Apple Has the Right to Refuse Service to You - DTNS 5228

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1:54this right here is the daily tech news for wednesday march 18th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you some important context and do our darndest to help each other understand today the court tells apple it can kick anyone out of the app store if it feels like it yeah don't have to go home but you can't serve your app here i'm tom merit and i'm sarah lane let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Yes, indeed. So thanks to R.W. Nash for noting this on the DTNS subreddit. Apple has won the right to deny an app from being in its app store without having to show cause. Doesn't have to say why, just doesn't like your looks, you're out.

2:33Muzi is the app that brought this court case. Muzi is an app launched in 2013 by two Canadian teenagers, and it wrapped YouTube music videos to make its own music app. There was no Android version, just an iOS version. And Musi claimed that it complied with YouTube's terms of service when it did this. It let YouTube ads run. It didn't claim that those were its service. It was just wrapping them up like a browser would. However, Apple kicked it off of the App Store in September 2024, claiming that YouTube objected to the app's use of its intellectual property. Apple said, YouTube says it doesn't like what you're doing, so we're kicking you out.

3:10So Musi sued, claiming that Apple violated its developer program license agreement, which says, and Musi quoted this part, Apple may stop offering an app download if it reasonably believes, based on a human or systematic review, that the application infringes intellectual property rights. And Musi said, we don't think Apple did a proper review of this, because if they did, they would have found out that YouTube's claims were BS. Musi says it does not use the YouTube API, so it should not be limited by api terms however they didn't make their case very well u.s district judge umi lee in the northern district of california found that apple can remove apps with or without cause because the developer program license agreement says that apple may and i quote cease marketing offering and allowing download by end users of the app at any time with or without cause by providing notice of termination.

4:09And nobody was saying that Apple didn't provide the notice. Musi admitted that. So the judge said, look, you've got it in their agreement that it says they can just tell you we're not going to offer your app anymore. They told you and they didn't. And since the agreement doesn't say anywhere else that that right is limited, in other words, it doesn't say like unless we fail the review or something like that, then nothing else in the terms can stop them. Apple can basically do whatever it wants. Judge Lee ordered the complaint from Musi dismissed with prejudice and without leave to amend. That means Musi can't rework it and try to sue again.

4:47It's basically done. You're out. Apple gets to keep you out. A couple of questions here. My first question is, if Musi is not using the YouTube API, how is the app being made and why um does music get any advertising revenue from this wrapped up youtube video experience yeah so um from what i could tell reading through all of this musy ran its own ads when you launched the app that's how they were making their money yeah then it would allow you to start playing the youtube stuff and they didn't make any money off that uh and they were just doing like a browser does at least that's what they say is they were just like yeah you basically say, I want to play this piece of music, and then we pulled it like you would in a browser on YouTube.

5:33We did not use the API to scrape it and pull it in. Now, they may be right about that. But what the judge was saying, it doesn't matter if they're right about that. Apple decided to look at YouTube and go, oh, you want them out? They're out. And Apple has the right to do that. They were not litigating whether YouTube was right about this or not. They were litigating whether Apple had the right to kick them out or not. Yeah. And I think it's probably very frustrating for the folks who are behind Musy to say, but wait, we've read the terms of service. We didn't do anything wrong. And we should be able to stay.

6:11And Apple goes, YouTube called us and said, we don't like it. And so you're out. It's like a bouncer at a party. It's like, you know, sometimes you're just not welcome. It seems like they should have sued YouTube, honestly, and say, you know, you you affected our business negatively by telling someone something that wasn't true about us. And I think the judge would have been more amenable to that and maybe dismissed it with prejudice if the lawyers had been better. There's a bunch of other legalese in here that Ars Tactica did a great job of writing up that caused them to punish the lawyers for submitting a claim without evidence, basically related to the API stuff, trying to say that Apple lied when it said they didn't know whether Musi was using the API or not.

6:58And the judge was like, no, they didn't lie. And there's a whole long explanation of what it is. And so she punished them under a very little used rule. So it sounds to me like they could have used better lawyers maybe. It's not that they lied. They just don't like you. That's right. It's not lying when they say get out, but they don't have to have a reason. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think it's a good reminder that just because terms of services are in place in all sorts of app stores, that the company who runs that app store – I mean, and there are exceptions, of course. There could be another lawsuit where this didn't go Apple's way.

7:40But something like this is like, we don't like the app. We've got some friends over at Google who said, hey, this is not working for us, and we want this app to go away. And now, Muzi doesn't really have much to say about it. Yeah, I don't even know if Apple and Google are being all that friendly. it's more than likely to me that apple said we got a credible report we don't want to have a fight with youtube about whether this report is right again this app has been controversial a lot of people wondered how they were legally able to do what they were doing uh let's not bother with it like yeah let's let's just you know make it simple we don't want we we have no dog in this fight yeah we don't want one and we don't want to adopt another dog we have plenty we have too many dogs oh all the dogs at apple headquarters all right dtns is made possible by all of you listening you might have a dog you might not but we want to thank you anyway thanks to john atwood and pat and mike cortez

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9:21Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Parles-tu français? Hablas espanol? Parli italiano? If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world.

