On a mobile device, so can't research much, but a couple of things:
1) The claims are incredibly broad, and I'm surprised they have held up so far. Many such patents issued back then (it happens much more rarely these days) but even by those standards this is broad. Without indulging too much in the sin of simplifying claims, they basically cover detecting if a server supports secure connections, and if so, establishing a VPN instead of a normal connection. One of the patents covers a DNS server which indicates whether a server supports secure connections.
2) One of the comments on TFA, which is significant if true (would be good if someone could verify):
> If you read through the court docs, the actual royalty imposed was 0.52%. It was Apple's various shenanigans and lies (partial and outright) to the court that prompted additional penalties up to a 0.98% rate.
Similar things have happened in the past, e.g. In i4i, where a Microsoft lawyer was sanctioned for insisting plaintiff was a patent troll. However, in that case the lawyer paid the price rather than the company as a whole. In any case, even 0.52% is incredibly high a single minor feature. I guess the lesson here is clear: don't piss off the court.