News - page 2328

Apple has spoken on the issue of porno iPhone apps, and it’s, ‘No way Jose.’

An Apple spokesman says the company will not approve iPhone apps with “inappropriate” content, especially pornography, despite the iPhone 3.0 age restriction system.

The question of porno apps arose after Hottest Girls appeared on the iPhone app store — the first app to feature saucy photos of naked women. Promising “2200+ sexy bikini babes and lingerie models,” the app is decidedly softcore. (The app disappeared for a few hours on Thursday, apparently because Apple had pulled it, but the developer had removed Hottest Girls voluntarily because of the strain on the image servers.)

Thanks to age restrictions in the new iPhone 3.0 OS software, mature apps can be blocked from download from the App Store. Many observers expected the App Store to be flooded with pornographic apps, especially because mobile porn is turning into big business. Juniper Research estimates the mobile porn market to be worth $3.5 billion by 2010. Growth will come from streaming video and video chat. The biggest market will not be the U.S., but Western Europe, Juniper said.

But now Apple says categorically it will not approve porno apps now or in the future. In a statement received by Cult of Mac, spokesman Tom Neumayr said:

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

According to local news reports, hundreds of people camped outside a discount store in San Marcos, California hoping to buy 8G iPod nanos for $0.99 cents.

Matt Roberts told TV station San Diego 6 he waited 26 hours to be the first of the lucky nine customers who got the device at a $148 discount as part of grand opening celebration for a 99¢ Only Store.

The eight guys behind him eyed each other  for stamina; if none dropped out after the overnight vigil, the rest of the folks in the parking lot got scooters, DVDs and computer mice for a buck.

If you’ve got the staying power and are short on cash, check out the openings of 99¢ Only Stores or follow their Twitter feed, they’ve been running the iPod scheme to celebrate new stores for months now.

Wonder if people would do that for a Zune…

Via San Diego 6

UPDATE: As predicted, seven of the Top 10 albums on iTunes are Michael Jackson’s. Checked at 8AM Friday morning.

Just hours after his untimely death, Michael Jackson’s albums are storming the charts on iTunes.

Jackson’s seminal album Thriller is currently the number one album on iTunes, while The Essential Michael Jackson is number two.

Several of his other albums are climbing the charts fast. At the time of writing (about 6.45 PST) Jackson has nine albums in the iTunes top 40:

Thriller (25th Anniversary, Zombie Cover) is #7; Off the Wall is #9; The Ultimate Collection is #12; Number Ones is #13; Bad is #22; Greatest Hits is #27; Dangerous is #29; and Thriller (25th Anniversary, Deluxe Edition) is #28.

Jackson is the best-selling solo artist of all time. He sold more than 750 million albums worldwide, and Thriller, produced by the genius Quincy Jones, sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide.

I expect Apple to post a homepage tribute, and Jackson’s albums to dominate the chart by the morning.

Mike Giepert discovered a novel use for the icons in his dock — spelling out words like “sex,” “props” and “agoraphobe!”

He asked the readers of his blog to submit their own. See some of the results after the jump. Much more here.

Via SwissMiss.

The King of Pop died in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. He was 50-years-old. He’d been staying in Bel-Air while working on his comeback, including 50 sold-out shows in London. CoM pays tribute to one of the greatest popstars ever: rest in peace Michael.

Michael Jackson on iTunes.

UPDATE 2: The app is available again from the App Store. Just checked at 4PM 6/25/09.

UPDATE: Apple hasn’t removed the app, the developer has, thanks to the strain on the saucy images server. “The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app,” says the developer. “Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing.” The app still works for those who have already bought it,  the developer says.

The first iPhone porn app has been removed from the iPhone App Store.

The softcore app, Hottest Girls, was downloadable for a few hours on Thursday, but is now unavailable. Neither Apple nor the developer were immediately available to provide an explanation, but it appears Apple changed its mind after the app received so much press attention on Thursday.

The $1.99 app for the iPhone and iPod touch featured 2,000 images of “topless, sexy babes and nude models,” according to reports.

Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrell, who downloaded the app before it was removed, said it was “terrible.”

“There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work,” he wrote.

The brief approval of the app had many wondering if Apple was now willing to approve adult content on the App Store. The iPhone 3.0 OS includes age restrictions on applications.

