9to5 Staff

This simple trick lets you crack the passwords on an iPhone or iPod touch – though it only threatens users who leave their device in hands reach of somebody they can’t trust.

The slight flaw can be exploited in almost every available application that stores passwords, including your saved email account passwords.

By simply using the delete button, an unauthorised person can reveal all the characters which make up your password, with the exception of the very first character in the password field. It works when a password field is present with a saved password in it.

The good news? This particular bug seems to have been patched in iPhone Software 3.1.

Perhaps that makes it a good reason to upgrade your Apple device – though users of jailbroken iPhones will probably wait a while.

Via: ModMyi.com

You know how we feel about MMS.  It is an outdated technology that ties your communication to a carrier and doesn’t offer many of the benefits of email, let alone more modern technologies like IM.  That being said, we know a lot of you out there can’t wait to get your hands on it. 

AT&T’s official launch date is September 25th, a few weeks beyond the "Late Summer" release promised at WWDC.  However, according to the Consumerist, AT&T has been turning a few AT&T customers’ MMS capabilities on by disabling the MMS opt-out code.  No reason was given for the changes.

Mediaite’s Ash Kalb discovered that his iPhone suddenly had MMS after a recent upgrade, and theorizes that AT&T is slowly removing the MMS opt-out codes on iPhone users’ accounts.

Perhaps they are testing the ability of AT&T’s frail network to withstand the MMS onslaught?  Or they are trying not to get sued.  Or "under-promising and over-delivering".  Whatever the reason, we’re sure many of you will want to check your iPhones and comment below.

The fine folks of iFixit, as per usual, have torn apart Apple’s latest iPod Touch revealing some very interesting technology. Firstly, the latest Broadcom BCM4329 makes the device capable of N-speed Wifi unlike any other iPod or iPhone.  Apple currently doesn’t have this capability enabled but there are plenty of people who’d like to switch their wireless to the 5GHz N network for longer range and less interference.

Secondly, the ARM chip (below) is different Samsung ARM chip than the iPhone 3GS or any Apple device before it.  The CPU is labelled 339S0075 ARM. This marks an improvement over the previous iPod and iPhone 3GS processors. The processor on the last iPod touch (2nd gen) was labelled 339S0048ARM. The processor in the iPhone 3GS is marked 339S0073ARM. 

The most revealing part of this take apart is the little empty space for a video camera like the one in the iPod Nano camera. If your not too skittish of the innards of the of whats inside check more pics here and here.

There’s a new comic book format in town, an Apple format, which suggests the company has a vision to enable next-generation book and comic publishing through its range of multimedia devices.

Tyrese Gibson’s Mayhem is the first digital book for sale on iTunes 9, and its being sold in the extended multimedia format, iTunes LP/iTunes Extras.

Mayhem’s comic iTunes LP ($1.99) is the first comic book to explore the format as a form of highly visual creative expression.

Its introduction makes it easy to see the potential of book or magazine sales through iTunes. And, let’s face it, it’s built for handheld devices and, we think, the fabled Apple tablet (October? January?)

The release of this beautiful digital comic – and look at the way the action flows and the expression isn’t confined to words and pictures – means Apple boss Steve Jobs may already be back to his opaque public statements self, when he told the New York Times Apple doesn’t see eBooks as a big business – for the company.

Being a big business for Apple doesn’t necessarily mean eBooks aren’t a potentially big business for its platforms. In fact, with eBooks being the second-biggest content category on iTunes after games, there’s a proper eBook gold rush surging up. It’s just that Apple doesn’t publish the books…but it does create the platform – particularly its mobile platforms.

If NYT interviewer David Pogue had thought things through, he’d maybe have been more explicit in reading between the Jobsian lines.

What Jobs, the Twitter-killer, did say was, “I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”

(You always need to read between Steve’s lines, even when he’s recovering from another life-saving surgery).

Can Kindle deliver this excellence in multimedia?

