My Applesoup column for February
Applesoup by Bart Hanson
February 2007
Cisco, while arguably the first company to market with a phone called iPhone, now looks like it will have to defend their use of the branding after merely placing iPhone stickers on the outside of its shrink-wrapped packaging.
Apple has trademarked the iPhone name widely outside the U.S. including New Zealand. Apple are planning to respond to Cisco's legal challenge regarding the use of the iPhone name on 21st of Feb. 2007.
There is some in depth analysis of the iPhone at:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/Archive.html
Before Jobs revealed the iPhone at Macworld, Apple had to keep secrets from multiple companies and its own employees for 30 months. Apple also sued bloggers during this period who discussed Asteroid (AppleTV?). This cost Apple $700,000 recently when a Santa Clara County Court ordered Apple to pay AppleInsider.com and PowerPage.org $700,000
Samsung has revealed its own Smart F700 mobile phone which has a large touch-screen and a slide-out key pad.
The phone can also access the Internet, play music, take pictures, show videos, handle e-mail and share photos, said Samsung, the world's third-largest manufacturer of mobile phone handsets.
Last month, rival LG Electronics Co. announced its own touch-screen mobile phone, the KE850 Prada. Produced in partnership with the Italian fashion brand, is to go on sale in late February for $780 in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
It looks like we are losing our iSight thanks to the worlwide RoHS (Removal of Hazardous Substances) directive. The substances in question include mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium VI and brominated flame retardants. Apple's iSight Firewire Camera, AirPort Base Station With Modem, AirPort Base Station Power Over Ethernet & Antenna, iPod shuffle External Battery Pack, and all versions of the eMac were affected and are no longer being produced.
Norway's consumer ombudsman has told Apple it must open access to its music download system by October 1 or face legal action. Pressure from many other European countries is building, with organisations from Germany, France, Finland and Norway this week agreeing on a joint position against iTunes.
They argue that Apple uses DRM to limit consumers' free use of songs bought on iTunes, including the ability to copy and transfer songs to other users and other MP3 devices besides the Apple iPod.
The growing pressures against Apple may have caused Steve Jobs to go public with his open letter "Some Thoughts about Music" in which he says that Apple would sell DRM-free music in a in a heartbeat but cannot. Apple has also concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies due to it barely being able to stem the reverse engineering and subsequent "breaking" of DRM.
The “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods.
After dividing the amount of music on an average ipod by the average amount sold from the iTunes Store Steve concluded that only 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and is protected with DRM.
In 2006 less than 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold DRM-free by the music companies themselves.
DVD Jon (the original DRM reverse engineer) has responded to Steve Jobs on his blog. Johansen notes that Apple could (at least in theory) swiftly remove FairPlay from any track from which a content owner declines DRM if it so wishes.
The man behind the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition is on a month-long "Month of Apple Bugs" project to expose unpatched Mac OS X and Apple application vulnerabilities.
Finisterre is a very well-respected researcher whose motivation for the project was: "Right now, many OS X users still think their system is bulletproof. They need a dose of reality."
Was this an attack, revenge, conspiracy or some kind of evil plot against Apple and the users of Apple products? "Not at all, some of us use OS X on a daily basis. Getting problems solved makes that use a bit more safe each day, for everyone else. Flaws exist, with and without people disclosing them.said Finisterre.
Apple has already released a Security Update 2007-02 which squashes four of the security issues raised by the Month of Apple Bugs project.
Apple is planing retail stores in Australia, one at the base of Sydney sky-rise building at the corner of King and George streets in Sydney.
The project is estimated to cost over $15 million complete with a suspended glowing 10-foot Apple logo.
Another Apple flagship store is proposed for Melbourne's Fun Factory site which calls for the demolition of the historic but under-utilized Fun Factory building on the corner of Toorak Road and Chapel Street in South Yarra. A cubed-shaped Apple store, reminiscent of the company's flagship location in San Francisco, would consume the largest chunk of space within the new retail plaza.
Apple is also expected to open stores in Italy, Scotland, France, and Germany to add to the 170 stores it has already in U.S., Canada, U.K. and Japan.
The Southern Cross Data Cable connecting New Zealand to Australia and the US is to be substantially upgraded. A tender is expected to be issued in March to lift the cable's capacity from 240GB per second to 1.2TB per second by installing new equipment in the 10 cable stations around the Pacific. The project will use dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to achieve the speed boost.
There's a rumour Apple may hold a Special Event on February 20 to introduce Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 as well as updated Mac.
Apple has also set the dates for the 2007 WorldWide Developers Conference for June 11-15 in San Francisco.
