AT&T used its Facebook page to quash rumors about an iPhone tethering plan Friday.

Apple fan site Appmodo quoted “a source with AT&T” Friday, saying iPhone tethering would cost users an $55 a month and be available sometime in July.

UPDATE: MMS and tethering are now scheduled for September, according to a report at Appmodo, and tethering will cost an additional $55 per month on top of iPhone data plans.

At this writing AT&T has not issued a statement confirming or denying the report and a call to ATT media relations was not returned. (Thanks, Jason)

An admin for the Facebook account made a status update saying, “There are a lot of reports out there, but wanted you guys to know that rumors of $55 tethering plan on top of an unlimited data plan are false,” says the AT&T statement. “We’ll have more news to share when the iPhone tethering option is closer to launch.”

Calls to AT&T were unreturned Friday afternoon, but Mark Siegel, AT&T executive director for media relations told Cult of Mac on Thursday the company would offer a tethering plan “in the future,” without giving details of pricing or a date certain.

Last fall I bought a 13-inch unibody MacBook, and I fell in love. For the last seven months I’ve been head-over-heels with the machine. But now there’s a new love in my life: a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which is shaping up to be the perfect laptop.

Released last week, Apple’s MacBook Pro 13″ is an amazing machine. It’s priced as a starter, but it’s now truly a “Pro” laptop. It’s worthy of real work. It adds many of the “Pro” features previously reserved for its higher-end siblings, but costs hundreds of dollars less.

It now has an awesome, all-day battery; a bright, energy-sipping screen; and a backlit keyboard. Firewire is back, and there’s an indispensible SD Card slot. And yet it starts at just $1,200. For a computer of this quality and power, that’s a steal.

Full review after the jump, including real-world benchmarks and tons of pics.

Language app iLingua is keeping down prices for summer, one dictionary/phrase book will set you back $1.99 on iTunes.

The Spanish language demo looks promising: words or phrases have images to make connecting the dots easy. The woman speaks very slowly, which is good for learning, thought it may sound a little silly if you cow out and just play a phrase like, “Hey this room is way too small” to a native speaker.

Background music on a loop is distracting and makes the sounds harder to hear, not clear whether you can turn that off or it’s just a demo thing.

Available in Russian, German, Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese — would’ve loved to have this for last year’s trip to Shanghai, where trying to get a restaurant reservation from the concierge (in what seemed slow, careful English) elicited nervous laughter and frustration all around…
We’ve written about using language/dictionary iPhone apps on the job —  have you used one traveling?

A new Mac Trojan has been spotted “in the wild” on a porno website, prompting a wave of misleading and inaccurate Mac malware stories.

A Trojan named OSX/Jahlav-C has been spotted on a porno website (xhottube.net), the British security group Sophos said on Friday.

In a blog post about the virus, Sophos also mentioned an update to an email worm called OSX/Tored-A, which has prompted news organizations to warn of renewed malware attacks against Macs.

But only the OSX/Jahlav-C is in the wild, and even Sophos described the OSX/Tored-A as “lame.”

The new OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan infects Macs when visitors to the “hardcore” porno website try to watch the site’s main video. They are prompted to download a “missing Video ActiveX Object” but are infected with the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan instead, says Sophos.

The social engineering here isn’t very sophisticated — ActiveX is associated with Windows. In addition, it’s unclear what the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan actually does. Sophos says “it will eventually run a Perl script that uses http to communicate with a remote website and download code supplied by the attacker.”

What that code does, Sophos doesn’t say. Apparently, it hasn’t executed the Perl script yet. Sophos rates the Trojan as low to medium risk.

“Although there is only a tiny amount of Mac malware compared to Windows viruses, that’s going to be little consolation if your gorgeous new MacBook gets infected,” said a sarcastic post on the company blog. “And sadly we know that many Mac users still believe they are somehow magically immune from attacks.”

The company made a condescending video demonstrating the attack (posted after the jump) — “Is it safe to surf for porn on an Apple Mac?”

UPDATE: ParetoLogic, a Canadian anti-virus company, is also warning about OSX/Jahlav-C. The Trojan is associated with PornTube, says MacNN.

UPDATE 2: Reader Scam Finder says the Trojan doesn’t exist on the xhottube site. Scam Finder tried to purposely infect his Mac but failed. See the comment below.

Safari 4 has been downloaded 11 million times is the first three days of release, Apple said in a press release on Friday — and 6 million of those were on Windows. There’s more Windows users running Apple’s  browser than Mac users.