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11:46All right, there's more we need to know today. let's get right into the briefs. Let's do it. Researchers at Google, iVerify, and Lookout discovered that a malicious hacking group referred to as UNC 6353 used a toolkit called Dark Sword to target iPhone users who visited specific websites from within Ukraine to access personal data and steal cryptocurrency. Dark Sword is capable of accessing passwords, photos, browser history and messages from WhatsApp and Telegram. It was designed to infect a device and then erase itself after a few minutes. So basically, grab a bunch of stuff and then make like a tree and get out of here.

12:25This follows Google's identification of an iPhone hacking toolkit developed by a US defense contractor called Karuna, which was used by Russians to target Ukrainians and later by Chinese criminals. Dark Sword also appears to have been professionally designed for government use. Yeah. So a lot of people in the security community, I think, are looking at this as an interesting example of iOS being more crackable than maybe its reputation implies since we have two of these professional tools. These are very sophisticated tools. It's not like you or I could just easily vibe code a crack of iOS. But here are two, one right after the other.

13:04I think the other thing people might have questions is like, wait a minute, I thought WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted. How are they getting these messages? Well, guess what? When you're at the end, then it's unencrypted, right? That's how you're able to see messages on WhatsApp. So that's what's going on here is they are getting to the end where they are unencrypted and then somehow being able to read them off of the device. But these are pretty sophisticated cracks. Yeah, I mean, a lot of hand-wringing from folks saying, you know, iOS, it's supposed to be safe and locked down and these things aren't supposed to happen.

13:37It is a very specific, it seems to be very specifically targeted. And so I, I don't personally look at this and go, Oh no, I can't use my iPhone anymore. But it is, it is a great reminder that if you visit a malicious site, you know, using all sorts of different OSs, then you can get got. Yeah, be careful where you go, as always. But you're right. DarkSword specifically needed you to be in Ukraine. It was actually checking IP addresses. It was like, if they're in Ukraine and they go to this site, we don't want to waste our time collecting data on a bunch of people outside Ukraine. We're specifically going after people in Ukraine.

14:20So that I mean, it's not great for Ukrainians, of course, but it is a more a more targeted use of this, which implies that this is definitely a military use as part of the war in Ukraine. Anthropic has two court cases against the U.S. going on. We've been talking about these on DTNS. We had a good rundown yesterday of where we are on this. Both of the court cases are part of the same issue. Anthropic is suing to contest the U.S. designating it as a supply chain risk. Anthropic has also asked the court to stay that designation. So one court case is disputing it altogether. The other is saying, while we do the court case about disputing it, can you stop it from being enforced until that other court case wraps up?

15:06Pretty typical move in cases like this. A hearing on whether the judge will grant that stay will happen on Tuesday, March 24th. And in advance of that, the U.S. Department of Defense filed its arguments why a stay should not be granted. Each side gets to file their reasons for that. Among the 40 pages of the DoD filing, the DoD says Anthropic poses a, quote, unacceptable risk to national security because it might, and I quote again, attempt to disable its technology or preemptively alter the behavior of its model. And that could disrupt actual warfighting operations just because Anthropic feels that its corporate red lines are being crossed.

15:51That line of argument does not seem to be well received by most legal experts I've been reading today. They all say the judge is going to ask, OK, they could do that and you can stop them from doing that by not having them as a customer. why did you need to go the further step of declaring them a supply chain risk? Why is that necessary? That argument does not seem to be well made in this filing. I was talking to a friend this morning, and this friend is just doesn't follow tech news as much as we do. And she was like, what's the big news today? And I said, well, yeah, there's quite a bit, quite a bit of news.

16:29But this was one of the stories that I went through. And she had a question that I think a lot of people probably also have. And it's like, okay, if Anthropic and the Department of Defense can't come to an agreement, doesn't the Department of Defense have the capacity to make something on their own and not have to use Anthropic at all? Yes. In fact, our next story is going to be about them doing exactly that. So, you know, like, They don't have to do business with Anthropic. They are not going to do business with Anthropic. And that's well within their rights to do that, to say like, you know what?

