Moments later, the page updated with “Retraction on Stave Jobs comment…we don’t know how that got in our feed.

The popular apple fan-site MacRumors.com was providing up to the minute coverage on the MacWorld 2009 Keynote address, when the page started displaying profanity and all-CAPS nonsense and 4chan slang.

Screenshots of the initial onslaught follow (Warning: NSFW, profanity):

Shortly thereafter both MacRumorsLive.com and MacRumors.com were down.

UPDATE:

as of 1:29pm EST, MacRumors.com was back online with the following post:

Our MacRumorsLive keynote coverage was hacked today, inserting inappropriate content into the text and photo feeds. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore our services. The hack appears to be limited to the MacRumorsLive servers so forum accounts should be safe.

We’ll continue Macworld Expo coverage on an ongoing basis this week, and will report on Apple’s announcements shortly.

I’ll first tell you what I did so you don’t have to repeat it, or at the least can save it for last, but if you’re impatient just scroll to the end of this post.

The Issues.. Oh god the issues!

The problem started Saturday morning when I was lying in bed and decided to check my email. Our roommate had just moved out and took with him our wireless network (his hardware, but I was managing it), but seeing the little blue “E” icon that meant i have EDGE service, I decided to open the mail app. Instead of a nice tidy inbox, I was greeted with pop-up message saying “Could not activate EDGE: You are not subscribed to EDGE”. Now, I don’t have a $20/month data plan for nothing. I most certainly was subscribed to EDGE, so pardon my acronym but WTF was this?

I restarted my phone and still got the error message, then turned airplane mode off for 20 seconds and back on again (This is supposed to clear some settings like WiFi so I gave it a shot). Still nothing. Now, I had jailbroken my phone the day before with iLiberty+ (I STRONGLY recommend this program for installing 3rd party apps, unlocking, activating, or bootloader patching), and so was afraid I’d broken it somehow, but I had used EDGE fine after that for the better part of a day so I was on the fence on whether that was the problem. Like any good problem solver I had to rule it out regardless, so I decided to restore my iPhone.

The first thing I did was go into iTunes and hit Restore. Once that was done I tried to get on EDGE with the result of the same error message. Through iLiberty my bootloader had been changed, and more importantly my baseband may have been changed as well. Baseband is the firmware that runs your phone, modem, wireless, and bluetooth hardware, so I was definitely suspect of that. I re-ran iLiberty+ with the option of restoring the baseband and bootloader, and still had no success. Finally I re-re-ran iLiberty+ with a WiFi/EDGE fix I had come across, usually only broken through using ZiPhone (DON’T USE ZiPHONE!) but decided to try it anyway. Of course, no change. I still got that damn error message! This was getting frustrating in the extreme.

After this I called AT&T through 611, and after 30 minutes of work knew the lady, while being extremely nice, had no idea what the problem was. She thought it must be because I was picking up WiFi. Not only were there no hotspots in range, I had WiFi explicitly turned off. Rather than explain this to her I just said thank you and hung up.

Figuring I’d done all I could with hardware, I account was screwed up, I went to AT&T and checked my account. It showed that I had an EDGE data plan and should be working. Nothing on the support site, KB, FAQ, etc. was of any use, and live chat was closed for the day, not that I had high hopes for that… I had a lot of things to do this weekend so I decided I’d just call a different support number on Monday and try again.

The Solution!

I know I know BLAH BLAH BLAH Get to the fix! Okay okay! Flash forward to today. Before calling AT&T back I decided to do some goog-vestigating. Of course this was practically the first thing I did, but hadn’t gotten any immediate success, the closest being an AT&T forum where go-phone customers were having a similar issue last December (they fixed this by renewing their monthly contracts a bit early). On this second round of searching I found a couple of potential hits, but the one that finally fixed me was here on Apple Discussions!

To summarize, people fixed this one of two ways. The way that fixed me makes me want to facepalm so hard that I replace Captain Picard as the de-facto image macro. Its an iPhone setting and goes thus:
Settings --> General --> Reset --> Resent Network Settings

I know! “IDIOT!” Why didn’t I know that was there? Because there was no “TFM” for me to “R”, thats why. I was so relieved when it worked that I cried out in a fit of unbridled joy, to the unease of my co-workers. Not only was my problem fixed, I didn’t have to call AT&T back!!!

