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After TechCrunch caught Facebook violating Apple’s employee-only app distribution policy to pay people for all their phone data,  Apple invalidated the social network’s Enterprise Certificate as punishment . That deactivated not only this Facebook Research app VPN, but also all of Facebook’s internal iOS apps for workplace collaboration, beta testing, and even getting the company lunch or bus schedule. That threw Facebook’s offices into chaos yesterday morning. Now after nearly two work days, Apple has ended Facebook’s time-out and restored its Enterprise Certification. That means employees can once again access all their office tools, pre-launch test versions of Facebook and Instagram…and the lunch menu. A Facebook spokesperson issued this statement to TechCrunch: “We have had our Enterprise Certification, which enables our internal employee applications, restored. We are in the process of getting our internal apps up and running. To be clear, this didn’t have an impact on our c...

On Thursday, detectives in Portland, Ore. announced that a long-cold local murder case finally came to a resolution, 40 years after the fact. In 1979, 20-year-old Anna Marie Hlavka was found dead in the Portland apartment she shared with her fiance and sister. According to police, she was strangled to death and sexually assaulted. Police followed a number of leads and kept tabs on the case for decades without a breakthrough. Last May, detectives with Portland’s Cold Case Homicide Detail dug back into the case using the methodology made famous when investigators tracked down the man believed to be the Golden State Killer last year. Around that time, Detectives working the Hlavka case reached out to a company called Parabon NanoLabs to determine if their case could be solved the same way, by cross-referencing the suspect’s DNA with public DNA profiles uploaded to GEDmatch, a popular free ancestry and genealogy database. “Most of our cases are cold cases, many of which are decades...

Amazon  posted its bi-annual report  Thursday detailing the number of government data demands it receives. The numbers themselves are unremarkable, neither spiking nor falling in the second-half of last year compared to the first-half. The number of subpoenas, search warrants and other court orders totaled 1,736 for the duration, down slightly on the previous report. Amazon still doesn’t break out demands for Echo data , but does with its Amazon Web Services content — a total of 175 requests down from 253 requests. But noticeably absent compared to earlier reports was how many requests the company received to remove data from its service. In its first-half report , the retail and cloud giant said in among the other demands it gets that it may receive court orders that might demand Amazon “remove user content or accounts.” Amazon used to report the requests “separately” in its report. Now it’s gone. Yet where freedom of speech and expression is more important than...

Remember when the rumor mill suggested that Nintendo was already working on a sequel to the Switch? Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa shut that down pretty quickly, saying that no successor was in the works. Now the rumor mill has shifted gears: rather than a whole new generation, the whispers suggest Nintendo is tinkering with a cheaper, more portable variation of the original. The rumor stems from a report by Nikkei (Japan’s predominant financial newspaper), later translated by NintendoEverything . According to their translation, Nintendo “has informed multiple suppliers and game development companies that they intend to release them as early as 2019” While the Switch is already kinda-sorta portable, it’s also kinda-sorta not. In its handheld mode, it comes in around 9.4×4 inches — the majority of which is made up of a big, oh-so-scratchable and fully exposed screen. Taking it on the road without some sort of hardshell case (which would further bulk things up) is pretty dau...

Cyrus Radfar Contributor Cyrus Radfar is the founding partner at V1 Worldwide . More posts by this contributor Amazon isn’t to blame for the Postal Service’s woes, but it will need to innovate to survive Dear United: Autonomous cars will pull you out of your seat As of September 2018, the top 10 tech companies in the U.S. had spent a total of $4.7 billion on healthcare acquisitions since 2012. The number of healthcare deals undertaken by those companies has consistently risen year-on-year. It all points to an increasing interest from technology companies in U.S. healthcare, which raises many questions as to what their intentions are, and what the ramifications will be for the health industry.   It also begs the question as to why healthcare has become the latest target of U.S. tech giants. On the surface, they don’t seem like natural bedfellows. One is agile and quick, the other slow moving and pensive; one obsessed with looking forward, the other struggling to keep ...

Apple has blocked Google from distributing its internal-only iOS apps on its corporate network after a TechCrunch investigation found the search giant abusing the certificates. “We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” said a Google spokesperson. A spokesperson for Apple said: “We are working together with Google to help them reinstate their enterprise certificates very quickly.” TechCrunch  reported Wednesday that Google was using an Apple-issued certificate that allows the company to create and build internal apps for its staff for one of its consumer-facing apps, called Screenwise Meter , in violation of Apple’s rules. The app was designed to collect an extensive amount of data from a person’s iPhone for research, but using the special certificate allowed the company to allow users to bypass Apple’s App Store. Google later apologized, and said that the app “should not have ope...

If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Lowe’s has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear is about to get bricked. On the upside, Lowe’s is committing to refund customers for “eligible, connected Iris devices” — with the caveat that you’ve got to go through its redemption portal . “PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR CONNECTED IRIS DEVICES BACK TO A LOWE’S STORE,” they note repeatedly. They don’t want it either. Refunds will be issued in the form of a prepaid Visa card. They also note that some — but definitely not all — Iris-compatible devices work with alternatives like Samsung’s SmartThings platform. As of November of 2018, Lowe’s was attempting to find a buyer for the product line. It might seem easier than ever to make any home a smart home — but for many, it’s still just a ma...