Take a look at the comic, it’s fab. (I’m finding the link troublesome, sorry).

As John Fortt at Fortune notes, "Maybe the tools Apple created to digitize Gibson’s Mayhem comic will be part of an author’s kit with that oft-rumored Apple tablet?"

2009’s shaping up to be a Mac new year for college-going students in the US, claims new research from the Parallels Desktop for Mac team.

In a press release citing a survey of 1,200 US students conducted by higher education-specialist research firm, Student Monitor, Parallels claims more than one third (36%) of full-time undergraduates at four-year US colleges and universities already plan to purchase a Mac.

Naturally, Parallels points out that some of these students also want to run Windows apps on their Mac, “which many solve with Parallels Desktop for Mac”. Uhm, OK.

"When I started at UCSC I got a Macbook (which I’ve named Charlie) and looking around campus it’s pretty obvious that lots of other students are opting for Macs now too," said Tim Deal, a sophomore attending the University of California, Santa Cruz. "A year later, I’ve learned all about the cool things I can do with my Mac, but I still want Windows so I can use Microsoft Office and play PC games. Parallels Desktop for Mac basically gives me the best of both worlds so I can get the ease of use, security and functionality of the Mac, without missing out on the applications I need for school assignments."

Parallels is launching a competition this month asking students to help it go "back to school". A flyer of the Parallels logo is available on its new Mac To School blog and Parallels is inviting students across the US to send in a photograph of themselves and the flyer taken at their favorite spot. All pictures suitable for publishing will be posted on the Mac to School blog and each week the most interesting submission will win a goodie bag.

The competition runs for one month, from September 15th to October 15th. The company is also offering students Parallels Desktop for Mac at a 50 per cent discount right now.
 

Apple delivered on one of the most-demanded features, radio, in the latest iteration of its iPod nano, and radio broadcasters seem thrilled by the news.

What’s interesting about the FM tuner inside the iPod nano is its capacity to rewind up to 15-minutes of a radio show, and a new tagging tool which lets users make a note of songs they’ve enjoyed for later purchase through iTunes, using technology from the Radio Advertising Bureau’s "Buy From FM" platform.

This is a significant move, which boosts just how attractive standard FM radio broadcasts can now be in a digital age. Jeff Haley, CEO of the Radio Advertising Bureau, said: "The idea that an 85-year-old medium has the chance to remain relevant and capture new distribution in an environment when those things are hard to come by is very exciting."

Jeff Smulyan, chairman-CEO of Emmis Communications, says the move will help make radio ubiquitous, pointing to the radio industry’s determined effort to ensure FM tuners are installed on all portable devices by 2013. The industry argues that making such a move would deliver a relevant emergency broadcast system, among other reasons.

The technology is there, but there’s a lot of nascent activity to really drive interactivity to radio," Haley said.

Until now, the radio industry has only had one similar deal in place, with Microsoft and the Zune.

Of course, we know the iPod touch and iPhone already have the technology inside existing models to receive FM radio broadcasts, but this has been blocked by Apple for some unknown reason.

Future developments for the Buy From FM standard promise radio stations and advertisers the chance to tag their radio ads to become interactive through the MP3 platform.

Clear Channel’s iPhone/BlackBerry app, iheartradio gathered 2.5 million users in June, a report claims.

This one slipped through the cracks last night but for those of you mulling a 3.0 update to your iPod touches, the already low $9.95 price just got cut in half to $4.95.  The update, which will take your Touch to 3.1, is recommended by Apple and will give your touch the added bonus of the 3.0 software.

It’s a shrewd move on the part of the company, which claims it is forced to charge for the upgrade under accounting/regulatory procedures. Recent months have seen claims that only a minority of iPod touch owners actually invest in the software patches as they emerge.

June saw a report from mobile advertising firm AdMob which suggested only 1% of iPod touch users accessing its ad network had upgraded to V.3.0 software, compared to 44% of iPhone users.

