John Brownlee - page 148

On Tuesday, the FBI seized a number of servers from DigitalOne, a Swiss hosting company that leases blade servers from a Virginia datacenter. The FBI had a warrant for only one particular server, used by a fraudulent “scareware” distributor, but the FBI ended up taking a lot more servers than the one they were actually looking for, knocking several web sites offline in the process… and making off with nearly all of popular offline reading platform Instapaper‘s user data, some of its codebase and some password encryption keys in the process.

Remember the hacker who exposed over 114,000 AT&T iPad customers’ personal data in last year’s widely publicized security breach? He just pled guilty.

We love Jan Michael Cart’s incredible iOS concept videos. We still wish Apple would bring his dashboard and voice recognition concepts to iOS 5.

Perhaps Cart’s latest idea is the one most closely in reach: he envisions cross-platform text chat between iOS and OS X computers, and foresees Apple releasing their new iMessage client on the Mac App Store.

Yesterday, Apple co-founder, occasional Cult of Mac commenter and just all-around huggable bear Steve Wozniak was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal, and as he has been wont to do quite a bit recently, he used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to talk about super-intelligent robots, futuristic androids and the ever present danger of machines enslaving humans.

If your audio taste is anything like mine, you’ll want to mute this music video for “Undivided,” the first single for the group Blush, feat. Snoopy Dog. It’s like someone vomiting jolly ranchers down your cochleas.

That said, make sure to watch it, because it was made by animator Shawn Harris using iOS app Brushes. Impressive, right? And we have the making off too!

Remember that Chinese teen who sold his kidney for an iPad 2? That was bad enough, but now another Chinese teen is following his lead and offering something even more irreplaceable in exchange for an iPhone 4. She’s selling her virginity.

In a shootout to determine which tablet has the best display over at DisplayMate, the iPad 2 came out ahead of the Eee Transformer and the Motorola Xoom. No surprises there.

What might be a bigger surprise is that the display experts over at DisplayMate have seriously approached the idea of whether or not the iPad 3 will get a Retina Display and have concluded that it would be nothing more than a marketing stunt… and would actually lower the quality of the iPad’s display while slowing down the hardware.

Apple COO Tim Cook happened to pop on by China Mobile’s headquarters earlier today. You know, just happened to be in the neighborhood, thought he’d see what was going on. No biggie.

Except China Mobile isn’t currently partnered with Apple. Oh, and they just happen to be the world’s largest mobile phone carrier, providing for over six hundred million customers. Biggie indeed.

Final Cut Pro X might now finally be available for purchase on the Mac App Store for a lower price than ever, but for some video professionals, it has not been worth the wait: a pretty update that sadly jettisons many of the features that they depend on. There may be hope on the horizon, though: Apple has reportedly claimed that Final Cut Pro X will be getting some of these missing features in future updates.

Jailbreak artist Comex has been hinting at plans to dust off Jailbreakme.com for a while now, allowing users on compatible iOS devices to jailbreak their systems just by loading the page in Mobile Safari. But what devices will be supported?

All of them running iOS 4.2.1 to iOS 4.3.3, for one. The iPad 2 for another. Hoorah!

Next month, AT&T will start rolling out its LTE network in the United States, prepping the ground for the launch of an LTE-equipped iPhone in 2012. Even though Ma Bell doesn’t actually have a 4G network in place right now, though, that’s not stopping them from selling 4G phones and bragging about their 4G speeds. New legislation working its way through the house wouldn’t stop that, but would make them append a caveat: their minimum data speeds.

Four years after it set the smartphone world on fire, Apple has won a patent for the original iPhone.

This isn’t just old news: it’s a huge win for Apple that will not only help Cupertino out in their case against Samsung, but according to some patent specialists could even allow Apple to go to war against other smartphone makers.

If you’ve got a small child with a sticky fingered fascination for your “magical” iPad, why not give him or her this adorable analog tablet instead?

A supposed new email from Steve claims that the only way to clean install Lion on a new machine is to install Snow Leopard first. We think it’s bogus, though: not only is that proposed solution just stupid and un-Apple-like, but we think there’s proof right in the email that it wasn’t sent from Steve’s iPhone, or even an iPhone at all.

All good things must come to an end. AT&T killed unlimited iPhone data almost a year ago, and now Verizon Wireless — which launched the CDMA iPhone 4 with unlimited data as a promotional stunt —is preparing to do the same.

With Lion’s release in July, Apple will switch over to a digital distribution of OS X through the Mac App Store. What if you’re one of the many Americans still on a modem, though? Or what if your broadband connection is slow? What if you are one of the increasing number of broadband users with a download cap? How will you install the 4GB OS X update?

Apple’s got a suggestion: bring your Mac on into the Apple Store and piggy back our free WiFi. Something tells me they might regret that.

One commonly cited reason why RIM’s would-be iPad killer sucks is that it doesn’t even have email and calendar support natively. To get the PlayBook to run email, you have to tether it to your BlackBerry, which is just stupid.

It’s about to get stupider, though. A new report is suggesting that the PlayBook doesn’t suck at email so much by design as by a complete lack of foresight. It might actually be impossible for the PlayBook to do email natively… at least without RIM radically overhauling their backend.

If you’re shooting a photo and uploading it to Flickr, chances are good that it’s on an iPhone 4, as Apple’s iconic smartphone has officially surpassed the Nikon D90 as the most popular camera on Yahoo’s photo sharing site.

This morning, the Apple Store briefly went down, and when it came back up, we had new Time Capsules, coming in two and three terabyte capacities starting at just $299.

After having his iPhone 4 literally stolen from his hand in a snatch-and-grab in San Francisco, Cabel Sasser was delighted to have it phone home two weeks later through Find My iPhone.

There was just one problem. The iPhone 4 was now 7,830 miles away. Here are the pictures, along with Cabel’s priceless reaction.

For almost twenty years now, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been toiling away, a lone developer who has single-handedly produced a library of old-school RPGs that contains over fifteen separate games.

To put the scope of Vogel’s prolificness in perspective, imagine if Richard Garriott had made the entire Ultima series by his lonesome and you’ll have an idea of the creativity and single-mindedness on display here: Vogel has collectively put together thousands of hours of some of the most intricately written and smartly crafted RPGs in computer gaming history at a pace that would give some of the biggest game design houses a permanent case of creative whiplash.

Vogel’s most recent and popular games have long been available for the Mac, but his latest title, Avadon: The Black Fortress, marks development for an entirely new platform: the iPad. It’s worth getting excited for.

Every day, there’s another app bundle, and sometimes it seems like each is more forgettable than the last. Code Canyon’s Freelance Mac App Bundle is a wonderful exception: it’s the first app bundle we’ve seen in ages worth getting excited about.

Although Apple still sells a white model, the piano black plastic MacBook is much missed. It might be Back to Black time for the MacBook line, though, as several anonymous sources are now reporting that the Thunderbolt and Sandy Bridge equipped MacBook Air could get a black anodized aluminum finish when it lands in July.

While you can hardly blame Microsoft entirely for this one, you’d think they’d at least notice that the featured Dictionary application on their official Windows Phone page had stolen its icon wholesale from the competition. Could we get a slow clap, please?

[via Craig Hockenberry’s Twitter]

When can you expect iOS 5 to drop on your iPhone? September’s a given, but the latest rumor gives an exact date that all the ripples of the iCloud will come to your device… along with the iPhone 5.