I just read about this in a book...

'Little Brother' by Cory Doctorow, this exact exploit is used to stick it to the man, also a good book, and free to read at http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2466

*fires up Xnet*

As Drak and others have pointed out

What Linux needs is closed source, and it's never going to get that no matter how pretty or clever it is until software houses are comfortable that a) they only have to code once and it'll run on any linux distro with no user configuration and b) they can actually make money from the Linux userbase.

The first requires a rethink of the whole dependancy mess and in these days of Broadband connections and Terabyte HD's the Mac scheme of making the app a directory containing everything it needs to run outside of absolutly guaranteed to exist core frameworks would be a damn good place to start borrowing from.

Increasing the userbase, and getting that userbase used to paying for software will be no small feat, but I'd suggest splashtop is something that has obvious appeal to new users, add an AppStore for impulse purchases and you may get them off the windows teat and positively expose them to Linux.

As for the Mac UI as inspiration, copy the principles then make your own pretty.

Flames for the gall of suggesting Linux needs Closed source.

Re: Thousands of configurations

Except so far every PC outfit that's followed this route, and even the Hackintosh DIY guides themselves all use/promote using the same components that Apple uses. So long as the cloners keep doing that, and you have to imagine they will seeing as Apple doesn't seem interested in adding support for stuff it doesn't use, these clones should work just fine.

I don't think officially sanctioned clones are forever off the Apple radar though, Apple has seriously diversified since the early 90's into music, films, applications, consumer hardware and now mobiles. I wouldn't be surprised to see iPhone + App Store profits alone overtake Macintosh Hardware profits this time next year. Assuming there was enough pent up demand to warrant a major OEM risking* upsetting Microsoft I believe they could run with it. Snow Leopard would be a good step if that was your intention.

*heh

And the security guard said

"Go stand by the exit from the car park, and look into the back of every car which goes out"

Either that is the most cynical bullshit pitch for a product I've ever heard or she needs to reconsider her choice to take her kids shopping at her local PedoMall.

Other safe alternatives

Tailgate a truck, buy a Motorbike or throw away your number plates as we seem to have retired actual road policing for vastly less effective but very profitable dumb cameras.

A pitiful logical fallacy

The BSA's argument makes the insultingly stupid assumption that money not spent on taxable software is either buried and forgotten about or spent on some sort of magical non taxable products instead.

In actuality, the BSA's continual squeaky wheel routine regarding piracy diverts Police time and therefore tax payer money away from solving crimes involving finite product theft and actual harm to individuals, property etc.

A few points

The LCD is different, not just the colour balance which is set in software for a 'warmer' (yellow) cast but the viewing angles are reduced over the original, entirely subjective whether this is a good or bad thing.

The Audio hardware is different, using the same chipsets as the iPod Classic for much improved audio (assuming you're using a decent set of headphones that now connect to this model).

Battery life is reduced while in 3G mode, switch that off though and despite a smaller battery, stamina is better than the original phone. Having said that, 5 1/2 hours of 3G talk time is at the top end of similar 3G phones.

MMS really does need to die, It may be an Industry standard but its a stupidly expensive way of sending poxy small pics between phones, I'm glad they left it out. Like it or Loathe it, Apple have created a customer expectation that the Mobile internet should a) not incur extra charges, and b) be as useful as the Internet on their PC's, As this expectation percolates through the mobile industry MMS will either have to become a free extra with your contract or will die the slow painful death it deserves.

Overall a surprisingly balanced review for an Apple product at 'Teh Reg', shame though that for a tech journal you're missing the details a quick scan of the Ars review would have revealed.

The Elephant in the room

Is the UK-USA average of 60-73 kilowatt hours, while it's considered just fine to piss that much energy away, alternative energy schemes are all DOA.

But then where is the profit in that route eh?

It hasn't been influenced by the iMac

Check the styling of the Eee logo on the front, now imagine the case in blood red rather than piano black and you have an Etch-A-Sketch rip off

Here's an earlier design I stumbled across*

http://darndog.no-ip.com/eee.jpg

And that's why it's awesome.

