MacRumors

The Cupertino City Council today posted a video of the press conference it held yesterday, announcing its approval of Apple's Campus 2 plans. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer spoke during the conference, thanking the community for green lighting its plans and providing some additional details on the campus.

This is a very special moment for us at Apple. We have put a tremendous amount of love and energy into this campus, and we can’t wait to get started building it. Cupertino is Apple’s home. We love Cupertino, we’re very proud to be here, and we were thrilled that Apple Campus 2 will be a part of Cupertino.

We’re going to build the best office building ever built in the world and we’re going to put it in a hundred acre park, returning the site to its natural beauty. It will be a place for the best team in the industry to innovate for decades to come.

We’re very grateful to the city council, to the city staff, and most importantly, our neighbors and the citizens of Cupertino and the surrounding communities who supported us last night and along the way to get to this point.

Oppenheimer went on to say that Apple’s new campus will be the most environmentally friendly building of its size, using water and landscaping efficiently and garnering 70 percent of its energy from solar and fuel cells with the rest coming from green energy sources within California.

During a question and answer period when he was asked about the use of the campus should Apple vacate, Oppenheimer noted that Apple is excited about the future products it has in the pipeline, which are going to surprise and delight customers, keeping Apple at its Campus 2 location for decades to come.

The Cupertino City Council unanimously approved Apple’s "spaceship campus" on Tuesday. Provided no petitions for reconsideration are filed within the next 10 days, Apple will be able to break ground with ancillary permits later this month. A second public reading, which will result in a full set of permits, is scheduled for November 19.

Apple’s first building phase will include the construction of the 2.8 million square foot ring-shaped structure along with multiple parking facilities, a fitness center, and an auditorium. During a second phase, Apple will construct offices with an additional 600,000 square feet of space and will also continue to occupy its current buildings in Cupertino and surrounding areas.

Apple has begun installing decorations at the Yerba Buena Center ahead of Tuesday's media event, where Apple is widely expected to introduce new iPad and iPad mini models.

MacRumors reader David Jones sent in this image of colorful decorations going up on the side of the San Francisco building. The graphics match the invitations sent out to media members earlier this week.

The original AllThingsD report claimed that event will focus on the iPad updates, but that OS X Mavericks and the redesigned Mac Pro will also be featured at the event. Apple is due to release a number of other product updates, perhaps most notably new MacBook Pros, but it is apparently still unclear whether those updates will be a part of next week's event.

Update: Jones has now caught a photo of the plans showing the overall design for the graphics.

Following the revelation of government data gathering program PRISM in June, Apple released a statement on customer privacy that suggested the company was unable to access or decrypt iMessage and FaceTime conversations.

According to researchers who presented at the Hack the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur (via Macworld), it is actually possible for someone inside Apple to intercept messages because the company has access to public iMessage keys.

The company's claim that iMessage is protected by unbreakable encryption is "just basically lies," said Cyril Cattiaux, who has developed iOS jailbreak software and works for Quarkslab, a penetration testing and reverse engineering company in Paris.

The researchers emphasized they have no indication that Apple or the government is reading iMessages, only that it would be possible to do so.

To encrypt iMessages, Apple utilizes public key cryptography, which means that every Apple device is assigned both a private key and a public key. When an iMessage is sent, it requests the public key of the recipient's device to encrypt the message, which is then decrypted by a private key upon receipt.

Because Apple manages public keys and does not divulge them to users, it is not possible to verify that a sent iMessage is going to the intended recipient. Apple could, for example, substitute or add a public key to intercept an outgoing message without the sender being aware of the change, as end users do not have access to public keys.

With a public server, such as MIT’s PGP Public Key Server, the sender can at least see more information, such as whether a key has changed. At that point, the sender can decide whether they want to trust it or not if they suspect a man in the middle attack. Apple’s key server is not public, the researchers say.

"The biggest problem here is you just cannot control that the public key you are using when you are ciphering the message is really the key of your recipient and not, for example, the public key of some guy in Apple," Cattiaux said.

