When Apple gave its highly publicized explanation of the iPhone 4antenna issues to the press back in July, CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple would give all iPhone 4 users a free case as an interim solution while the company researched the problem further. An executive with Mexican mobile carrier Telcel has now claimed that after September 30, Apple will release revised iPhone 4 hardware that does not exhibit the same signal attenuation flaw.
While announcing the launch of the iPhone 4 in Mexico, Telcel's Director of Value Added Services, Marco Quatorze, told CanalMX that initial units would exhibit the same antenna problems as those released so far in the US. He also said that Apple would be providing free cases to all iPhone 4 buyers who request one from its website.
However, Quatorze also said that after September 30—the date Jobs promised an update on the antenna issue and the date that the free case program expires—Apple will begin supplying revised iPhone 4 devices that "do not have the reception malfunction."
MacRumors notes that it is unusual for a carrier executive to have such advance knowledge of Apple's plans, or to be allowed to share it if he did. However, Quatorze also said that Telcel will have a number of options for early buyers to upgrade to the revised hardware without having to extend the usual two-year contract. Apple did not to respond to our request for clarification at the time of publication.
2.Cat leaves bag: PSJailbreak cloned, released, freely available
The PSJailbreak hardware may be held up by the Australian courts, but to the surprise of no one, the code behind the project has been reverse-engineered and is now freely available online. You'll need the code, a PlayStation 3, and a USB microcontroller in order to open your system. Oddly enough, sales of such devices seem to be in the middle of a spike.
As of this writing, the ability to play backed-up or copied games has been disabled in the code, but that won't last long. The genie is completely out of the bottle, and now that the code is floating around the expected sites, Sony has few options to stop its dissemination.
Once the PlayStation 3 was hacked it was only a matter of time before the software was made available free of charge; there are simply too many risks involved with selling this sort of thing via a standard storefront, and too many people more interested in the software's spread than profit. We have not tried the hack ourselves—and likely never will—so tread very carefully when downloading code from the Internet and using it to attempt to crack your PlayStation 3. There are some very technical details available on how exactly the exploit works if you've ever wondered how the hackers made an end run around Sony's safeguards.
3.Gmail Gets an Algorith3ic Mail Sorter
Google is reaching out to help those who just don't have the time to wade through hundreds of emails each day. The company unveiled Priority Inbox, an application that aims to automatically identify important incoming messages and separate them from more general, tedious emails. "It's about time," said Scott Steinberg, president and CEO of Digital Trends. "The vast majority of our emails are not pressing concerns. It shouldn't be difficult to prioritize these."
4. The Kernel Bug, the Missing Patch and the 6-Years-Later Fix
So widely acknowledged are the security advantages of Linux that on those rare occasions when a bug is found, it tends to makes quite a splash. Such, in fact, is just what happened recently when news broke of the Linux kernel bug that -- it turns out -- had been around since 2004. A fix was actually supplied back then by SUSE maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, apparently; for some unknown reason, however, it never got incorporated into the Linux kernel. That, fortunately, has now been corrected. Nevertheless, even the most ardent Linux supporter can only wonder what happened to delay the fix this long.
5. Life in Technology's Invisible Panopticon
Technology is a wonderful thing. It has given us many good things, including the pacemaker, the radio, TV, prosthetic limbs and eyes that help the lame and the blind, instant communications by way of the Internet and mobile phones. Proponents of technology point to all this as evidence that technology gives us freedom. But technology has also made it easier to limit our freedom in ways few realize. For example, Apple was recently awarded a patent for technology that could identify users of iPod touches, iPads or iPhones by their heartbeats, voiceprints and mug shots.
6. Own your gaming console: iFixit now offers tools, guides, parts
Your gaming hardware is expensive, used often, and there is no easy way to crack it open if something goes wrong. "The game console industry is hostile to consumers: goliath manufacturers have shipped hundreds of millions of units to consumers with no information on how to maintain or repair them," the folks behind the website iFixit claim. "Console owners are left with few options when their warranties expire, causing many to throw away broken units."
So iFixit has decided to push into a largely untapped market: gamers who want to open their systems, work on the innards, and keep them alive. It's a combination of information and products, mixing how-to manuals with specialized tools and replacement parts. (If you're dealing with PS2 disc read errors, Ars has you covered.)
7. Hands-on: Firefox 4 beta 4 brings Tab Candy and Sync
Mozilla has announced the availability of the fourth Firefox 4 beta release. The new beta brings some extremely significant new features that have been gestating in Mozilla's labs, including built-in synchronization functionality and a sophisticated new tab management system.
Tabs have arguably had a major impact on how users operate Web browsers, but the concept hasn't scaled very well as browsing habits become more complex. Mozilla devised a compelling solution with its Tab Candy concept, which allows users to arrange groups of tags in spatially-organized collections. Mozilla's experimental implementation of Tab Candy has matured swiftly and is going to be fully integrated in Firefox 4. It's available for testing in the new beta release, though it's said to not be fully feature-complete yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment