Leander Kahney - page 62

Steve Jobs is officially back at work after six-month’s medical leave, an Apple spokesperson just told Bloomberg reporter Connie Guglielmo in a phone interview.

“Steve is back to work,” said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling on Monday. “We are very glad to have him back.”

Jobs is working at Apple a few days a week and working from home the remainder of the time, Dowling added. Jobs reportedly returned to work last week, but Monday’s statement is Apple’s first official word.

Jobs took six month’s medical leave in January, promising to return by the end of June. Monday is June 29. During his absence, Jobs had a liver transplant in Memphis, TN.

LINK.

After using the iPhone 3GS for a week, here’s five of my favorite, non-obvious tricks I’ve picked up.

A couple of weeks ago the Swedish site Dreamfeld.se posted a video showing the iPhone operating system running on a Mac Pro and a big multitouch screen.

The video was pretty impressive. It looked like the world’s biggest iPhone running on a 24-inch monitor. The video soon went viral on blogs, YouTube and Twitter. It’s been watched more than 300,000 times and is still being passed around.

But the whole thing is a fake; a viral video experiment to see how many hits could be generated.

How did they do it?

A Parisian iPhone owner was videoing friends in a backyard swimming pool when he accidentally dropped it in the water. Amazingly, the iPhone kept recording and was working fine when he fished it out.

“It still frickin’ works,” he says amazed into the still-recording camera. Watch the video of the entire episode below.

And it still works fine, says the owner. “Phone still working fine with no issues whatsoever,” he says in the comments to the video. “I’m probably the luckiest guy alive!!”

Although the iPhone 3GS is an exceptionally well-made piece of hardware, it is NOT waterproof. This iPhone had a rubbery condom cover on, which probably helped it survive the dip in the pool.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

Steve Jobs has reportedly bought a mansion in Memphis. It’s not this one, but maybe he’s living near Elvis’ Graceland. CC-licensed picture by Pictophile.

Back in April, rumors swirled that Steve Jobs had bought a mansion in a swanky neighborhood of downtown Memphis while he was receiving medical treatment. The rumors didn’t gain much traction — it was just too weird — but now the WSJ says Jobs received a life-saving liver transplant at one of the city’s hospitals.

The rumor about the mansion started with Alexander Haislip, who runs a private equity site, PEHub Blog, citing a “well-connected business person in Memphis.”

Today, Haislip adds some more interesting details. It’s a 7,500 square-foot mansion located at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a “swank” part of downtown Memphis, Haislip says. Surrounded by old growth trees, the mansion is painted yellow with white trim and a pool in the back.

The mansion, built in 1914, has undergone substantial renovation since it was purchased last month. “I thought the house had flooded and the roof had caved in or something,” one neighborhood resident says. “There was an inordinate number of workers there. There’s been large crews preparing this house for someone.”

Among the renovations? Upgraded security. “Whoever “bought” the house installed video cameras in the trees and there is a security guard in a white jeep,” says another neighborhood resident. “It’s been very secretive.”

Haislip dug into property records hoping to find Steve Jobs on the title, but the new owner is listed as a mysterious LLC, which he says traces back to a Memphis law firm. The lawyer  in charge gave him a no comment and the realtor who sold the mansion said she didn’t know who the client was, she dealt only with the lawyers. Haislip spoke to residents and no one has actually seen Jobs, but one claims to have seen his wife, Laurene Powell.

Haislip didn’t name the street, but it may be Morningside Drive, according to a comment in a related Barron’s blog post.

The commenter also says the mansion was bought by LGHC LLC — the name of the mysterious LLC — which he says shares an address with Memphis law firm Burch,Porter & Johnson.

I did some digging myself. The law firm appears to be real, but a search for Morningside Drive in Memphis turns up only Morningside Street, which is definitely NOT a Steve Jobs kind of neighborhood judging by the Street View pictures.

I also searched local tax and property records for Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell and LGHC LLC, as well as several real estate sites and Zillow — turning up nothing.

Meanwhile, CNBC is reporting that it confirmed Jobs’ private Gulstream jet flew from San Jose to Memphis in late March, which fits the WSJ’s transplant timeframe.

There’s plenty of naysayers pooh poohing the iPhone 3G S. It’s a minor upgrade, they say. Not worth the money, especially for 3G owners.

But after buying one on Friday morning and playing with it all day, I can say with 100% certainty that that’s complete and utter rubbish.

The 3G S is a major step up from the iPhone 3G, worth every penny. Sell the car; sell the house; sell the kids: you must have this phone.

The full review after the jump, plus plenty of test photos and video shot in sunny San Francisco.

Steve Jobs had a liver transplant about two months ago but is making a speedy recovery and will return to Apple in June, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there’s nothing further to say,” Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton told the Journal.

Jobs had the transplant in Tennessee and may return to work part time, the Journal said.

In January, Bloomberg News reported that Jobs was considering a liver transplant.

Jobs took six months medical leave in January, promising to return to work in June, but many have been pessimistic about his prospects.Jobs lost weight rapidly in 2008.

The Journal said Jobs had the surgery in Tennessee because of the state’s short waiting list — 48 days compared to 306 nationally. A cancer expert told the Journal that Jobs’ pancreatic cancer may have metastasized and spread to his liver, requiring a transplant.

Five-year survival rates for liver-transplants is about 75 percent, the Journal said. The survival rate of slow-growing tumors like Jobs’ — with or without liver surgery — is usually longer than a decade, the expert said.

The Journal said Jobs has been spotted at Apple’s HQ during his leave.