Xinoura's from Geek to Chic

LawWatcher writes "On October 1, 2008, a federal judge in California upheld a class action claiming that Apple and AT&T Mobility's five-year exclusive voice and data service provider agreement for the iPhone violates the anti-monopoly provisions of the antitrust laws. The court also ruled that Apple may have violated federal and California criminal computer fraud and abuse statutes by releasing version 1.1.1 of its iPhone operating software when Apple knew that doing so would damage or destroy some iPhones that had been 'unlocked' to enable use of a carrier other than AT&T."

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eldavojohn writes "You may recall us discussing some legislation about online music. More decisions are being made that may affect how much money Apple must impart to labels and musicians. Right now, it's 9 cents a track — which adds up, when you sell 2.4 billion tracks each year. The Copyright Royalty Board is asking for 15 cents a track (66% increase) and Apple isn't going to agree." Reader scorp1us points out a similar article at CNN; both stories mention that Apple has intimated such a change might cause a complete shutdown of the iTunes Music Store. Update: 10/02 21:03 GMT by T : According to CNet, the rate has been officially frozen at 9.1 cents per track.

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Fanboi Killa writes "Apple is investigating damning claims, published in a leading French newspaper, that its computers emit a toxic odor containing chemicals including the cancer-causing benzene. Apple has not denied the accusations. Its spokesman, Bill Evans, told Macworld the company had not found any evidence to support the claim but Apple would continue to investigate. Posts on Apple's own discussion boards suggest the Mac maker knew about potentially toxic odors being linked to its computers as early as December last year."

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ds writes "Apple, this morning, announced they are dropping the iPhone Developer NDA in respect to released software. Previously, iPhone developers were legally bound even after their software had been released." Another reader adds, "Early release software is still covered, but this should bring about increased developer interaction, as well as a slew of iPhone dev books." The complete message about the NDA change can be seen for now at Apple's iPhone Developer site, and is reproduced below.

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ImNotAtWork writes "Apple is allowing IBM's Lotus to be installed on iPhones. Recently it killed a developer-submitted program that was deemed competitive with Apple's product."

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Boxee, an open source media center with a focus on UI and social networking is now available on Apple TV!

Boxee will play any non-DRM content, and let users share information with each other and their existing social networks about what they’re watching or listening to. It will also aggregate all your entertainment (video, music, images) into one place and add in any RSS/XML/MMS feed (with mainstream content from sites like Hulu & ABC coming soon).

You can read more about Boxee in this article, or watch the video below.

The installation is very simple, thanks to an installer which formats a USB drive and sets it up to do the installation for you once plugged into your Apple TV.

If you would like to get an invite to the Boxee alpha, simply follow this link http://www.boxee.tv/atvhacks. You can then grab the USB-drive installer software from here.

The atv-bootloader team have today launched atvusb-creator, which creates USB flash drive based installers that include patchstick, factory restore and various Linux distributions.

This version is comes with ssh, bin tools, and two plugins (XBMC for Mac and Boxee for Mac). That’s right, two full blown OSX applications with their own AppleTV plugin to launch and get updates.

Currently, it is only available to run on OS X, but Linux and Windows versions should be following within the week.

Download it http://atvusb-creator.googlecode.com.

XBMC, an open source, cross-platform media center is no installable on Apple TV. XBMC supports a very complete spectrum of of audio and video multimedia file formats and codecs right out-of-the-box.

With the built in features and third party plugins, this really is a flexible media center. You can find out more on how to install XBMC on your Apple TV at this thread on their website.

A USB installer is in the works, but is currently not quite ready. For now you have to do the installation manually.

Ruler of Planets writes "PlanetX64 has just published an article on loading OS X on an MSI Wind, effectively creating a machine that is smaller and lighter than a Macbook Air. The exercise was done solely for academic purposes and doing so voids all kinds of warranties, but hey, now you can slip a Mac into a lab coat pocket!"

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slash-sa writes "O3B Networks has been quietly preparing itself over the last 12 months for the moment last week when it announced that it was going to be offering cheap, low-latency satellite bandwidth that can cover any part of Africa by 2010. It has put in place early finance with Google, Liberty Global and HSBC. Here are more details from the entrepreneur behind the project, Greg Wyler."

