iPhone

Charles Miller is no stranger to Apple and its products.

In July, Miller and his colleagues at Independent Security Evaluators discovered the first known vulnerability within the Apple iPhone. They then worked with the Cupertino vendor to release a patch for the iPhone the day before the start of the annual Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas earlier this month. But all that goodwill didn't stop Miller from talking about pending problems lurking deep within the Mac OS. "Macs," he said, "are as easy to hack as they are to use."

During a 20-minute talk … Read more

Earlier this month, New York enacted an Air Passenger Bill of Rights. Among other things, it requires that airlines make minimal provisions for passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours. If you've done any traveling with kids, you probably know how difficult it is to both pack light (a key strategy for successful travel generally) and to pack enough stuff so that if there's a delay, you can keep the little ones occupied. The New York law bounds the problem a little bit: if your longest leg is 6 hours, you can be relatively assured that your outbound leg from a New York airport won't add more than 3 hours to that. But as the US Customs and Border Patrol SNAFU at LAX confirms, airport authorities don't seem to get particularly concerned about tarmac waits of 6, 8, or 10 hours, be they outbound or inbound. I think that when traveling with children, that's a bit much. What's a parent to do?… Read more

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." --Albert Einstein

Oh goody, you can watch YouTube on your iPhone, but what if you just want a phone? I tried to buy a phone that's just a phone, and wound up with a Samsung SCH-u540. Is it just me or do you think it's odd that a phone comes with a 151 page User Manual?

Manufacturers load on features to sell product--whatever it is--phones, coffee makers, micro-wave ovens, or A/V receivers. Here's the deep, dark ugly truth: the features don'… Read more

Like the Harper's Index, here are some numbers I've observed over the past 40 days... (well, 42 days actually).

Number of days in my possession: 42

Number of iPhones I purchased: 2

Number of which I kept: 1

Percent, to the nearest whole integer, of commission I took for getting a certain someone their iPhone: 0

Approximate number of hours waited in line: 10

Approximate number of days after I waited in line until the iPhone was sold out: 1

Number of people who cut in front of me in the line: 40

Number of people I allowed … Read more

It seems that a few iPhone users are encountering problems with the iPhone's touch screen, prompting Apple to replace some units.

Posters on Apple's support discussion boards and forums belonging to both AppleInsider and MacRumors have complained of dead spots on their iPhone's touch screen, almost like the old floor at the old Boston Garden. On a phone based almost entirely around touch-screen input, this would obviously be a serious problem.

It's not at all clear how widespread a problem this is. There were several active discussions about the problem on Apple's own support forums, … Read more

SpiralFrog is a proposed online service that would let users download songs for free in exchange for viewing some sort of advertising. It got some press coverage last August when it announced an agreement to license the music catalog of Universal Music Group, the largest of the four major labels. Over the next few months, however, a missed launch date and executive shake-up led many to write it off as dead.

But the company survived, and now its founder, Joe Mohen, is heralding the beginning of a closed beta test in the United States, with wide release expected by the … Read more

InfoWorld's Tom Yager tries his prima ballerina slippers on:

Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It's just a matter of patience.

Hubris, thy name is Yager.

Despite its successful initial launch, Yager apparently thinks the iPhone will fail if you just give it long enough. Well, good luck with that one, Tom. Although, the horned one should point out that only one of you and Jobs is going … Read more

I usually get up in the mornings and go to my office and turn on my desktop CPU to check the day's news, my email, etc. But before I even turn on my desktop on a given morning, the iPhone, which sits atop my office desk, will now tell me if I have new email that has come in overnight. (Note: I have to leave my iPhone outside of my room because the GSM signal interferes with my iPod/JBL music dock's speakers, making that noise--you know that noise). Being aware that I got email overnight is nice, … Read more

With all the bills and expenses of daily life, most of us need to follow some sort of budget. With Expense View for the iPhone, you can post your expenses as they happen and then track and analyze your money on the ExpenseView.com Web site. You'll need to register to use this application, but fortunately it won't affect your budget: It's free.

iPhone Link: http://www.expenseview.com/gadgetLogin.aspx

Web site link: http://www.expenseview.com