Apple has responded to the currently circulating iPhone worm that is enabling hackers to steal information from users with jailbroken iPhones, spokesperson Natalie Harrison said: “The worm affects only a very specific set of iPhone users who have jailbroken their iPhones and hacked it with unauthorized software.
Apple
BGR kind of got played on the last Black Friday ad. This time though, they have a “credible source” (Lindsay) with an all new ad that is purported to be this year’s Apple Black Friday, online only ad. Remember 9to5mac/toys (feed, Twitter) is running special Black Friday Deals all week. Gander at this:
Deals include: iMacs starting at $1098, iPod nanos starting at $138, iPod touch starting at $178, MacBook Pros starting at $1098, Apple TVs starting at $208, Airport Express starting at $88, Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard going for $64 each
iPhone! Botnet!
Those two words are likely to get people’s ears up. The qualifier is that the security hole is with unsecured jailbroken iPhones that have enabled SSH. The equivalent in the computer world would be telling everyone to set their root passwords to “alpine” and enable root access. Then put your computer on the Internet without a firewall and leave it until someone logs in.
If you jailbreak your iPhone and don’t change your password, it is the equivalent to physically giving it to a malicious hacker.
It is important to note that standard, non-jailbroken iPhones or iPod touches are not at risk; it is extremely dangerous to jailbreak an iPhone because of the vulnerabilities that this process creates. (Estimates suggest that 6-8% of iPhones are jailbroken.) Jailbroken iPhones at risk are those where ssh is installed, and where the default password has not been changed.
This worm starts by searching its local network, as well as a number of IP address ranges, for available devices to infect. The address ranges it scans include those of ISPs in the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, and if an appropriately unprotected iPhone is found, the worm can copy itself to these devices.
When active on an iPhone, the iBotnet worm changes the root password for the device (from
In June 2010, the iPhone will go onto other carriers increasing volume of iPhone sales. -Brian Marshall, closet fanboy who is street high.
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Apple has introduced
Apple
Apple may have experienced a fairly slow start to iPhone sales in China, but in South Korea pre-orders for the device have already reached over 15,000, reports claim.
iPhone goes on sale through local carrier, KT, on Saturday. That carrier now claims to have attracted at least 15,000 reservations so far, and that figure could rise as it only includes those made online – it does not include customers ordering an iPhone in-store.
Meanwhile the game between iPhone-carrying network, China Unicom, and the country
Since the release of Snow Leoapard, there has been quite a stir because of the loss of creator codes, which were in previous versions of OS X. Creator codes allow you to choose which application opens a particular file. If developers wanted to open a txt file in Word or BBEdit as opposed to a TextEdit default for instance, they could change the creator code in the file. Then when you double clicked it, you could avoid the “open with” dialogue.
Today we learn they aren’t coming back. Tidbits found some new evidence that Apple has officially announced the change:
…in a recent revision (17 November 2009) of its Launch Services documentation, Apple explicitly calls out the change in a boxed note:
Note: In Mac OS X version 10.6 and later, Launch Services no longer considers file creator signatures when binding documents to applications. Launch Services ignores the creator signature when it’s attached to a document. In addition, the functions LSCopyKindStringForTypeInfo and LSGetApplicationForInfo ignore the parameter containing the creator signature.
And in a later boxed note on the same page:
Note: Criterion 4a [i.e. the conflict-resolution rule that gives primacy to a document’s creator code, if it has one] does not apply in Mac OS X version 10.6 and later.
The creator codes were known to be missing when Snow Leopard went official, but there had been some hope that they’d return in a later release.
We can’t wait to read the Gruber rant on this.
According to iPhonAsia (translations of orig appreciated), China Mobile, the biggest mobile operator in the world with over 600 million subscribers, is telling its retail partners that it cannot advertise or carry the iPhone. China Unicom, the second largest Chinese carrier, won the non-exclusive right to carry the iPhone and began selling the device last month.
The distributors that received the China Mobile notice include: Gome, Suning, Zoomflight, Dixintong (our fav!) (D-Phone), Tongwanbao and Kinfic. The China Mobile letter further warns these distributors to NOT display iPhones nor any iPhone related marketing materials.
Many cell phone distributors received formal notification that
For you Windows users out there (Bootcamp?) with a Magic Mouse, we have some fantastic news for you. You can now use the ‘magic’ scrolling capabilities of the device thanks to a clever little hack:
Thanks to a little hackery from Apple
Many of us recall the shock when Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPod nano and its video camera – months of rumour and speculation had suggested a similar feature would appear within the iPod touch – it didn
This seems somewhat strange to us: Apple is allegedly refusing to honour warranties on Macs belonging to smokers, voiding warranties while arguing that smoking near a Mac exposes the tech support worker to secondhand smoke.
Sure, chain smoking can make everything around disgusting and we feel for those technicians who have to deal with those machines that probably stink and have some tar residue in the fans. But does smoking actually cause damage to the computer?
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Apple has at last managed to approve Touch DJ, a serious-seeming application for digital DJs.
Developed by Amidio the app sat for eight weeks waiting in the approval queue. Now the wait is over and you too can get started with what seems pretty impressive DJ-ing, all on your iPhone.
The app seems to realise the potential of Apple
Remember we told you how Cond
Very good post at Computerworld from Mike Elgan about Apple, though I’d venture that a lot of you already know this:
Tech watchers love the horse race aspect of technology industry competition. Apple competes with Microsoft. Apple competes with Google. Apple competes with companies like HP. But Apple doesn’t see it that way.