Not saying I’d proudly adorn myself with it in public, but on days like today when that spinning beach ball of death has threatened to freeze the faithful MacBook several times, I’d kind of like to have it nearby to recover something like a sense of humor.

Made by a “guy in his mid-twenties born, raised, and terrified of economic collapse in West Michigan” who also has a cute Mac addict button, both cost $1.00 on Etsy.

Joining other experts, billionaire investor Warren Buffet says Apple might have violated the law by keeping quiet about Steve Jobs’s liver transplant.

The head of Berkshire Hathaway said Jobs’s life-saving operation was a “material fact” that Apple was legally obliged to report to investors. The Securities and Exchange commission requires public companies to report material facts to shareholders. Failure to do so is in breach of the law.

“It’s a material fact,” said Buffett on CNBC on Wednesday. “Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact. Whether (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt is, I mean, so I think that’s important to get out. They’re going to find out about it anyway so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”

Ex-Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter feed has been used to spread a Mac Trojan.

Kawasaki’s popular feed, which has 140,000 subscribers, included a link on Tuesday night to a what purported to be a sex tape featuring Gossip Girl actress Leighton Meester. However, the link pointed to the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan, a rare Mac Trojan that has popped up recently on a couple of porno websites.

Kawasaki said the link was the result of leaving his feed open to “user generated” stories.

“Here’s the scoop,” Kawasaki said by email to CoM. “I used Twitterfeed to insert the Truemors feed into my tweets (Here’s the feed). I thought that was a 100% safe, moderated feed, but I now know it isn’t. ‘User generated’ stories can get inserted into that feed. The bottom line is that my Twitter account wasn’t hacked; Twitter-Twitterfeed was all working right. It’s just that a bad story got into the feed that was refed by me.

“My short career as a pornographer lasted 45 minutes. :-)”

Graham Cluley, a spokesman for Sophos, a British security firm which first publicised the malware tweet, said it was the first time he’d heard of Twitter being used to spread the Mac malware.

“Guy is the only person we’ve discovered by this attack, but it may just be that he’s the most high profile,” said Cluley.

However, Twitter has been used before to spread malware on Windows. In August, security firm Kapersky Labs warned of banking Trojans posing as porno tapes of Brazilian pop star Kelly Key.

In a twist on the “I’m a Mac” ads, this sticker shows a PC playing solitaire while waiting for the Mac to load a witty retort. Or maybe the PC just froze.

The 4″ x 2.75″ sticker costs $1.50 and, according to the description, was made on a PC.

Via Nerd Approved

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI

“Objectified” the indie documentary film about industrial design that gives you a rare peek into Apple designer Johnathan Ive’s studio is out in movie theaters now — with a limited number of screenings from Stockholm to San Francisco.

The 90-second trailer is punctuated with Apple products (iPhone, MacBook) and a nice-close up of Ives.

At least one reviewer said Ive’s contribution — where he explains how a laptop emerges from just about one piece of metal — is a highlight of the effort by director Gary Hustwit.

If you catch it, let us know what you think.

Besides its (much-needed and noticeable) speed bump, the new iPhone 3GS offers only three exclusive features over its predecessors. There’s the extremely well-executed video editing, the promising but presently limited compass, and the voice control app.

And, surprising no one, the voice program is the only one of the three that isn’t ready for prime time. Why? Because voice recognition programs suck. Based on the challenges facing the 3GS, a truly foolproof voice interface is about as close to arriving as a mind-power interface. Having never owned a Newton, I have the distinct pleasure of playing with an advanced Apple technology that really doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s almost exciting!

Let’s get out the good first. When the app works, it does a pretty good job. On about 3 out of 10 efforts, it has actually done what I asked (more than any previous voice dialing app I’ve ever tried). Another third of the time, it did the function I wanted but with the wrong content (it placed a phone call, but to my mom, not my wife). And then 40 percent of the time, it just did something crazy and frustrating, like shutting down and locking the screen or, when I asked it to “Call Bruce,” it began to play a Sonic Youth song.

So there you go, a 30 percent hit rate of actual usefulness. Which is about 69 percent below the rest of the iPhone’s functionality — even the AT&T-dependent parts. Though I’ve owned an iPhone for all of 56 hours, I’m typing like a pro now, much faster than I ever managed on a BlackBerry. Every part of the iPhone experience that’s supposed to be questionable is actually brilliant.

