iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0 Hits The Streets

You might want to plug your iPhone or iPod Touch into iTunes now and do a sync as well as a check for updates. That’s because iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0 is now available. This update is free for iPhone users, but $9.95 for iPod Touch users. If you’ve downloaded this and installed it, please post a comment and let us know what you think of it. Also if something goes south and you have a solution to fix it, that would be good to know as well.

Bing Serves Porn From Its Own Domain To Protect You

You might remember that I made a passing reference to the fact that Microsoft’s Bing search engine makes it real easy to find porn. Microsoft has now decided that it porn needs its own “red light district.” How does this work? Here’s a brief description from the Bing Community Blog:

First, potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be. This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off.

In addition, we will begin returning source url information in the query string for images and video content so that companies who already use this method of filtering will be able to catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers.

I’ll give Microsoft points for this. They’ve come up with a solution that allows companies and schools to filter X rated content easily, without affecting those who don’t care or are lonely and horny. That’s the sort of balance that’s needed in the world. We need more of that.

Apple Issues Warning About Third Party Devices Syncing With iTunes [UPDATED]

You knew that Apple wasn’t going to sit idly by and allow third party devices to sync to iTunes. But what I didn’t expect was a warning about it that is posted in their knowledge base:

Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

I guess that translates to “It works for now. But if it doesn’t work in the future because we do something, don’t come crying to us.” That’s pretty soft by Apple standards. I really thought that they would have sent the iLawyers after companies that have made their devices sync with iTunes. I’m thinking specifically of Palm and the new Pre here, but the BlackBerry does the same thing via BlackBerry Desktop Manager on Windows. Perhaps Apple isn’t looking for a fight… At least not yet.

UPDATE: Palm has responded to Apple via All Things Digital. Let the mud slinging begin.

Opera Unite Is Going To Reinvent The Web… Or So They Say….

Remember I mentioned a teaser page that I saw on the Opera site last week. They’ve stopped teasing and announce Opera Unite. What is it you ask? I’ll let them tell you:

Opera today unveiled Opera Unite, a new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web. Opera Unite turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers.

Opera Unite makes serving data as simple and easy as browsing the Web. For consumers, Opera Unite services give greater control of private data and make it easy to share data with any device equipped with a modern Web browser.

For Web developers, Opera Unite services are based on the same open Web standards as Web sites today. This dramatically simplifies the complexity of authoring cutting-edge Web services. With Opera Unite, creating a full Web service is now as easy as coding a Web page.

Sounds interesting. It might be cool if it catches on. You can take a look at the Opera Unite site and watch a YouTube video about the product. Then you can judge for yourself.

Sorry For The Radio Silence….

…. Over the last 24 hours. My attention was distracted because my condo got robbed.

Let me start at the beginning.

I have a motion sensitive camera installed in my condo and it is aimed at the door. The camera will send e-mails with pictures to my BlackBerry if it detects motion and I can log into it remotely and see what’s going on. Yesterday I got a stream of e-mails on my Blackberry from the camera. I knew that wasn’t good and when I checked, my place was being robbed. A man and woman had kicked the door in and started trashing my place. I quickly was on the phone with the police and they dispatched what turned out to be five police cars to the place to try and capture the bad guys, but by the time the police had arrived, the thieves had escaped. As an aside, I have video of five or six police officers entering my unit with guns drawn. I made my way home via cab to asses the damage. They really trashed the place, but it was apparent what was stolen. All of my wife’s jewelry was stolen. Most if not all of the jewelry was from our wedding and had great sentimental value to her. Along with that went a set of our car keys (but not the car, which is in hiding at our dealership waiting to be re-keyed), one of my cheques, and My MacBook Pro. All of my personal and business stuff was on it. Two saving graces though. First, I back up nightly (see, backing up can really save your butt) and the computer was password protected. So I had my data and it is highly unlikely that the thieves are going to get access to my stuff. So they’ll likely either fence it as is or they’ll take it to an Apple Store. That’s where it will come back to bite them as it has been flagged in Apple’s system so if they walk into an Apple Store, they’re busted. I also took the precaution of notifying all of the independent Apple dealers in the area about the theft. So I’m hoping that it will turn up something. If you see a Santa Rosa (mid 2007) MacBook Pro 15″ with the serial number W87272V3X91. Call the cops. Please.

Currently the cops have the images from the security camera, and they’re working with the condo to pull video from the video system that monitors every entrance. Needless to say if they can get good descriptions of these scumbags, they’re going to get caught.