Industry titans like Microsoft, Google and HP instinctively “fill out” their product lines to dominate huge areas of technology. Microsoft, for example, wants Microsoft software running on wristwatches, supercomputers and everything in between. Google wants to offer every conceivable service that can be squeezed through an internet connection. HP’s massive product line runs the gamut from consumer digital cameras sold at Best Buy to entire data centers filled with enterprise systems.
Apple doesn’t want to dominate like this. It has no interest in this kind of imperialist expansion. Apple is interested only in surgical strikes into this business or that product category, where they can solve design problems others have failed to solve.
Understanding this about Apple helps explain otherwise inexplicable decisions, such as why Apple got into the mobile phone handset business, and why the company is so ambivalent about business products.
To Apple, the mobile phone industry proved clueless at how to offer a compelling user experience with a phone, with its history of cramped buttons and claustrophobic user interfaces. They believed, correctly it turns out, that their designers could drop a game-changing phone into the market and “change the world” again. But when Apple casts its gaze at the enterprise space, it doesn’t see sufficiently compelling design problems that will emotionally affect users. So why bother?
Apple’s choices in markets it gets into make no sense, unless you understand that they don’t want to dominate industries, or even maximize revenues. They just want to design and sell better products that will affect user experience in markets where that’s an achievable goal.
Of course, business success is great. But Apple sees that as only a means to the end of shipping thrilling designs.
Steve Jobs was recently named CEO of the Decade by Fortune Magazine. I’m sure Jobs’ ego was pleased by the designation. But ultimately, he doesn’t care about this sort of thing as much as you might expect. Jobs doesn’t want to be viewed by history as a Lee Iacocca or a Henry Ford. He wants posterity to look at him as a Mozart or a Da Vinci. He wants to be seen as a builder of beautiful things, not a builder of business empires.
Next time Apple does something that infuriates you, or makes you go “huh?” remember that Apple has its own unique world view. And only by understanding that perspective can you understand why Apple does what it does.
This is just the 4th part of the post, read the whole article here.
Woops. It looks like Apple might have made those new iMacs a little too fast!
According to Macworld’s tests, the Core i7 iMac beat the Octo-core Mac Pro 2.2GHz in a number of Speedmark 6 tests and overall it was 1.5% faster than the fastest base model computer Apple sells. Sure, you can update that Mac Pro Beast to 2.93GHz Octo, but that is $2600 more, $500 more than the entire Core i7 iMac! Even the Core i5 iMac did pretty well. Oh, and that iMac has the best display Apple has ever produced.
Our tests of the built-to-order Core i7 iMac (which, other than the processor, has identical specifications as the stock Core i5 iMac) showed even greater performance prowess. With a Speedmark 6 score of 225, the $2199 Core i7 iMac was nearly 8 percent faster than the Core i5 iMac. The Core i7 was nearly 11 percent faster than the $2499 2.66GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro and 9 percent faster than the 2.26GHz 8-Core Mac Pro, which sells for $1100 more. In our tests, there were a few tasks where having eight physical processing cores was beneficial, like our MathematicaMark and Cinebench CPU tests.
Sure, these are just a few specific tests and users real-world milage will vary. But it does show that the fastest iMac can hang around with the Mac Pros. In fact, unless you need to add internal RAID hard drives and/or extra PCI cards (or hate the hi-shine
Computerworld has the story. A lawsuit that has been dragging on since the iPhone 1.1.1 update that bricked a lot of jailbroken iPhones got an interesting twist this week. The plaintiffs in the case are requesting that Apple reveal the source code of the iPhone 1.1.1 software so they can ascertain whether or not Apple maliciously bricked jailbroken iPhones or whether is was just a by-product of the new software code.
Good luck with that.
I can’t think of anything that Apple would want to give up less than that source code, even if it is two years and iterations old.
Bad news for those Android users who were hoping to get the same level of game access as exists on the iPhone. It doesn’t look like it is happening. Gameloft and companies like them have started to scale back their Android investments, according to someone who should know, Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefor (Bolds are ours):
“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference. Rochefort said the company has cut back on investment mostly due to weaknesses of Android’s application store. “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue,” Rochefort said. Games for iPhone generated 13 percent of Gameloft’s revenue in the last quarter. “We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android,” Rochefort said.
400 to one isn’t a good ratio for Android no matter how big a lead the iPhone has had. via MR
Update: Amazon has dropped Droid to $150 as well
You might be able to find a refurbished iPhone for $49 off…but only if if it is refurbished. Even chain discounter Walmart only takes $2 off the price of the iPhone and there are never sales. Apple simply doesn’t discount it, ever (we’ll see about Black Friday).
Verizon/Motorola have taken a different approach with their top handset. Merely a week after launch, the Droid has already lost $80 in value over at Dell who are selling it for $120 with plan. This follows news that the Palm Pre is selling for $79.99 at Amazon (Pixie is $24.99 – not even enough to qualify for free shipping – zoikes).
Why are Verizon and Motorola so quick to discount the Droid when apparently it has been flying off of shelves?
Sony plans to launch its own music, movies and gaming service, based on its existing PlayStation Network (PSN), which already has 33 million users.
The new store, which enhances Sony
Apple may be planning a special Moscone Center event on January 19, the latest speculation – emanating from within Apple