Now, for those of you who are not so lucky as to have you iPhone placated with this simple settings reset, most of the people on the above thread solved their problem thusly:

It’s definitely not an Apple problem, it’s a simple checkbox on AT&T’s account configuration screen called EDGE Provisioning. Some account changes, like adding a Foundation Account number to your plan to take advantage of company discounts, over-ride the EDGE provisioning setting.

Unfortunately, some AT&T customer service reps think it’s iPhone related and don’t bother checking your account first before transferring you to Apple. So, do yourselves a favor and ask them to check “EDGE Provisioning” on your account (use their terminology) and they will be able to fix it for you in a second.

Several people on the forum echoed cries of joy as this solved their problem as well. Apparently the number to call is either 800-331-0500 or 877-419-4500 and be sure to ask them to check your “EDGE Provisioning”.

So, with a fully functioning iPhone (again jailbroken and running some kick-ass apps!) I leave you this information in hopes that it helps someone out the same issue.

PS: A very special thanks to Joe Maloney1 at the Apple Discussions forum for providing the crucial fix for me!

Today I was 3 computers deep into remote desktop (RD to one computer, then use that one to get to another, etc). Navigate through that sort of setup long enough, and you start to question what is real, or at least what is actually the machine you are physically sitting in front of. Quite existential, that.

At any rate, on the drive to work today I was doing a little casual geo-wardriving with my new bluetooth GPS receiver and netstumbler and I came across 2 access points within about 100 yards of one another that I found very interesting. They had two distinct names that told me a lot about the persons that set them up.

The first AP was secured and named “Da Internets”. This one made me literally LOL, but beyond that, shows that the user was familiar with the silly internet jargon we love to use (the internets, the intarwebs, the interwobbles…) and was therefore smart enough to know they should secure their wireless to prevent theft of their personal information. That, and they probably are stingy about bandwidth usage.

The second AP was unsecured and named “FREE WIRELESS HERE!” There are actually at least 2 types of people that could have set this up. The first would be a generous person who embraces the movement to provide a network of open wireless across America, and knows to not send private info across their wireless, using a wired connection instead. The second type of person is someone dumb enough to not change the DEFAULT PASSWORD for their access point and also not secure their AP. Then some 31337 h4X0r with the default password list saved on his/her laptop connected to the open AP, saw it had a default SSID of “linksys” or “default” or “belkin” and went to 192.168.1.1 and proceeded to log in with the default password and change the SSID if they were lucky, and infect their computers with backdoors or trojans or sniffed their traffic if they were quite unlucky.

Moral of the story: Be generous or be stingy, I don’t care. But please secure your AP’s admin account!

If you’re interested, here are some of the APs I hit before getting onto the interstate last night on the drive home. Red nodes are secure, green are unsecure, and the size of the node is how close to it I was when I picked it up. If I drove around I could pinpoint an individual AP, but as it is the locations are where I was when I first got the signal.

In other news, I’m excited for what may be announced at Mac World next week. Steve Jobs’ keynote, or “Stevenote” is 90 minutes long, and new laptops and a video-rental area in the iTunes Store is not enough to cover that! Or is it? Perhaps he will talk about those for 15-30 minutes, rip his shirt-mic off, and say “Thats it bitches! Keep buying iPhones! BAAAAH! BAAAH! and throw a smoke bomb, cackling as the vapor disperses leaving and empty stage. We’ll see.

Oh, speaking of DRM free, apparently Amazon is going to start selling Sony mp3s without DRM! Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. This basically us breaking the dinosaur record lable’s balls until they’re forced to concede un-copy-protected music so we’ll start buying it instead of stealing it. Kudos to them, despite their monetary motives, and hopefully it will last.

Remember, Artists wont go hungry if you don’t buy their albums. Labels give them next to nothing for their music, and many artists have spoken up about it (Trent Reznor, Courtney Love, NOFX, to name just a few). Because of this, I’m much more likely to pay for a Fat Wrech Chords or Fueled by Ramen album than I am a Sony or RCA one.