17:07We don't like the way you are approaching these two red lines that we discussed on yesterday's show. Then we're not going to use you anymore. Supply chain risk is supposed to be used when you say anybody doing business with that company risks their security. The reasoning they're giving in this filing is it risks the security because they might stop you from using a couple of their features. And I don't see how that connects. If the Pentagon isn't using them, then you're not using any of their features. So I don't think it's a risk anymore if you've done that. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

17:42I don't know. Maybe the judge will see something in it that I don't. Well, as you mentioned, the Department of Defense would like to work with other companies. MIT Technology Review reports that the DOD plans to collaborate with companies to train their large language models on classified information for military uses. You might say, hmm, is this a good idea? This would give more accurate and more detailed responses specifically for military questions. The models would be trained on the same data centers used to store classified information and wouldn't be accessible elsewhere. Some LLM company staff might be given classified clearance in order to help run the training.

18:20Somebody's got to do it. OpenAI and XAI recently signed agreements with the DoD as well. Yeah. So a lot of this is very uncontroversial. Giving a corporate contractor classified clearance is necessary in a lot of cases in order for them to do their job. You have to be very careful about that. You have to make sure they know the rules of the road on that. And there's training programs for all of that. Not saying it's perfect, but it's not unusual. So I wouldn't get too freaked out about that. The one criticism I've seen people say is that if they do this, which I think personally is a great idea, like you want your model to work better, train it on your own data.

18:57Great. Military is doing that. That's great. That's going to make that model work better. But the other thing is when you've trained it on your own data, it can output your own data. And you want to make sure that people in the DoD aren't getting this chatbot from OpenAI to give them information that they don't have clearance to know, right? So how do you manage that? Because there's different levels of clearance. Not saying that's impossible for them to do, but that's one concern I've seen raised that makes sense to me anyway. Well, if you want product reviews from folks who actually use technology well beyond that first week or two of initial thoughts, we do that.

19:36The show is called Live With It. And this week, Jason Howell and I are breaking down his experience using the Oakley Meta Smart Glasses. Get Live With It wherever you get your podcasts. And better yet, we do a video version. You can watch that at YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. You got to see Jason in his glasses. They're pretty fly.

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21:00And now some quick headlines that are good to know and will make you look prettier or possibly smarter. I would like both, Tom. Fitbit announced new features and public preview that improve its detection of sleep stages by 15 percent, as well as a new sleep score. Everybody's doing the sleep score these days. and coming next month, the ability to link health records with a Fitbit app. Oh, yeah. Okay. Better sleep. I'm into that. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has issued new guidance that payment stable coins, so those are coins linked to a currency like a dollar and used simply to transact payments, digital collectibles, NFTs, MFCs, And digital commodities should be treated as non-securities.

21:48Non-securities have fewer disclosure requirements than commodities. If you want to keep it straight in your head, commodities are things like gold or wheat or oil. Securities are things like stocks or bonds. So they're saying a payment stablecoin is, you know, like a barrel of oil. Okay. I can see why many people would want that to be the case. I wish it was literally a barrel of oil in many cases. Right. Samsung has agreed to supply more high bandwidth memory and DDR5 memory for AMD chips and has announced that it may shift from quarterly or yearly to three to five year contracts for memory supplies to ease concerns about shortages.

22:29Samsung, I don't think we're easing a lot of concerns, but, you know, let's let's give it a try. Yeah, the big thing there is people have been assuming that they would cut down the contracts because of the shifting prices. So saying we'll give you a five-year contract at the exact same price that it is right now would definitely make a company feel a little better. In theory, that's fewer fluctuations. Yeah, exactly. Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all combined to give$12.5 million, which is a lot of money for me. Not a lot of money for those five companies. But maybe that's all that's needed because they're giving it to the Linux Foundation's Alpha Omega Project to help open source projects cope with the increased number of bug reports generated by LLMs.

23:17So basically, the five companies responsible for all of these increased bug reports are saying, let me give you some money to help you deal with the bug reports. So that's a good thing. You're only going to get more of them, but we're going to give you money to help deal with them. Here's a check. Yeah. I mean, I guess that means just hiring more people. Yeah. Yeah. Probably, or helping develop systems, all that kind of thing. Yeah. NVIDIA says it has finally received purchase orders from Chinese companies for its H200 chips. The U.S. eased restrictions on selling these chips in China back in December, but China slowed approvals for their purchase.

23:53Sources tell Reuters, I almost got those two confused, that NVIDIA plans to sell its Grok, that's Grok with a Q, inference chips to Chinese companies as well. Oh, the chips are finally flowing there. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have discovered a new particle that is like a proton, but with two charm quarks rather than two up quarks. If you know, you're a particle physicist. Anyway, the upshot is that makes it four times as massive as the proton. And what do we get out of that, Tom? We get to know a new particle, and the next step is to figure out what that means. Is there anything we can do with that particle?

24:34It's just a really big proton. Now what? Party. Particle. Apple's senior director of home devices is leaving the company to join Aura Health. Oh, that's not good for them, is it? It's not. Well, I mean, it's good for Aura, I suppose. Oh, sure. Yeah. Makes me think Aura is going to be expanding into devices rather than its very successful ring. Yeah. And it doesn't mean good things for Apple's devices, which is, you know, not as stable as it was. A lot of executive shifting as of late. The European Union announced EU Inc, a plan to let companies incorporate once across the entire 27-member block and do it within 48 hours.

