Earlier this week, Apple removed a WikiLeaks app from the App Store and joined the shameful ranks of U.S. companies that oppose press freedom.

Here’s the disgraceful episode as seen through the eyes of Next Media Animation, a Taiwanese tabloid that animates the news.

Jobs kicks WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of the App Store. He returns to hug other companies that have tried to privately censor WikiLeaks (Amazon, PayPal, Visa and Bank of America etc.). Outside, Assange pulls out an Android phone and fires up the banned WikiLeaks App.

As Next Media shows, you can’t suppress the truth. My Christmas wish is that Steve Jobs would get on the right side of this immensely important story. Unfortunately, he’s not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfOZ58USCyI

Via MICGadget. Thanks Chris.

There’s a lot of fantastic Apple-centric projects trying to get off the ground thanks to crowd-sourced funding site Kickstarter, but if you’re green-conscious to boot, why not check out Eric Strebel’s Solar Vox, a portable gadget charger perfect for juicing up your iOS device?

The Solar Vox needs $35,000 of funding to become a real project, so if you’ve got Gaia tattooed anywhere on your body or just want a way to juice your Touch when you’re out hiking, maybe drop a few bucks on this one and help make it real.

The Cherokee Language isn’t one that doesn’t get a lot of play off of the reservation, but you’re probably carrying around at least one terminal for it in your pocket: the Cherokee Language is now a part of iOS.

It’s actually been on iOS for a while now, since iOS 4.1, but the road to getting there was long: three years ago, the Cherokee Nation made a request of Apple that they would add their language to those supported on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. In September, though, Apple finally baked it into their mobile operating system along with approximately fifty other languages.

Cherokee Nation’s language technology representative Joseph Erb was pretty excited to see it added. “There are countries vying to get on these devices for languages, so we are pretty excited we were included.”

Cherokee is a dying language, and only 8,000 members of the approximately 300,000 strong tribe still speak it. Perhaps a few more will be turned on now that it’s a part of the most respected mobile operating system on Earth.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might have made TIME Magazine’s title of “Person of the Year,” but the austere Financial Times has a much different take, and they’re giving the title to none other than Steve Jobs… and while there’s many reasons the Financial Times think Jobs qualifies, most of it boils down to the iPad.

When you try to open a file that your Mac doesn’t already have a default app registered to, it doesn’t know what to do, so it either asks you to choose the application you want to use, or it will — if you so desire it — unceremoniously dump you back to Finder.

That’s actually not a very elegant way to handle unrecognized file extensions. Windows has a better system, for goodness’ sake: it will automatically search the web for applications that can open the file.

Luckily, with the arrival of the Mac App Store in January as well as the release of Mac OS X 10.6.6, that’s all slated to change. As it turns out, Apple has very cleverly deigned to integrate the App Store into the prompt you get when OS X doesn’t know what to do with a file: you can now search the Mac App Store for one that’ll work to open it. Keen!

Need a last-minute stocking stuffer, or wondering how to keep that New Year’s resolution? Digifit is giving away its $80 ANT+ Digifit Connect — just download their free Digifit app, then pop for the $15 in-app upgrade (which allows the app to connect with the dongle).

The idea is pretty much the same as with the Wahoo Fisica dongle (also $80): Attach the Digifit Connect to an iPhone (or iPad or iPod) and it’ll communicate with any ANT+ heart-rate monitor, footpod, bicycle cadence or speed sensor; then workout data can be tracked and analyzed through the Digifit app, or download the data to one of several websites, like New Leaf Fitness.

Apple and Android have consumed much of the ink used to describe the tablet wars. Now HP is attempting to grab some of the spotlight; it’s first move, an interview dissing Google’s mobile operating system as “backward looking” and preparing to take on Apple’s iPad with a Franken-tablet: part Palm and part revamped Slate.

HP’s Jon Rubinstein, who helped create the iMac and iPod when at Apple, has gone onto an executive position at Palm, which was then acquired by HP. Rubinstein, in a Wall Street Journal interview, talks about competition and the remade Slate tablet, now named the PalmPad, ahead of the upcoming CES.

I love my new MacBook Air, but I’m terrified of it being stolen. I’ve been bitten on this before with a top-of-the-line, 15-inch MacBook Pro that was stolen (as I discovered later, by a drug-addicted friend) a mere two months after I bought it. The new MacBook Air’s an even bigger worry, since it’s light weight and small form factor make it all the more a target for a quick snatch-and-run.

Apple doesn’t have a Mac-centric version of their “Find my iPhone” app, but I’ve been looking into Hidden, an OS X application that hides in the background processes of your Mac and only broadcasts your Mac’s location when you go to the official website and tell it to ping your laptop.

If that sounds up your alley, there’s now officially no reason to give Hidden a download: usually $20, the application is now free for the rest of the month. Just go here to sign up.

Steve Jobs has a number one fan in the most powerful man in the world. In a recent interview, President Obama cited the Apple CEO as a laudable example of wealth that Americans should be proud to call one of their own.

In response to a reporter’s question, President Obama referred to Jobs as an example of the “American dream” and said his success should be celebrated, not derided.

When we talk about the iPad 2, we already know at least some of what to expect when Apple officially unveils their newest tablet in April: FaceTime support, an iPhone 4 like gyroscope and maybe a higher-resolution (but not Retina) display. Those are all pretty much lock-ins.

When it comes to iOS devices, though, Apple has a tendency to rejigger the device’s physical design in the second gen — consider the aesthetic difference between the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, for example — so what does Ive and Co. plan to tweak in the iPad 2’s casing? A Japanese blog citing anonymous Chinese sources claims to have the answer, if we’re willing to believe them.