With 20 million iPod touch units sold so far, that’s an awful lot of customers who aren’t up to speed with the latest improvements in the company’s mobile OS.

I did a blog post over at Computerworld last night on the mystery of the iPod touch camera.  We’d seen pictures and videos of prototypes, heard the rumors from as far away as China and France and even saw iPod case designers from all over building their new cases with holes.  But the iPod touches released at the even had no cameras.  What happened and why? 

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, is world-renowned for playing it cool under pressure (and dancing for developers), and he played it cool when faced with an iPhone-wielding employee this week.

The company held a meeting in Seattle yesterday to preview some of the things it is working on, proferring free beer for stressed-out employees. There was even a ceremonial entrance by the CEO, and that’s when the moment happened.

As he entered the room, a Microsoft employee tried to take a picture of Ballmer – using an iPhone…

The CEO’s reaction was calm in the circumstances. He grabbed the device from out the hapless employee’s hand, made some remarks which generated an outbreak of boos from assembled employees, threw the iPhone to the floor and mimicked stamping on it…

We’re not 100 per cent sure if this wasn’t a staged stunt, of course, given the admiration with which Microsoft views its Apple smartphone challenger.

Later on when making his presentation on stage he referred to the incident again and glanced at the iPhone-using Microsoft employee. Who we hope has a pleasant day at work today.

Twittering about the incident, one employee pointed out, "you just don’t pick up the CEO of Chevy in a BMW."

Which pretty much sums up this incident. Also interesting is news today the Zune HD won’t ship in Europe before Christmas, leaving Europe open for Apple’s iPod, which already boasts 69 per cent UK market share.

via Engadget

From the Toys section:

For the next 2 hours, Amazon has the Canon D340 Digital Copier Laser Printer for $198.  That’s 59% off of list and $145 off of Amazon’s normal price.

As we warned before 3.1 came out, the latest iPhone update disables the tethering hack that so many of you enjoy using.  That in itself is reason enough hold off on updating. 

However, today TUAW publishes some more discouraging news.  After the 3.1 update, non-iPhone 3GS users (touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G) won’t be able to access Exchange servers for their Email, Contacts and Calendar if the Exchange connection has been set by their administrators with a forced device encryption connection.  Only iPhone 3GS devices now work in this mode.  Apple has said it improperly set up encryption on iPhone OS 3.0 which wasn’t really encrypting the Exchange information.

Luckily, the Gmail Calendar and Contacts sync that uses Microsoft’s ActiveSync API (to act like an Exchange Server) is not affected.

We’re hanging back on this update a bit.

And Just like that after Apple’s "It’s only Rock and Roll" event they have seeded OS X 10.6 to the masses

The 10.6.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:

– compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
– an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
– some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
– an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
– instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
– an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
– Motion 4 becoming unresponsive

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3810.
For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Just under two weeks after the release of Snow Leopard comes 10.6.1 via Software Update or standalone updater here.  It includes the latest version of Flash, which had been an issue with the original Snow Leopard release. 

How did the update go for y’all? (we had a slow restart). 

The 10.6.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:
compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
Motion 4 becoming unresponsive
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3810.
For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

In case you wondered what the new Nano looks like with its itsy bitsy camera, 52 extra pixel screen and FM radio tuner, iFixit has taken the time to take a blue one apart.  Overall, it looks pretty much how you’d excpect.  Unsurprisingly, they don’t reccomend you try this at home.  More choice picts below.

Facebook is the new crack, we all know this. The typical pattern is that you begin messing with it in a small way, and then slowly find yourself using it for all manner of social interaction, becoming ever more obsessed…

Fact is users spent a billion hours on the service in June, new research says. So be thankful, Mac users, that  a Facebook dev’s developing a desktop Mac client so you can keep an eye on your friend feed pretty much all the time…should be great for productivity.

“According to Nielsen, the average Facebook visitor spent more than 4.5 hours on Facebook in June. That’s over an hour more than the average Yahoo user spent using Yahoo. Facebook says it has 200 million active users. That means users spent more than a billion hours clicking around the site in June,” reports Business Insider.