25:23The idea is to make it easier for startups to get up and running. A new LLM called Hunter Alpha appeared on Open Router on March 11th, performing well and sparking some speculation that it may be the next version of DeepSeek. Microsoft says it may sue to stop OpenAI from offering its Frontier product through AWS. Microsoft still has some exclusivity agreements with OpenAI, specifically over API calls. API calls have to go through Azure, but Amazon and OpenAI say they found a way to offer stateful access to Frontier to businesses without needing API access. And they're all fighting about whether that's true.

26:03Epic Games will return to the Google Play Store globally on March 19th. You might recall it returned to the US in December. Yeah, we're getting peace in our gaming world. One of the biggest Xbox exclusives, Starfield, is going to come to the Sony PS5 on April 7th. How about that? Meta plans to open a retail store in Manhattan, that's New York City, at 687 Fifth Avenue, a big shopping district. It also operates stores in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ooh, fancy Fifth Avenue. Well, you won't be able to get Horizon Worlds on the VR headset you buy at that fancy Fifth Avenue store because Meta announced the date of the shutdown of Horizon Worlds on VR.

26:42it actually is going to get delisted from the app store march 31st and then it shuts down entirely june 15th however as we talked about before you will continue to be able to access horizon worlds on mobile yeah for how long though there's all sorts of meta vr stuff that's got me bummed out these days but yeah but they're opening a store right Right. More quests. What do you play? We don't know. Mostly for classes, I guess. Firefox announced a new mascot called Kit, who will appear in marketing as well as in the browser itself when you're just getting started. Discovering a new feature, making a major configuration change, and other moments.

27:24Hey, Kit. Hi, I see you're trying to look at your browser history. I'm Kit. Can I help you? Yeah. Kid, if you're not clippy, then everyone may love you. Hard to say. Kid is kind of cute. I'll give him that. It is cute. Well, yeah. Wall Street Journal has a good read about companies beginning to track the cost of its employees' LLM usage to see who is using the tools well. If you're using them costly, did your productivity go up? Because if you're costing the company a lot of money on tokens and your productivity did not go up, they're going to have a talk with you. So don't waste those tokens.

27:58we like to end every episode of dtns in fact we do do this every episode of dtns i mean we do like doing it but we also like it but we also do it even if we didn't like it we would still do it because we like shared perspectives we love them today phil has more thoughts on our discussion from monday about running open claw based products yeah i really appreciate this perspective phil wrote uh i wanted to have a play with open claw keeping it sandboxed but not wanting to spend too much money on an experiment, I decided to try a managed hosted solution. Got me up and running quickly, but I soon ran into problems because it was running in a pre-built Docker container on virtual Linux server.

28:36And there were so many layers of abstraction that I couldn't use standard commands to set it up. So it was hard to follow any best practice advice out there. Then I remembered that I had an old Raspberry Pi 5 laying around unused. So chucked an Ubuntu image on it and installed OpenClaw, and it's been working fine since. I've still not really found the killer use case for me yet, but as I don't need it to have access to desktop applications, just third-party services like WhatsApp and a dedicated email address, and I'm not running any actual models on the device, the low-spec Raspberry Pi is working perfectly fine for me.

29:12Loving the shows. I've only been a regular for a couple of years, but can't live without it now. Keep up the great work. I'm happy to hear that, Phil. And very cool about running it on the Raspberry Pi. Isn't that funny? We don't always have that Raspberry Pi five laying around, but there is often a project where I go, yeah, I just don't know what, wait a second, that Windows laptop that's in my closet might actually be the right call here. I got something I could pull out. I think a lot of us have one or two things in our back pocket that might be good for a project like this. Andrew in Montreal also wrote in, sorry to be the language police the swish swiss roche farm company does not have anything to do with insects in new york apartments but roche makes drugs now i think i'm the one who said roach yesterday uh because i read i was like i said roche yeah roach uh so thank you andrew but yes when you say you're sorry to be the language police though i'm not sure if i believe you.

30:15Yeah. I think you're happy to be the language police, but you know what? We appreciate that. Yes. Thank you. As well. Uh, pronunciation is good. Uh, speaking of things that you look up on YouTube, boy, do I look up a lot of pronunciations and there's always one out there. Yeah. Whoever's doing all of those, uh, bless you. What are you thinking about? If you have insight into anything that we talked about on the show or something that you want us to cover on a future show. Share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Phil and Andrew R for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show.

30:55You keep us in business. Thanks for doing that. If you'd like to become a patron that keeps us in business, go to patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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31:51This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.