damage

Apple has agreed to pay $53 million to settle a class-action lawsuit related to warranties covering early versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2010, claimed Apple had unfairly denied warranty coverage to some customers under an Apple policy associated with devices affected by water damage. The settlement, which still requires the court's approval, will be held in a fund to be distributed among the 153,000 members of the class-action suit, according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. … Read more

It's happened to a lot of people -- their iPhone drops from their hands, falls off their lap, plunks into a toilet, or gets knocked off a table.

Showing off a cracked iPhone screen is sometimes almost a point of pride. I have one friend who lovingly calls his damaged phone "The Hurt Locker," referring to the 2008 movie about a bomb disposal team working during the Iraq War.

But, many of these damaged iPhones cease to work after going through various mishaps. That's when repairs come into play -- and, they're not cheap.

Currently, … Read more

A Mexican court ruled last November that Yahoo and Yahoo Mexico had to shell out a whopping $2.75 billion in a lawsuit over a yellow pages listing service's lost profits. On Thursday, Mexico's Superior Court of Justice reduced that number to a mere $172,500 in damages.

This is likely welcome news to the tech company. Damages of $2.75 billion is a huge portion of the company's revenue -- in Yahoo's most recently reported quarter, it only generated $1.07 billion in revenue.

The lawsuit was originally filed by the Worldwide Directories and Ideas … Read more

While using OS X, you may discover a folder at the root of the hard drive, called Damaged Files. You may wonder why it's there and what's in it.

This folder, which less commonly is found at the root of secondary storage volumes you have mounted, results from the system's automatic file system checking routines (fsck). These routines may run after a power failure, a kernel panic, or if you boot to Safe Mode by holding the Shift key at startup. In this routine, the system will check the inodes in the file system structure (folders and … Read more

Namie-machi was a small bustling city that used to sit near the Fukushima nuclear plant. But on March 11, 2011, that changed. After a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed the town and the plant's infrastructure, causing hazardous waste to leak into the surrounding land, every single one of Namie-Machi's 21,000 residents had to abandon their homes.

Working with Google Maps and its Street View imagery, the mayor of Namie-machi is now providing the city's previous residents, and anyone else who wants to see, a glimpse of what the town currently looks like.

"Two years … Read more

As many as a quarter of iPhone owners are walking around with a broken screen, according to new figures.

Mobile-phone insurance Web site MobileInsurance.co.uk (which obviously has a vested interest here) asked iPhone owners whether their blower's display is currently broken, smashed, or cracked in any way, to which 23 percent yes.

The average length of time people have been putting up with their damaged display? Six months.

Most people said they hadn't gotten around to fixing their screen, with roughly equal numbers saying they weren't insured, couldn't afford to fix it, or were … Read more

U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh handed down some of her first post-trial rulings from the much publicized Apple v. Samsung patent case this evening.

In a 32-page order filed today, the judge said she predominantly agreed with the jury's decision that Samsung infringed on seven of Apple's design and utility patents. However, she disagreed with one finding -- that Samsung "willfully" infringed on Apple's patents.

What this means is that Apple will now be unable to triple its damage awards. If Koh had agreed with the jury on this decision, Apple could have … Read more

The last thing you need as an entrepreneur is for your company to be engulfed in a public controversy. Just ask Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Airbnb, Geeklist, and the countless other companies, big and small, that have been the target of press backlash and user vitriol.

It doesn't matter how careful you are: the more successful you become, the more likely it is that you'll make a mistake that ignites the blogosphere. There are ways to minimize the fallout and, more importantly, ways to prevent a large-scale user revolt in the first place.

Let's take Instagram's recent Terms of Service controversy … Read more

Acting on her promise, Jammie Thomas-Rasset has finally fought her music uploading case all the way to the Supreme Court. Her lawyers announced today that they have filed an official petition asking the Supreme Court to review her long-running case, which has moved up through the courts over the past five years.

In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) accused Thomas-Rasset of copyright infringement for sharing 1,700 copyrighted songs -- the equivalent of 150 CDs. But the RIAA whittled down the number to 24. A jury heard the evidence against her and rendered a $222,000 verdict.… Read more