In order to promote the Facebook obsession, developers there are now building a Mac app that offers Desktop Notifications. This inhabits the menu bar at the top of your screen and lets you access your News Feed, recent Wall Posts, and messages. And it’s available now for download, though the company is warning that this is just a protoype. So don’t blame us if it goes wrong.

And for those Facebook users who like to send a minute-by-minute biography of themselves, the application features a universal hotkey for sending out a new status updates.

We predict a lot of missed meetings and deadlines in the months ahead.

You’ll find the client here.

(Note: The page describing the app has since been update to specifically state Facebook are not developing this app, it’s an independent dev. Only just found out).

Apple’s keynote yesterday was heavily-hyped with huge expectation surrounding the event, the high points of which turned out to be the return of Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, introduction of iTunes 9 and the iPod nano – and the total collapse of Twitter during the show.

Jobs may have been partially responsible for the collapse of the popular ‘micro-blogging’ service. He mentioned Twitter during his keynote speech and, “boom”, within moments the service collapsed.

Users of the notoriously volatile website were met with blank pages alerting them to a "HTTP Server Error 503" when they tried to log on, though the problem was fixed after around 15-minutes, though the service wasn’t fully up to speed, with users complaining their @ message pages were failing to refresh.

Apple, Steve Jobs and iTunes 9 all rocketed to the top of Twitter’s "trending topics" list.

Apple’s beaten Twitter before: the service also fell over during the January keynote earlier this year.

The University of San Diego has signed-up for the mobile application march, introducing a suite of student-focused applications for use on the iPhone and other devices.

Dubbed, "MySDMobile," these solutions let students and faculty use their iPhones or other mobile devices to view a GPS-enabled interactive map of the university campus, including where particular classes are located; they can call or email faculty and staff members using the directory feature of the application; and browse through the university’s course and library cataloguess.

Students can also use their devices to view university content on YouTube or iTunesU, and get up-to-the-minute scores for USD Toreros athletics teams. Current news and campus events are also accessible, along with photos of USD’s campus that can be used as phone wallpaper.

USD’s Information Technology Services unit developed custom applications for the university in partnership with Terriblyclever. "It has been our fundamental philosophy that students today are digital nomads and expect an array of practical services to be easily available through their mobile devices at all times," said Chris Wessells, USD’s chief technology officer.

Initially, nine powerful mobile programs are being delivered within the MySDMobile application, and USD is already planning future addition of new mobile programs with features including paying tuition and fees, enrolling in classes, selecting meal plans, viewing grades, and tracking university trams through GPS map services.

Apple boss Steve Jobs said nothing much at all about eBooks during his iPod-focused keynote, but he did have a few things to say about Amazon.

As reported, he spoke with David Pogue, granting a rare but fleeting interview. Amazon’s teams must be taking a close look at what he said about them, and their Kindle…

Jobs doesn’t think Amazon are selling many Kindles, saying Apple doesn’t see eBooks as a big market at this point – though they are the second biggest category on the App Store and were described as a killer feature by Phil Schiller.

Jobs also suggested that Amazon’s refusal to provide definite numbers for Kindle sales was a sign it hasn’t succeeded in the market. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody,” he said of Kindle sales to Pogue.

“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he also said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”

His point of view then probably is: “eBooks? There’s an app for that.”

David Pogue, who has been criticized recently for conflicts of interest with his Times job and Missing Manual books, had an opportunity to speak with Steve Jobs after the event.  He asked him about the Amazon Kindle, his weight, production while he was gone and some other stuff.  Not a lot, but some very candid information.  It seems like they might post a video of the conversation soon as well.  Our fav:

Know what’s weird?  This morning you could buy an 8GB iPod touch for $189.  5 hours later, it’s $199. 

Someone want to explain that?

Update: We think Olly might have figured it out.