ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,598,538, issued on April 7, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Unified access control" was invented by Yuqin Chen (Beijing), Alexander Sirotkin (Tel Aviv, Israel), Fangli Xu (Beijing), Haijing Hu (Los Gatos, Calif.), Mona Agnel (Uxbridge, Great Britain), Naveen Kumar R. Palle Venkata (San Diego), Pavan Nuggehalli (San Carlos, Calif.), Ralf Rossbach (Munich), Sarma V. Vangala (Campbell, Calif.), Sethuraman Gurumoorthy (San Ramon, Calif.), Sudeep Manithara Vamanan (Nuremberg, Germany) and Zhibin Wu (Los Altos, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Provided is a method by a user equipment (UE), comprising: receiving, from a ba...