Which just makes the voice control app’s flaws that much more prominent — it’s like a holdover from a Moto Razr that somehow snuck onto my iPhone. It’s not even good enough to use in the car — too great a risk of calling the wrong person. Honestly, I think it’s as good of an example as you can find for the overall difficulties with making voice-anything bullet-proof and reliable. Too many vocal variations, accents, and possible disruptions to ever be as good as what Apple shoots for.

Still, it’s hardly a downside to owning a 3GS — you can pull it out at parties and amuse your friends as it screws up. It’s like the first-generation Newton’s handwriting recognition all over again. Ian is riding a taste sensation, indeed!

The popular Boxee media center software is the rare app that starts on the Mac before going to Windows. CC-licensed pic by Matt Grimm.

Here’s some good news for Mac users of Boxee, the popular media platform for Macs and Apple TV: The software is going Windows.

At a developer event on Tuesday night in San Francisco, Boxee released its first version for Windows PCs.

This is good news for Mac users because the Boxee platform will have a much larger user base for developers to create plug-ins for. Significantly, the software will run on Windows Media Center PCs, which is by far the biggest installed base of computers connected to TVs.

UPDATE: Hospital spokeswoman Ruth Ann Hale declined to add any more information to hospital’s statement. She would not say when the transplant was performed (the Wall Street Journal said about two months ago); how long Steve Jobs had been on the transplant waiting list; nor where the donor organ came from. “We’re not saying anything beyond what it says in the statement,” she said by phone on Tuesday night. It’s safe to assume the donor liver came from a deceased patient — otherwise Jobs wouldn’t be on a waiting list. But the lack of a time frame for the operation is curious. Perhaps it’s to protect the identity of the donor? If the time of the operation is known, maybe it makes it easier to identify potential donors?

Methodist University Hospital in Memphis has confirmed that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant — and the disclosure was made with Jobs’s permission, the hospital says.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the hospital said Jobs was the sickest person on the waiting list at the time the donor organ became available.

The hospital’s statement is likely in response to growing questions about the transplant. On Tuesday morning, the New York Times published a high-profile story asking whether Jobs’s money and power helped him to jump to the front of the queue. “Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous,” the paper said.

The hospital’s statement appears to be a flat denial that Jobs received any preferential treatment.

“He received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available,” the hospital said.

The hospital said Jobs is doing well.

“Mr. Jobs is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis.”

Full text of the statement after the jump.

Hacker George Hotz appears to have found a way to jailbreak and unlock the iPhone 3GS.

The 19-year-old Hotz, better known as GeoHot, may have found a hole in the iPhone 3GS boot sequence, which will allow hackers to unlock the device.

The crack comes just days after the release of the new iPhone. Previous jailbreaking hacks have sometimes taken weeks.

Details are hazy, however. Hotz has posted a screenshot that appears to show a custom command inserted into the iPhone’s iBoot, implying that signature checks had been bypassed, according to one explanation in the comments of the post. If so, it’s the first step in jailbreaking the device.

In addition, the just-released UltraSn0w unlock should also be compatible with the iPhone 3GS.

Via iClarified.

Kevin Miller has a great story about how he used the new “Find My iPhone” feature to track down his stolen iPhone and recover it from a thief.

In Chicago for a Lego convention, Kevin had his iPhone stolen in a bar. Luckily, he’d just activated the Find My iPhone feature. The following day, Kevin and a couple of his Lego-convention friends used the iPhone’s built-in GPS and Google Maps to track its location.

As they converged on the crook, he tried to make a run for it. I won’t ruin the rest of the story. It’s a great story, well told.

The Dev-Team, an iPhone hacking group, has released a free jailbreaking and unlocking tool for the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Called UltraSn0w, the easy to use unlocking tool jailbreaks the 3.0 iPhone to allow unauthorized apps and unlocks it for use with other carriers.

Apple broke the law by lying about Steve Jobs health, says a top marketing professor.

But whether the Security and Exchange Commission has the “balls” to prosecute is unclear.

Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communication at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, says that Apple’s communications about its CEO’s health violated the SEC’s full disclosure regulations.

