 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV. For Friday, October 12th, 2012, I'm Kristen Velletti. An injection that forbade the sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the United States has been overturned by the US Court of Appeals. Also, Samsung has lost one of its top chip designers to Apple iOS 6. To Apple and Apple iOS 6 is tracking you. Join us now to discuss these headlines as SiliconANGLE contributing editor, John Casaretto. Welcome, John. Good morning. In late June, following a lawsuit filed by Apple earlier this year, a California court granted an injunction against Samsung that banned the sale of the Galaxy Nexus in the US, which was overturned yesterday. We're well aware that these two companies have been undergoing major legal battles over patents for several months. How big of a victory is this for Samsung? It's a big victory. Samsung got that injunction back in over the summer and this is a big ruling. And it's significant in that they're now going to be able to return to selling the Galaxy Nexus. What was the court's reasoning for removing the junction? Well, basically, they were able to focus in on the functionality of the product as a whole. So they were able to say there is no one feature that makes a person buy a certain phone, a certain device. Was there a specific hardware or software feature on the Galaxy Nexus that the lawsuit was focused on? Yeah, in this case, it was a search. So the gist of what was essentially said was that the search function on its own was not enough to really justify to say that people are buying these phones because of search functionality. And therefore, that was the reasoning for overturning this. So how soon can Samsung return to selling the Galaxy Nexus? Well, it would appear as though that would be right away. We'll probably hear something from Samsung sometime today or the next few days, but it would probably be instant. Do you think Apple will continue to pursue this particular lawsuit or attempt to take any further action regarding it? I believe so. I believe that they will continue to pursue this. They either make it hard. So I think that they have more in store and this will continue back and forth between Samsung and Apple as they have this fight in the courts around the world. In other Samsung news, Samsung recently went on a hiring spree of chip designers and now one of the most prominent of those recruits has left the company for Apple. Prior to working at Samsung, Jim Mergaard was previously vice president and chief engineer, along with being a 16 year veteran at AMD. So why is Mergaard now moving on to Apple and do you think others will follow? You know, it's a good question. He's obviously a veteran and somebody that has a lot of credentials. Apple and Samsung, you know, it's a little bit of if you can't beat them, join them. In this case, it's, you know, can't necessarily beat them, but maybe you can join us. So I think other people will start to look at Apple as a potential employer, perhaps people from Mergaard's team. It all has to do with the fact that, you know, there's an alignment with ARM technology and the chip development in that space, which is obviously integrated into Apple's products, their iPads or iPhones, et cetera. What kinds of qualifications and experience does Mergaard have that can help Apple? Well, his particular experience is what's known in a type of chip known as a SOX, which is a systems on a chip. So basically what they're able to do is create a very low power type of chip, which is efficient on batteries, which is basically he's got a lot of components packed into it. So special kinds of like circuitry all packed into a single, one single piece of silicon chip. So that's his specialty. It's a very advanced type of technology and what makes these devices so powerful. Where do you see Apple applying Mergaard's talents? Well, they're definitely continuing to look for the brightest people out there. I think that they're going to look to advance their max. They're going to continue to miniaturize, continue to advance their, you know, the phone sets and advance the tabs and things like that. Samsung was rumored to be looking at moving into the server space being that the ARM technologies are pretty prevalent there and there's a big movement towards moving to that type of architecture. But, you know, perhaps that might be another reason or another touch point as to why he's no longer part of Samsung and wants to focus more on a consumer focused device. It remains to be seen. Veteran technical talent is always in high demand and it's common for high level engineers to move between big name companies. We know that. But there's a love hate relationship sort of between Samsung and Apple. Can you explain how closely the two companies are intertwined? Well, there's obviously, you know, the big headline court cases going on and that's one element of being intertwined between the two companies and that will continue. But Apple itself uses quite a bit of Samsung's technology on its bleeding edge devices. So, you know, they're dependent, they're partners and at the same time adversaries. Chip design seems to be pretty important to both companies right now. Who do you think is ahead in chip design? Samsung or Apple or are they pretty evenly matched? Well, I would say, you know, that's a difficult question because famously Apple has very tight controls on its requirements and designs. So, you know, while Samsung is the deliverer of those advanced systems and chips and architecture that make those things possible, Apple has got the blueprints and pretty much the list of demands that they require to make their systems work the way that they do. So I think as far as being ahead, Samsung has clearly established, has been doing this and is currently delivering on that. So I would say Samsung at this point has got the leg up in those regards. Along with Apple rolling out its new iOS 6 software in September, an enhancement came with the new mobile operating system that many users are unaware of. The company has started tracking users through a new technology called IFA or IDFA, which is used so that advertisers can target them. Can you explain to us how the technology works? Yeah, basically it's a number that's assigned to the different iOS devices and it's a random supposedly anonymous number that is attached to a user and their device. So previously they had a different scheme called a UDID which was permanent, it was also non-deletable, it was more like a serial number. So, and it's basically a tracking token, essentially, that identifies behavior that's going on. And previously, as far as the UDID was concerned, there was a big scandal around the fact that a lot of this information was being collected and a lot of people didn't know about it. So how does this information benefit advertisers? Well, what it does is it gives advertisers the ability to track users from the initial presentation of an advertisement all the way into the point at which they actually buy in. The most typical example would be the buying of an application. So, basically they can now start to build some statistics around, we showed so many advertisements or we showed this group of users this advertisement and we had this many conversions. You talked about Apple's UDIDs and that they had used them previously. It was understood that they had been disabled. So why roll out a new type of tracking device now? Well, they were technically not so much disabled as they were basically, Apple was basically not approving any applications that track the UDID. UDIDs were still on element of the phones themselves. So with this new scheme or this new technology IDFA, what it does is it basically allows, it gives those benefits that those advertisers but it gives kind of a demographic, if you will, that advertisers can use. So it's kind of part of their overall plan to create the ecosystem that they want. They basically require it. Does the user have a choice here? Can they switch it off if they want to? Yeah, they can. And reportedly it's a little bit tricky to disable. This was definitely a change from the UDID scheme. So it's something new that they're able to do and you can choose to do it and look that up online. A lot of people that are concerned with privacy may want to take a look at that, turn those kind of things off. And let me just be clear that there's no personal individual information that is disclosed with this IDFA thing. So basically what it does is it provides just general numbers about an audience altogether, so. Apple doesn't even mention IFA on its iOS 6 launch page. Why do you think they're keeping this such a secret from users? Well, obviously there was the bad press and privacy concerns. They don't want people to be alerted about that. And it may be a genuine move towards respecting privacy quite a bit more, having a stronger policy in place and the fact that you can opt out. Whereas you couldn't before it was all in the hands of the advertisers and the application developers and things like that, so. Well, John, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate you joining us. Absolutely. For all the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV.