US sought to force Apple to break into 15 devices in last four months

Court records released on Tuesday show the US Justice Department has in the last four months sought court orders to force Apple Inc to help investigators extract data from 15 devices in cases across the country.

The disclosure comes amid a heated dispute between Apple and federal investigators over access to a locked iPhone belonging to one of the killers in December's mass-shooting in San Bernardino, California.

In a letter unsealed on Tuesday addressed to a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, overseeing one such case, Apple said it had received requests since October to assist law enforcement in accessing 13 other devices.

Prosecutors said they were aware of a 15th case filed in Massachusetts, in their own letter filed late on Monday ahead of the unsealing of Apple's Feb. 17 list of cases.

Those cases include one announced last week in which a federal magistrate judge ordered Apple to unlock the iPhone belonging to one of the killers in the San Bernardino shooting, which has escalated into a high-publicity showdown between Apple and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

According to Apple's letter, the technology company has objected to providing law enforcement assistance with regards to at least 12 of the 15 devices so far.

The letter was addressed to US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who since October has been weighing whether to order Apple to provide authorities access to data on a locked iPhone in a narcotics-related case.

Prosecutors earlier said that before the Brooklyn dispute emerged, Apple had since 2008 received 70 court orders requiring it provide similar assistance to which it complied without objection.

In contrast to the San Bernardino case, many of the cases listed by Apple and the Justice Department appear to involve iPhones using an older Apple operating system, which has fewer security barriers to surmount.

The Justice Department on Friday filed a motion seeking to compel Apple to comply with a judge's order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, portraying the tech giant's refusal as a "marketing strategy."

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has refused to do so, and sent a letter to employees Monday morning making clear the company's hardline stance refusing to make software to unlock the phone addresses broader issues, not just a single device linked to a grisly attack.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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