According to the researchers, there would be no way for an end user to detect an intercepted or rerouted message from their iOS device, as it is impossible to see whether or not a key has been switched or where a message has been routed. The solution to the issue, to introduce true end-to-end encryption, would require Apple to store public keys on each iOS device to allow users to compare keys to verify that messages are going to the intended recipient.

Earlier this year, a Drug Enforcement Agency document noted that it was impossible for law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop directly on iMessage conversations due to Apple's encryption, but it appears that Apple itself could potentially intercept those messages using public keys.

Update: Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said in a statement to AllThingsD that "iMessage is not architected to allow Apple to read messages," adding that "The research discussed theoretical vulnerabilities that would require Apple to re-engineer the iMessage system to exploit it, and Apple has no plans or intentions to do so."

Apple has started a new print advertising campaign for the iPhone 5s. The first spot, running on the back of this week's issue of The New Yorker, showcases the Touch ID-equipped home button of the new gold iPhone 5s.

Your finger is the password.

Touch ID was created not only to protect all the important and personal information on your phone, but to be so easy to use, you'll actually use it. Its state-of-the-art technology learns your unique fingerprint, so you can unlock your phone or even authorize purchases with just a simple touch.

Touch ID. Only on iPhone 5s.

The spot in our image includes T-Mobile branding, but Apple's iPhone TV ads have traditionally rotated branding between all the carriers that carry the iPhone, likely as part of a co-marketing agreement.

Apple has been heavily advertising the iPhone 5c on television in recent weeks, but we have seen relatively little about the 5s, likely because of tight supplies. The print ads mention 'limited availability' of the iPhone 5s in fine print.

Update: Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated are running the same ad but with Sprint co-branding, while Rolling Stone is running it with Verizon co-branding and TIME is running it with AT&T co-branding.

Last December, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in response to a challenge preliminarily invalidated the so-called "Steve Jobs patent", a massive 364-page patent with 293 pages of drawings dating back to September 2006 and covering many details of the original iPhone. Steve Jobs is listed as the first of over two dozen inventors on the patent, and it is considered perhaps the most famous of his over 300 credited patents.

But as noted by FOSS Patents, the USPTO has now completed its reexamination of the patent and ruled that all twenty claims have been confirmed as patentable, significantly strengthening a patent that has been used against several of Apple's competitors in court.

As we speak, the Steve Jobs patent is even stronger than it was before someone (presumably Samsung and Google) challenged it anonymously. On September 4, 2013, the USPTO issued a reexamination certificate confirming the patentability of all 20 claims because the prior art neither anticipated this invention nor renders it obvious.

A number of Apple's key patents have been challenged for reexamination as its competitors have sought to derail Apple's claims against them in various court battles. While the USPTO has issued preliminary "first office actions" invalidating those patents in some cases, Apple has been successful in arguing its case and ultimately restoring the validity of at least the most important claims of those patents. In an example from earlier this year, a key claim of Apple's "rubber banding" patent used against Samsung was confirmed after having been preliminary invalidated last year.

Verizon today became the first of the major U.S mobile carriers to report financial results for the third quarter for 2013, giving the first piece of data to help shed light on Apple's early iPhone 5s and 5c sales other than an Apple press release announcing nine million units sold on the launch weekend.

The carrier revealed during its conference call that it activated approximately 3.9 million iPhones during the quarter, representing just over half of Verizon's 7.6 million total smartphone activations during the quarter, and up from 3.1 million iPhone activations in the year-ago quarter. Verizon also noted in the call that it encountered iPhone supply constraints in September, which will also result in some carryover in sales to the fourth quarter.

Verizon also reported that it has now covered "over 99% of its 3G footprint" with LTE, as the network is now in over 500 markets with more small towns being added in the coming months. Overall, the carrier stated that there were 6.8 million 4G LTE device activations on its network in the quarter, up 21.1% when compared to the year-ago quarter.

Finally, Verizon announced that smartphones now account for more than 67% of the Verizon Wireless retail postpaid customer phone base, up from 64% at the end of the second-quarter in 2013.

Apple will announce its quarterly earnings on October 28.