Also does it have DVD? or don't we use them anymore?

*ok, quickly shopped

RIS?

Flash ads on search results pages would be a massive about turn for a company that built it's brand on low key, simply presented information rather than the flash bang in your face portals of old.

Even if integrated into the text results, the odds of a flash ad being what the majority wanted/expected from a search are surely as close to nil as makes no difference.

Is this another indicator that Advertising 2.0's wheels are coming off? or are they simply counting on us being too lazy to find a better search engine?

Obligatory link to the mash

"THE RESEARCHER developing an intelligent bra says there is ‘no way’ it is finished and that he may have to carry on studying women’s breasts for decades."

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/bra-research-must-go-on%2c-vows-scientist-20071210588/

More details from A mac IT Nerd.

I stumbled across a forum (shadowmac I think), where the participants were cobbling this together while I was googling failure conditions on the ARD exploit.

Social engineering is needed to get Trojan downloaded and for first run on target computer, in this case the run part is handled by a fake applescript warning concerning broken pref panes with a 'should I repair?' style pop up at login/app run.

Uses the recent ARD exploit to gain root access to box and enable services, swiss cheese the firewall etc, does not require user to enter any password.

Full exploit will only work if:

User that activates it is logged into GUI *AND* ARD has not been set up.

So simply turn Apple Remote Desktop on and set access privileges for a user in the sharing prefs to disable the exploit.

Hopefully there will be a patch for this rather embarrassing vulnerability shortly.

Unlikely

So upon entering the airport I'll get a message to the effect of "Welcome to hell, reply to this message with NO or we'll bombard you with adverts"? because that would imply that I had to spend time/money to opt out, which sounds like it'd fall foul of anti spam legislation.

As an opt in service this has FAIL written all over it, the very idea that marketing wonks would resist the temptation to pretty much stream ads at the poor punter that agreed to it is ludicrous, these poor saps could be recognised the the Airport on account of them going 'bing' every other step.

Dream on FUDster

If allegedly competent author really believes Apple is about to kowtow to Network operators perhaps he should read up on how their Music business worked out for the Labels.

<Ranty>

"Most operators will have a list of features, each of which is worth a specific amount of subsidy based on the revenue that feature will generate. One-button MMS, for example, cuts the price significantly, while a music player isn't really of interest unless it's linked to the operator's download service."

Didn't the fact that neither iPhone version supports MMS ring any bells? do you really think they left it out because it was 'just too damn complicated'? It was left out for the same reason that they don't plaster their computers with Intel stickers or preinstall crapware.

Apple is all about the user experience, and that experience includes not getting a surprise bill each month because you were stupid enough to send some pictures as 25p-£1.75 MMS's (Standard O2 rates), instead of free email attachments*

The whole premise of this Article is so badly flawed, the author so ignorant of how Apple operates, that I can't understand how it made it onto my beloved Reg unless it's purely to drive up ad revenue for the Friday night piss up**.

*the whole SMS thing is a load of bollocks too, the sooner the Telco inspired cash cows die a death through IM clients the better (watch the AIM part of the WWDC keynote and the part on background push notification to see how that's been implemented without slowing things down to a crawl).

**If so have a beer on my clicks

The blindingly obvious problem with this

Is that by default, suicide bombers never have any previous.

I'm obviously mad...

...as I'd be happy as Larry if more developers moved from "Look at all this shiny new stuff" to "new version runs way faster and doesn't crash".

The forced constraints of mobile devices are going to do more good in a couple of years through quality optimised coding than two decades of go faster chips have given us.

Pay to receive?

<color=#990033>

What a corking idea, after all, it's worked so well with e-mail hasn't it?

</color>

*wonders if the colour ref was too subtle.

I'm Amazed...

She managed to take a shot with PhotoBooth without the crims realising something was up, PhotoBooth is well in your face.

You can do all this yourself using free stuff, I set up my old mans Macbook to covertly snap a pic and email me whenever it connects to an unknown network, as such I've a ton of pics of him stealing his neighbours wifi heh.