All day today I have been dealing with insurance adjusters, police, the bank, car dealer, property manager, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t recall because my mind is a mess. I don’t wish this on anybody.

In closing there’s some people who I’d like to thank:

• The Toronto Police at 22 division including the responding officers and the Major Crime unit. I have no doubt you’ll get these scumbags.
• “M.K.” who in our hour of need dropped everything she was doing to assist us in any way she could. Your kindness will not be forgotten.
• Our insurance agents who are doing their best to make the claims process as easy as possible.
• The property management who fixed the entrance in record time.

Oh yeah, if the people who did this are reading this. We’ve got your faces on camera. The cops are going to be looking for you and because it’s being handled by the Major Crimes division of the Toronto Police Force, you’re not going to get away. You should be expecting a knock on your door shortly.

Psystar May Not Be Able To Escape The iLawyers…… Even In Bankruptcy

If Psystar thought that declaring bankruptcy would keep them from being the target of Apple’s hordes of iLawyers, they may have to think twice. News.com is reporting that Apple still wants to get the Mac clonemaker into court:

Apple filed a motion on June 5 asking the court to modify a stay of proceedings and to compel Mac clone-maker Psystar to show up in court in November as previously scheduled.

Psystar got an automatic stay of proceedings when it filed for bankruptcy in May, but Apple doesn’t think the company should be able to use the bankruptcy laws to do so.

Why does Apple feel this way? Simple:

At the heart of Apple’s new motion is that despite Psystar’s bankruptcy, the company is still in business and continues to sell its computers with Mac OS X pre-installed. The latter is what prompted Apple to file a copyright infringement lawsuit in the first place.

Personally, I think this is part of a larger strategy by Psystar. They don’t have any hope of winning this and they know it. Therefore they stall, delay, and do anything to keep from being shut down by the courts. IANAL but I’m not sure how you would fight that.

Perhaps we’re about to find out.

Download IE8, Donate To Charity….Hmmm… There’s Must Be More To This

I must admit the cynic in me is having a hard time processing this at face value.

If you go to this website, you can download Internet Explorer 8 and at the same time Microsoft will donate 8 meals to Feeding America. On the surface, that sounds like a great gesture. It doesn’t cost you anything to download IE8 and some of the less fortunate will get fed. Win win right?

Here’s where the cynic in me comes out. If we look around the browser universe, we see the following:

• 11 million copies of Safari 4 were downloaded in the first three days of the browser being available.
• According to Net Applications as of May 2009, Internet Explorer’s global share of browser usage stood at 65.5%, compared with 22.5% for Firefox, 8.4% for Safari, and 1.8% for Google’s Chrome. Keep in mind that IE used to have a share around 90% of the market.

So is this about helping the needy, or is it about jacking their share of the browser market under the guise of doing good?

I’ll let you weigh in and give me your two cents.

Opera To “Reinvent The Web” On June 16th… Huh?

This teaser page has appeared on the Opera website which claims that they are about to “Reinvent The Web.” My best guess is that Opera 10 will come out of beta on that day. Or perhaps they’ve hired Al Gore who (at least in his mind) invented the Internet in the first place. I guess we’ll see on Tuesday.

Anybody have any other guesses?

Firefox 3.0.11 Is Out And About

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.11 last night. Apparently this latest update addresses stability and security issues that include JavaScript chrome privilege escalation, URL spoofing with invalid Unicode characters, and SSL tampering via non-200 responses to proxy CONNECT requests. If you want to see the details, check the release notes and then download your preferred flavor of Firefox.

Macs Get Two New Attack Threats…. Fanbois Not So Sure About Mac Security Now

If you’re an Apple fanboi, you have to wonder what is happening to the once seemingly invincible Mac operating system. A number of threats have appeared over the last year an a bit and now two more have now hit the streets:

On Tuesday, Paretologic warned about a porn site that was downloading malware that targets both the PC and the Mac. Mac users get redirected to the pagemac.php page, which downloads a QuickTime.dmg file, the blog post says.

Sophos explained in blog post on Thursday that visitors to the malicious porn site are told they have to download an ActiveX component to view the videos. Instead, a Trojan, dubbed OSX/Jahlavc, gets downloaded.

Okay, you have to surf to a porn site to get nailed by this. But that isn’t the point. The point is that the number of attacks that are out there for the Mac are growing. So you can expect more of this in the future, and they will become more sophisticated. It will only be a matter of time before Mac users are running anti-virus software just like the PC users that they love to make fun of.