UPDATE: Reuters reports that Steve Jobs was seen leaving Apple’s campus on Monday. “He was seen leaving the main Apple building in Cupertino, California and getting into a black car alone that was then driven off by men in black suits with ear-pieces,” the news service reported.

CNBC’s Jim Goldman is saying that Steve Jobs returned to work at Apple on Monday.

Employees have seen Jobs around Apple’s campus, Goldman says. “Officials at Apple have yet to respond to multiple phone calls and emails seeking guidance about Jobs and his whereabouts, but employees are doing what Apple PR isn’t, and that’s confirming that he’s here at work,” says Goldman.

The information jibes with this morning’s iPhone 3G S press release,
which quoted Jobs for the first time since he took his medical leave,
implying he’s back in charge.

This is great news – if it’s true. I’d be delighted to see Jobs back in charge at Apple, but trouble is, I’m not sure I trust Goldman. He’s proven as unreliable as Apple’s own PR surrounding Jobs’ illness. Goldman last year said Steve Jobs wasn’t sick, just days before he took sick leave. For this, he was accused by NewsWeek columnist Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve) of being “played and punked” by Apple PR.

So I’m willing to give a prize to the first reader who sends in a picture of Steve Jobs at Apple’s campus or a picture of his car (preferably parked in a handicapped spot).

Yeah, I know, it’s stalkerish. But I’d like to know if Steve Jobs is really back at work, and this is one way of getting to the bottom of it.

BTW, I’ve called and emailed Apple’s PR asking if Jobs is back at work — but I’m not holding my breath.

Show us Steve’s smiling face. Let’s cheer his return to work and good health!

Steve Jobs may not be back to work yet, but Fake Steve is.

Fake Steve Jobs (aka Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons) has started blogging again.

Over the weekend, Fake Steve made a series of off-color jokes about Steve Jobs’ recent liver transplant. The posts are classic Fake Steve  — sick, tasteless and LOL funny.

Unfortunately, it may not last.

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in his first officially quoted statement for the company since taking a medical leave of absence in January.

Jobs’ comment came in the wake of a news release touting one million iPhone 3G S units sold in its first weekend since being released last Friday. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever,” continued Jobs in the release, which also noted that six million customers have downloaded the new iPhone 3.0 software since it was released last Wednesday.

The statement did not indicate whether or not Jobs would return to work at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA on Monday.

Apple issued $30 iTunes store credits over the weekend to some US customers whose iPhone 3G S models were not able to be activated for service with AT&T when the phones were released on Friday.

In an email sent to customers who had ordered the new smartphone through Apple’s online store prior to the official release, Apple apologized for delays “due to system issues and continued high activation volumes,” which the email said “could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.”

Customers were told to expect an email with the iTunes credit authorization on Monday and asked to accept the company’s “sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.”

Some customers were particularly miffed last week after having received initial notice from UPS that their phones were scheduled for delivery on Wednesday, but saw deliveries rescheduled to Friday’s official release date, apparently at Apple’s behest.

Jobs has blocked the FAA from officially tracking his jet’s flights (a routine request; some simple paperwork with the National Business Aviation Association). But his 15-seater Gulfstream 5 has a distinctive tail number — N2N — that makes it easy for aviation buffs to track its movements on the Internet.

And while it looks like he flew to Memphis on March 23, possibly for a liver transplant — as CNBC claims to have independently confirmed — his jet made many more flights in April.

Could this 7,500 square foot mansion at 36 Morningside Place in Memphis be Steve Jobs’s new mansion?

Jobs has reportedly bought a large residence in Memphis after receiving a liver transplant in March at one of the city’s hospitals.

Forbes reports that Jobs may have bought a mansion in Memphis close to The Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute, a liver transplant center.

A finance reporter, Alexander Haislip, previously at Red Herring magazine, also says that Jobs has bought a mansion.

UPDATED: The problems are fixed. No more ‘Page Not Found’ errors. CoM is back to normal.

Sorry folks, there’s a database problem with the site, which is causing all news stories to return ‘Page Not Found’ errors.

I just published an in-depth review of the new iPhone 3G S and it’s camera, which I’ve been working on since dawn yesterday, so I’m super delighted by this turn of events. What a wonderful weekend surprise!

The site’s hosting provider is looking into it and promises a fix by the end of the day — kinda, maybe, fingers crossed.

Hopefully, CoM won’t need a liver transplant or anything like that!