Eleven million downloads in three days is quite impressive, but not a record. In June last year, Mozilla set a Guinness World Record with 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in one day — the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

Apple claims Safari 4 is the fastest, most innovative browser available (It executes JavaScript nearly 8x faster than IE 8 and loads HTML web pages more than 3x faster than IE 8, Apple claims).

The browser will get better with the release of Snow Leopard in September. Says Apple:

“In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent. Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page. Safari running on Snow Leopard also delivers HTTP streaming, making it easy to deliver high-quality audio and video in industry standard formats from any web server without the need for browser plug-ins.”

Safari 4 was officially launched on Monday at WWDC, but had been widely available for months as a beta.

The “sealed” battery in Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro is easily replaced with standard screwdrivers, a teardown by iFixit shows.

The MacBook battery is not supposed to be changed by the user. Sealed inside the case, Apple encourages customers to pay Apple $130 to change the battery and dispose of the old one.

However, the battery is easily accessed with a standard Phillips screwdriver, and the battery removed with a tri-wing screwdriver, iFixit found when dissassmbling the device on Tuesday.

In addition, iFixit notes that the single audio jack (see post below) is innapropriate for a “Pro” machine. The jack supports analog and digital audio-out, and analog audio-in, but not digital audio-in.

“If you need digital audio-in, this is not the machine for you.” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens in an email.

Wiens also said the MBP’s new SD card slot is “rather unimaginative.”

“Half the card hangs outside the computer,” said Wiens. “Apparently, Apple couldn’t free up enough space for a slot that would make the card completely captive.”

Wiens notes the battery is beefier (360 grams, about 60 grams heavier than the old one), but is rated 60 Watt-hours, compared to the older battery’s 45 W-h. Apple claims the battery will last for 7 hours. The previous MacBook’s battery was rated 5 hours (yeah, right!)

More details and pictures from iFixit after the jump.

What goes around comes around: a ring of disk jockeys have been charged with running a six-figure iTunes scam.
Nine British djs allegedly used 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards to buy their own tracks to the tune of £500,000 (USD $815,000). They were paid £185,000 (USD $300,000) in royalties before getting caught.

The fake buys also boosted them up higher in the iTunes sales rankings, generating further buzz and more royalties. It all started in September, when the DJs used American music distributor TuneCore to get their music on iTunes.

The scam played out with the police in London in New York about three months later after Apple got hit with ‘stop payment’ orders from credit card companies, saying accounts were fraudulent.

The DJs, ages 19 to 41, were arrested in London and the Midlands on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Via Metro UK

UPDATE: The security lock on this device does not block the SuperDrive. See our review

Eagle-eyed reader Ronald Kang thinks the new 13-inch MacBook Pro may have some design problems.

Poring over pictures of the machine on Apple’s website, Kang is worried about two things: the Kensington Security Slot blocking the Superdrive; and the single audio I/O jack, which makes the machine unsuitable for “Pro” audio recording.

You have to love the guys at iFixit. No sooner does Apple release new hardware into the wild than those guys are all over it with their Phillips #0, Spudger and Tri-wing screwdrivers like so many buzzards on a fresh carcass in the desert.

As we post, they are liveblogging their tear-down of a new 13″ MacBook Pro. If you’re enthralled by computer innards and don’t get queasy at the sight of silicon, you’ll want to head on over for a look-see.

My real life, I’m a Mac moment.

So I’m siting on an airplane trying to leave DC yesterday, after three hours on the tarmac, and the flight attendants bringing us “Apple Juice” (really just Jack Daniels), even the most stone-faced folks with their noses in books will get chatty. He tells me where he works, they’re a client, I tell him where I work, and so on.

After take off, he sees me trying to watch Lonesome Dove on my ipod and mentions he has a splitter and did I want to watch a movie on his computer. Sure I say.

Well that’s when the fun starts, his computer takes like 10 minutes to boot, Windows had a hard-crash he says. then when the movie starts, it’s all stuttery and such,we try to watch for like 10 minutes, and finally I mention, hey, you wanna try mine? He says, sure, may as well…

I pull out the 17inch Macbook Pro, like it was the gold artifact in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, his eyes go wide, I open the lid, it’s on instantly, I’ve got like half a dozen spreadsheets and documents open, it doesn’t matter, I pop the movie in, it starts right up, as a final floursih I produce my remote control, and set it next to him, “You Drive,” I said.

The punchline: My new friend, is a senior executive at Dell.

The Movie, Lakeview Terrace, not so awesome.

My I’m a Mac Moment, Priceless.

Sound off and share your “I’m a Mac Moments” in the comments, I’ll pull them together into a best of post later in the week!