February 2007
Cisco, while arguably the first company to market with a phone called iPhone, now looks like it will have to defend their use of the branding after merely placing iPhone stickers on the outside of its shrink-wrapped packaging.
Apple has trademarked the iPhone name widely outside the U.S. including New Zealand. Apple are planning to respond to Cisco's legal challenge regarding the use of the iPhone name on 21st of Feb. 2007.
There is some in depth analysis of the iPhone at:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/Archive.html
Before Jobs revealed the iPhone at Macworld, Apple had to keep secrets from multiple companies and its own employees for 30 months. Apple also sued bloggers during this period who discussed Asteroid (AppleTV?). This cost Apple $700,000 recently when a Santa Clara County Court ordered Apple to pay AppleInsider.com and PowerPage.org $700,000
Samsung has revealed its own Smart F700 mobile phone which has a large touch-screen and a slide-out key pad.
The phone can also access the Internet, play music, take pictures, show videos, handle e-mail and share photos, said Samsung, the world's third-largest manufacturer of mobile phone handsets.
Last month, rival LG Electronics Co. announced its own touch-screen mobile phone, the KE850 Prada. Produced in partnership with the Italian fashion brand, is to go on sale in late February for $780 in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
It looks like we are losing our iSight thanks to the worlwide RoHS (Removal of Hazardous Substances) directive. The substances in question include mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium VI and brominated flame retardants. Apple's iSight Firewire Camera, AirPort Base Station With Modem, AirPort Base Station Power Over Ethernet & Antenna, iPod shuffle External Battery Pack, and all versions of the eMac were affected and are no longer being produced.
Norway's consumer ombudsman has told Apple it must open access to its music download system by October 1 or face legal action. Pressure from many other European countries is building, with organisations from Germany, France, Finland and Norway this week agreeing on a joint position against iTunes.
They argue that Apple uses DRM to limit consumers' free use of songs bought on iTunes, including the ability to copy and transfer songs to other users and other MP3 devices besides the Apple iPod.
The growing pressures against Apple may have caused Steve Jobs to go public with his open letter "Some Thoughts about Music" in which he says that Apple would sell DRM-free music in a in a heartbeat but cannot. Apple has also concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies due to it barely being able to stem the reverse engineering and subsequent "breaking" of DRM.
The “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods.
After dividing the amount of music on an average ipod by the average amount sold from the iTunes Store Steve concluded that only 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and is protected with DRM.
In 2006 less than 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold DRM-free by the music companies themselves.
DVD Jon (the original DRM reverse engineer) has responded to Steve Jobs on his blog. Johansen notes that Apple could (at least in theory) swiftly remove FairPlay from any track from which a content owner declines DRM if it so wishes.
The man behind the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition is on a month-long "Month of Apple Bugs" project to expose unpatched Mac OS X and Apple application vulnerabilities.
Finisterre is a very well-respected researcher whose motivation for the project was: "Right now, many OS X users still think their system is bulletproof. They need a dose of reality."
Was this an attack, revenge, conspiracy or some kind of evil plot against Apple and the users of Apple products? "Not at all, some of us use OS X on a daily basis. Getting problems solved makes that use a bit more safe each day, for everyone else. Flaws exist, with and without people disclosing them.said Finisterre.
Apple has already released a Security Update 2007-02 which squashes four of the security issues raised by the Month of Apple Bugs project.
Apple is planing retail stores in Australia, one at the base of Sydney sky-rise building at the corner of King and George streets in Sydney.
The project is estimated to cost over $15 million complete with a suspended glowing 10-foot Apple logo.
Another Apple flagship store is proposed for Melbourne's Fun Factory site which calls for the demolition of the historic but under-utilized Fun Factory building on the corner of Toorak Road and Chapel Street in South Yarra. A cubed-shaped Apple store, reminiscent of the company's flagship location in San Francisco, would consume the largest chunk of space within the new retail plaza.
Apple is also expected to open stores in Italy, Scotland, France, and Germany to add to the 170 stores it has already in U.S., Canada, U.K. and Japan.
The Southern Cross Data Cable connecting New Zealand to Australia and the US is to be substantially upgraded. A tender is expected to be issued in March to lift the cable's capacity from 240GB per second to 1.2TB per second by installing new equipment in the 10 cable stations around the Pacific. The project will use dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to achieve the speed boost.
There's a rumour Apple may hold a Special Event on February 20 to introduce Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 as well as updated Mac.
Apple has also set the dates for the 2007 WorldWide Developers Conference for June 11-15 in San Francisco.
posted by two beach - half moon @ 10:12 PM
