Today’s topics include the halt of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China, a lawsuit against Google, Facebook and Twitter, the unveiling of Bluetooth 5 with better Internet of things capabilities and the refactoring of Microsoft’s Visual Studio to make it more streamlined.
Chinese officials have ordered Apple to stop selling its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones in Beijing after determining the handsets infringe on Chinese-held patents related to smartphone designs. The order from Beijing’s intellectual property regulator was reported in a June 17 story by The Wall Street Journal. No other iPhone models were mentioned in the order.
It’s not immediately clear what impact the order will have, the article reported, because some retailers there previously stopped selling the two models months ago after Apple released its newer iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models. The two older models will drop from production in the future.
Apple, however, told eWEEK that the phones have not been pulled from store shelves in China.
The father of a victim of last year’s deadly terror attacks in Paris has sued Google, Facebook and Twitter for permitting groups such as ISIS to use their platforms to spew extremist propaganda.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District Court of California, lawyers for Reynaldo Gonzalez blamed the three Internet companies for contributing to the deaths of more than 125 people, including his daughter Nohemi Gonzalez.
U.S. laws normally exempt companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter from being sued for content posted on their platforms by users and groups, including those with suspected terrorist affiliations. However, in this case, Gonzalez’s lawyers have accused the companies of providing material support to the terrorists by permitting the use of their networks to disseminate propaganda.
The next version of the Bluetooth wireless connectivity standard will be faster, have an increased range and feature greater broadcast messaging capacity, all of which will be a boon to the Internet of things.
Officials with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group said Bluetooth 5, which will come later this year or in early 2017 and will be supported by more than 30,000 Bluetooth Special Interest Group companies, will make the Internet of things something that happens more simply and easily for users. According to Special Interest Group officials, Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range and double the speed of low-energy connections and increase the capacity of connectionless data broadcasts by 800 percent.
As Microsoft moves to become all things to all developers, the company has undergone some growing pains in terms of making that happen via its core toolset, Visual Studio. The move to take its .NET platform cross-platform and to support all different kinds of development from the Visual Studio toolset has bloated the size of the tools.
As a result, Microsoft is moving to provide developers with a streamlined acquisition experience for Visual Studio, based on the type of development they are involved in.
At its Build 2016 conference, Microsoft delivered the first preview of the next version of Visual Studio and gave an early look at a lightweight acquisition experience with Visual Studio.