Hasta La Gadget!

Google claims that Microsoft is encouraging third party anti-trust lawsuits originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s famous desire for total control over its operations seems to have extended to its manufacturing facilities as we’ve come across Cupertino’s Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report, which details audits the American company has done of its overseas suppliers and the failures identified therein. The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple’s already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit). Apple is, predictably, not jazzed about the situation, and has taken action through train-the-trainer schemes, threats of business termination with recidivist plants, and — most notably — the recovery of $2.2 million in recruitment fees that international contract workers should not have had to pay.

It should come as no shock to learn that cheaper overseas factories are cutting illegal corners, but it’s disappointing to hear Apple’s note that most of the 102 audited manufacturers said Cupertino was the only vendor to perform such rigorous compliance checks. Still, we’ll take what we can get and the very existence of this report — which can be savagely skewed to defame Apple’s efforts (as demonstrated expertly by The Daily Telegraph below) — is an encouraging sign that corporate responsibility is being taken seriously. We hope, wherever your geek loyalties and fervor may lie, that you’ll agree Apple’s leading in the right direction and that its competitors should at the very least have matching monitoring schemes. They may have to swallow some bad PR at first, but sweeping up the dirty details of where gadgets come from is juvenile and has no place in a civilized world. Hit the source link for the full report.

Apple supplier audit reveals sub-minimum wage pay and records of underage labor originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that Microsoft’s browser selection story is all but settled, it looks like the European Union is gearing up for a new antitrust probe, with its crosshairs aimed generally in Google’s direction. According to the search giant’s Senior Competition Counsel Julia Holtz (via its European Public Policy Blog), complaints from three European internet companies — legal search group EJustice.fr, price comparison site Foundem.co.uk, and German-based Microsoft subsidiary Ciao.de — have prompted the European Commission to launch a preliminary, fact-finding probe. The charges? Anticompetitive practices stemming from unfair downranking of its competitors in search results. Google denies any wrongdoing, while adding ,”we are also the first to admit that our search is not perfect, but it’s a very hard computer science problem to crack.” The Microsoft connection seems particularly notable to Google; Holtz reiterates that the company had a good relationship with Ciao until the Redmond company picked it up in 2008 — “we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions.” Like we said, at this point it’s just a fact-finding probe that could end up going nowhere, but seriously, Google’s lawyers cannot seem to get a break these days.

EU launches preliminary antitrust probe against Google originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hold onto your butts, kids, we’ve got a doozy of a story. Let’s take this one slow: a class-action lawsuit has been filed in Pennsylvania accusing the Lower Merion school district of “unauthorized, inappropriate and indiscriminate remote activation” of webcams in laptops issued to students, without prior knowledge or consent. The tale begins when Assistant Principal Lindy Mastko of Harriton High School informed a student that he was “engaged in improper behavior in his home”; the suit alleges that when pressed for details, Mastko told both the boy and his father that the school district could remotely activate the webcam — a capability that is apparently being used.

The school district has yet to respond to the accusations, so at this point we’ve only got the plaintiff’s side of the story — for all we know this kid took a picture of himself and somehow accidentally uploaded it on the school network. Then again, some purported Lower Merion students just emailed Gizmodo and claimed that their MacBooks’ green webcam lights went on at random times, but they were told by IT support that it was just a technical glitch. Holy alleged invasion of privacy, Batman, this could get mighty interesting. PDF of the complaint available below.

Update: The Lower Merion School District superintendent Christopher McGinley has issued an official response on its website, acknowledging “a
security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops.” Going further, he says the district ”
has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever” but that the matter is “under review.”

[Thanks, Yossi]

School allegedly uses students’ laptop webcams for espionage, lawsuit ensues originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t you sometimes wish legal squabbles like this actually delivered on their promises? There’s pretty much no way that Toshiba’s patent claim with the US International Trade Commission will lead to a ban on Wistron imports — the company builds laptops for Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and others, and will likely settle in cash long before any rulings against it — but it’s fun to imagine the mayhem that would result if such an eventuality were to materialize. A quick look at the rankings of global computer vendors shows that Toshiba is mostly trying to throw a banana skin in front of its direct competitors, claiming as it does that Wistron products infringe on its methodologies for touchpad production and file saving when the laptop loses power. The ITC, should it decide to investigate, will take up to 15 months on this matter, so no breath-holding is advised just yet, though if that settlement does eventuate it should be a pretty breathtaking number.

Toshiba seeks to prevent Wistron laptop imports to the US originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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