John Lister

It looks as if Apple has attempted to fix the widespread connection glitches with the iPhone through a new software update. But it comes amid increased concerns about how much control the company has over users. As we reported earlier this week, ... customers worldwide have complained about calls mysteriously dropping . It still appears the problem is that the phone often fails to pick up even a strong 3G signal (the high-speed connection which makes many of the data features possible) and was repeatedly switching to a traditional network signal instead, which often triggered the glitch. The ... (view more)

iPhone users worldwide are complaining of dropped calls, and it's looking increasingly likely the cause is the phone itself. The problem appears to be occurring with the "3G connection," the fast-access which allows many of the smartphone features ... to operate. Because the phones aren't getting a strong enough connection on the 3G networks, they often need to switch to a traditional phone network in mid-call. This doesn't always go smoothly and is sometimes causing temporary disconnections which are enough to terminate the connection. There doesn't seem to be any strong geographical pattern in ... (view more)

iPhone users have spent $30 million on applications for the new 3G model in the month since it's released. But Apple will get 'only' $9 million of that take. Users can buy applications, produced by third-party developers, from the iTunes store. ... There have been around 60 million application downloads so far, though many of these (estimates say as much as 90%) are free. Paid applications range from around a dollar for novelty items to around ten dollars for games, so an average $5 price would fit the estimates. The most expensive item, a thousand dollar screensaver, was pulled by Apple recently ... (view more)

Security researchers have revealed that the current military hostilities between Russia and Georgia may have actually begun online a couple of weeks ago. There's no official word as to who was behind cyber attacks which brought down Georgian ... government websites, including that of the country's president Mikheil Saakashvili. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which were routed through servers based in the US. Whoever was responsible used denial of service (DOS) attacks, a brutally simple technique which involves sending repeated requests to a website's server. It ... (view more)

Google has said sorry to users of its Gmail service after they were left without access to their emails for almost two hours early last week. The firm made a rare apology on its official blog after the outage, saying "The issue was caused by a ... temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly." (Source: blogspot.com ) There has been some speculation the problem may be connected with a recent change to Gmail's contacts system, designed to separate contacts users have manually added from those which are created automatically when you send or receive a ... (view more)

Google is to introduce close integration between its two main advertising systems. It should mean better targeted ads, though it will lead to extra tracking information on users' computers. The changes involve both Doubleclick -- an online ad ... company Google bought for just over $3 billion last year -- and Google's own Adsense system. They work in different ways: Doubleclick tracks the browsing history of a user and builds up a picture of their interests, while Adsense ads are specific to a particular website's content (though they do take into account a user's geographical location to provide ... (view more)

Three French journalists have been booted from a major security conference amid claims they were able to hack the laptops being used by fellow reporters. It's particularly embarrassing for those reporters, many of whom write for Global Security Mag, ... an official sponsor of the Black Hat Las Vegas event. Only one of the hackers, Mark Brami, has spoken out; though he blamed colleague Mauro Israel for the 'attack', he said it was meant as a prank. The men involved reportedly told organisers they were attempting to raise the issue of privacy risks among people using public Internet connections. ... (view more)

Apple has removed an unusual third-party product from iTunes: an iPhone screensaver costing $999.99. The product was listed by a developer named Armin Heinrich and sold through the iTunes Store's iPhones apps section, which allows people to buy ... add-ons for their phones. This particular product, named "I Am Rich", did nothing but display a glowing ruby on a phone's screen (though if you clicked on the ruby, it promised to display a mantra for success.) This wasn't a scam as such; Heinrich openly admitted it was useless in the product description, which read "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod ... (view more)

A recently-discovered security flaw in fundamental operation of the Internet could be much more serious than first believed. Every form of network, including email services, could be vulnerable. Dan Kaminsky, the security expert heading efforts to ... solve the problem, told a Las Vegas convention that the central problem can be exploited in at least 15 different ways. As we recently reported , the heart of the problem is the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website addresses into the identifying number of the particular computer where the content of site is physically stored. A key ... (view more)

Google's Street View mapping system has got the go-ahead from regulators in the United Kingdom, but is continuing to cause legal problems in the US. The system involves taking photographs of streets in major cities around the world. Unlike the ... better-known Google Earth system, these are not satellite images; instead photographers take shots from a standing position. This allows Google to produce maps which are more human-eye than bird's-eye. Britain's Information Commissioner had been asked to investigate the project after complaints it could be a threat to privacy because people might be ... (view more)