The 'undercover' service mentioned in the comments above is a nice solution to the less geeky, although if you can't roll it yourself you're reading the wrong site friend.

You lost me

Is the point of this article that Apple would need to licence the stupefyingly obvious concept of 'phone vibrates annoyingly when key is pressed' or is the suggestion that they couldn't code something that retarded themselves?

Flames are for the haptic trolls.

My crystal ball says

"come June the current 16GB iPhone will drop to £169, iPhone2 (3G, maybe GPS), is released in 16 & 32 GB varieties for £269 and £329 respectively.

Mobile OS X 2.0 contains an improved security model, better battery performance, some improvements to existing bundled apps, a couple of games and a handful of bugs, oh and the App store."

Mind you my crystal ball has 'Mad in Britain' stamped on it so it may not be entirely accurate.

Heh

Factory worker accidentally infects device image master? totally plausible scenario.

Remember when mobile phones were new?

and stupidly expensive, with a battery that looked like it could start your car and anyone that bought one was obviously a pretentious asshole?

After using one of Apple's dinky phones for a while I'm convinced that for the vast majority of people this will be all the computer they need. Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and a dock to monitor lead and iPhone 1.0 would do for a large chunk of office workers, in 5 years time mobile computing is going to be a massive Market.

Keep em coming Steve.

re: backwards

Agreed, the flash plugin needs fixing not the content, otherwise malcontents will be torrenting old copies of dreamweaver to create more vunerable content.

Colour me shocked!

100,000 applicants and they didn't all get accepted for the beta program? :o

Just because no one else seems to have mentioned it...

The reason they've not bothered DRM'ing the iPhone vids is because you can't download anything on an iPhone, I repeat, Nothing, nada, all download links are disabled, and the reason is because there is nowhere to save anything you might want to download*. As such all you can do is stream video, if you lose your connection or the Beeb takes it off-line it's gone for good, no downloading and watching on the tube to work.

Mighty nice of them to trust user agents to identify iPhones though, I'd have expected more people would have been happy with this rather large loophole instead of seizing the chance for another pointless rant about DRM and Linux, kids these days eh?.

*Subject to change without notice, may not apply to jailbroken hardware.

w00ty

App store was a given, free apps are free though, one off fee for comercial devs seems reasonable. Didn't realize the platform was at all suitable for games but there's some cool demos on the video. SDK is way more polished than I imagined, guessing we'll see some more updates to 1.0 arcitecture before June.

Exchange support worked as advertised, only fly in that ointment is the lack of availability until June.

Looking forward to seeing what turns up in the store.

No Linux

And I won't be buying one.

Anyone want to take a bet that if they sell XP and Linux versions they will be priced the same or the linux version will cost a little bit more/have degraded hardware specs.

You can't beat free*

*Does not apply to Microsoft.

RIS?

They said the disk was 'server grade' and it is, as in: 'used in servers', the specs and the manufacturer also tell the same story.

I'll admit there's specialist areas where 15K disks make all the difference but for the vast majority of servers on this planet they're overkill, on this box though, which isn't a server and doesn't claim to be*, they'd be a retarded way to double the price, quarter the capacity, and demolish the sales.

* get a fecking grip, it's a consumer network backup box FFS.

T3 & Skynet

I know there's that old myth about t' |ntertubes being safe from nuclear attacks by design but key word there is 'myth'.

if Skynet really was 'distributed on home computers and servers worldwide' then at the end of T3 it clearly commits suicide with the WW3 style nuckage. ROTM indeed.

This Apple user

Is drooling at those pics, that's exactly what I was hoping for instead of the Air. I'll take the Linux version please.

Nothing to see here.

The places you are most likely to ever watch mobile TV: bored antisocial passenger in car, train or tube are exactly the places it's clearly not going to bloody work because well, you're moving for a start and in the case of the tube, like underground.

Just another thing to run your battery down and frustrate those punters naive enough to think it might actually work.