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rickthewizkid writes "Recent updates to the iTunes software allow blind users to access the program without assistance. From the article: 'The new software — which transforms the written information on an iTunes-linked computer screen into speech or Braille — stemmed from an agreement between Apple, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company, the National Federation of the Blind and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.'" It's not just the actual iTunes app, though; the article notes that this update makes iTunes U useable as well.

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An anonymous reader points out Gizmodo's review of a USB dongle, made by a company called Efix, which allows for an effort-free transformation of a non-Apple computer into one that runs Mac OS X. According to the reviewer, the transformation is perfect (aside from a few quirks he describes as "trivial"); the included screenshots sure make it seem that way, too. The dongle costs $155, and works only on a subset of PC hardware. Non-Apple machines running OS X will no doubt make Apple unhappy, though, so, the reviewer concludes, "it's understandable if you wanna approach this with caution."

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isBandGeek() writes "After a few reasonable App Store bans, such as the ones on I Am Rich and NetShare, developers started complaining about excessive restrictions on applications like Podcaster and MailWrangler, supposedly because they provided 'duplicate functionality.' In response, Apple rubbed salt in their wounds by slapping non-disclosure agreements on application rejection notices. Now developers are not even allowed to tell their fanbase that Apple decided to withhold approval for an application. Is Apple confident that Google's open platform Android won't be much of a threat?"

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recoiledsnake writes "Another submission has been rejected from the iPhone App Store, this time for 'duplicating the functionality of the iPhone Mail application.' The author claims that his application allows the user to log into their multiple web email accounts and that Apple seems to be confusing Gmail and Mail.app. This comes on the heels of Apple rejecting an application for competing with iTunes and rejecting other silly but harmless apps as being of 'limited utility.'" ComputerWorld has an update to the rejected Podcaster app mentioned above. It seems the developer has used Apple's "Ad Hoc" service to begin distributing the software despite the fact that they blocked it from the App Store.

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Earyauteur writes "The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is running a story on an interesting motion-controlled iPhone application which uses the iPhone's 3-axis accelerometer to control a digital synthesizer. The musical instrument is played much like a theremin with the added ability to perform music using different musical scales. TUAW also links to a YouTube video which shows a performer demonstrating the iPhone instrument."

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Shin-LaC writes "In a post on their official blog, WebKit developers introduced the 'next generation' of their JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor. The post lists several changes contributing to the performance improvements, including 'bytecode optimization,' a 'polymorphic inline cache' (which sounds similar to V8's 'hidden class transitions'), and a 'context threaded JIT' compiler which generates native code (currently only for x86 processors), and is also applied to regular expressions. The new JavaScript engine is already available in the latest WebKit nightly builds. According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey."

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Nuclear Elephant writes "Apple appears to be taking ideas from commercial software already being sold and is attempting to patent the concepts as their own. According to Apple Insider, Apple has recently filed a patent application for a notification screen on the iPhone. The only problem with this is that Intellisync has been using this concept in their popular iPhone notification screen software for over a year now, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a clear rip-off. Apple recently became famous (or infamous) for stealing other people's ideas when they rolled out their Dashboard in Mac OS X, which had many similarities to a desktop widget program named the Konfabulator, which later became Yahoo widgets. The case here isn't a simple hijacking of an idea, however — Apple is applying for a patent on Intelliscreen's concept, which could be detrimental to the original manufacturer of the software, who is actively selling it for Jailbroken iPhones"

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jesuscash writes "It seems early adopters of the new iPod Touch are out of luck when they bring it home and attempt to connect it to their WPA/WPA2 secured network. Reading this Apple forum thread shows that many tests with different configurations show a no-go on WPA. Some of the last entries give the best clue, revealing a 'received deauthentication' error in their router logs. Apple has yet to respond."

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If you ever wanted to prove your geek-cred to your friends what could be better than using your iPhone as a graphical remote for your car stereo.

Nels Johnson has done exactly that, and has posted the details for how to do it yourself at his site http://www.quickanddirty.tv/.

We’d point out that you should probably have someone else controlling the tunes, whilst you pay attention to the road!

Andrew Kippen of Boxee has just informed me that the long-awaited Ubuntu Linux version of Boxee will finally be made available for download today at boxee.tv

Like the OS X version of Boxee, the software will be released as an alpha version.  So please keep that in mind.

By the way, if you are working on porting Boxee to Apple TV, I would love to hear your progress on how the port is going.   Can’t wait to see it running on the Apple TV.