight a group of US authors in court on Thursday in one of the first big legal tests of whether tech companies can use copyrighted material to train their powerful artificial intelligence models. The case, which has been brought by about a dozen authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, is centred on the $1.4tn social media giant’s use of LibGen, a so-called shadow library of millions of books, academic articles and comics, to train its Llama AI models. The ruling will have wide-reaching implications in the fierce copyright battle between artists and AI groups and is one of several lawsuits around the world that allege technology groups are using content without permission.
Big Tech's fortunes diverge as AI powers cloud, tariffs hit consumer electronics
Reuters
Aditya Soni and Deborah Mary Sophia
The fortunes of Big Tech are diverging in a rapidly changing business landscape, as demand for artificial intelligence fuels growth in cloud and digital ads while consumer electronics take a battering from President Donald Trump's global trade war. AI came to the rescue of earnings at Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet in their March quarter, offering investors hope that their billion-dollar bets on the technology would help them ride out the fallout from sweeping U.S. tariffs. Their upbeat commentary stood in stark contrast to gloomy predictions from companies more exposed to tightening consumer budgets: chipmakers Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, and Intel warned that economic uncertainty caused by Trump's attempts to reorder global trade was hurting their businesses.
Artificial Intelligence
North Korea stole your job
WIRED
Bobbie Johnson
For years, North Korea has been secretly placing young IT workers inside Western companies. With AI, their schemes are now more devious—and effective—than ever. On paper, the first candidate looked perfect. Thomas was from rural Tennessee and had studied computer science at the University of Missouri. His résumé said he’d been a professional programmer for eight years, and he’d breezed through a preliminary coding test. All of this was excellent news for Thomas’ prospective boss, Simon Wijckmans, founder of the web security startup C.Side. The 27-year-old Belgian was based in London but was looking for ambitious, fully remote coders.
Misc
Visa partners with AI giants to streamline online shopping
Reuters
Niket Nishant
Visa is partnering with tech heavyweights, including Microsoft and OpenAI, to roll out a new platform that lets users delegate their online shopping tasks to AI agents. While users will set spending limits, the AI agents will do the rest — searching for products, booking vacations or ordering groceries, the payments processor said on Wednesday. Digital commerce companies often try to shorten the time between consumers selecting a product and making a payment to prevent them from abandoning their purchases midway. Shorter checkout times have become even more crucial since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many users shifted to online shopping.
Events & Podcasts
Meta’s race to popularize AI-powered ‘Digital Companions’ is raising concern
The Wall Street Journal
This week, our question is, which areas of tech are you most interested in hearing more about? AI? Crypto? Tech policy? Gadgets? If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description, or you can send us an email to tnb@wsj.com. Now on to the show. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, April 30th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Today, a show about Meta's AI-powered digital companions. They range from the traditional virtual assistant role to providing more of a friendly voice with personality, opinions, and interests.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
For more on China's pressure campaign against Taiwan—including military threats, interference and cyberwarfare, check out ASPI’s State of the Strait Weekly Digest.