Artists go hungry when you don’t go to their shows and don’t buy their merch. Support your favorite bands by going to some shows and buying t-shirts! You may even fall in love with the opening band you hadn’t really heard of and thus further your own happiness.

I knew this was coming, especially in light of the iPhone and the steadily declining iPod shipments (thinning out their stocks), but to physically see it, in all it’s glory, is another thing all together. It comes with Wi-Fi, web browser, and all the other goodies that the iPhone has (sans cellular). I, for one, don’t mind keeping my phone as a phone and my iPod as an iPod, so the fact that the iPod Touch has all that stuff does better justify getting one rather than an iPhone.

We also now have a new nano (that reminds me of the Zen V), and now plays video and has cover flow?! As if that wasn’t enough, the newly dubbed ‘iPod Classic’ is now all metal and comes in up to 160GB! Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Crazy times we live in my friends, crazy times…

This February, in what was most definitely a classic hype-producing move, Steve Jobs posted his “Thoughts on Music” essay for all the internet to jabber about. Then in April Apple and EMI announced iTunes would soon be offering tracks to download sans-DRM. Now at last, a giant step forwards in the war against lame copy-protection arrives: iTunes Plus.

iTunes Plus is the new catalog of EMI tracks, AAC 256kbps encoded, now available for download at a slightly increased $1.39 a track, or the same old 9.99 an album (you should get the album anyways for the artists’ sake, or more importantly go to their concerts and buy their merch!).

Another very cool addition is the ability to upgrade already-purchased DRM songs to DRM-free versions for 30 cents a pop or $3.00 an album.

And this isn’t just a meager offering of a few so-so artists. EMI has a slew of big-name bands such as Blur, Coldplay, Dandy Warhols, Everclear, Queen, Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Sigur Ros, and the Chemical Brothers.

Though this is a dollar-driven move, as it always is, it nevertheless works out very favorably for all the DMCA/restricted rights hating consumers out there.

I can’t wait to see what kind of success the iPhone will have, and you can be sure I’ll keep you up to date with all the latest developments.

(image Copyright © 2007 Apple Computer)

Yes, the iPhone is here! No, not that one, you sneaky Cisco devils. This is the true iPhone, the one that has been discussed and dreamed about for what seems like years. Catch the full scoop after the jump:

As expected, its a perfect blend of an iPod and a phone, with loads of other features tossed in for good measure.

The nitty, as well as the gritty

So whats this hot little number packing? Oh, just a 3.5-inch multi-touch wide -screen! That means you can touch two places at once, and it recognizes them. That’s something completely new in the mobile device arena. But don’t worry, the proximity sensor will shut off the key bad when you have the phone close to your ear, so your cheek doesn’t decide to get click-happy while you’re on a call. Touchiness aside, you can now also watch wide-screen videos on an actual wide-screen… Wide, thats a funny word. Say it out loud with me, “WIDE”. Funny, huh? Anyway…
It still plays music and audio books as well, but there is oh so much more.

First off, lets get some specs out of the way:

• 11.6 mm’s thin (damn!)
• 3.5-inch multi-touch wide-screen
• 480 x 320 resolution, 160 ppi
• Quad-band GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900)
• 135 grams
• 5 hrs battery life for talking/video, 16 hrs for music
• Cingular exclusive prices of $499 for 4GB (ouch! but MANY will fork out for it) for a 2 year contract, and $599 for 8GB
• Ships this June in the US, Europe this Fall

For the Talkers and Texters

Just like the name would lead all English speaking humanoids to conclude, its a phone. As such, its got a dialpad(via touch-display), call logs, and an address book (that syncs with your computer), but it also has easy to use conference calling (my Razr isn’t exactly intuitive in this department), and stores your voicemails so you can listen to them whenever and visually navigate through them like email. No more listening to your first 6 messages Bob sent you to get to the 7th one from your wife. On the negative, there is no built in VoIp support, which I suppose is to be expected since Cingular would rather you use their minutes on this phone, but it would be nice to have the VoIp option when in a wireless hotspot. Perhaps Gizmo Project will run on it, but that remains to be seen.

For SMS the iPhone has a soft-keyboard with predictive entry and auto-correct, with an iChat style interface that always makes me drool. With this style of display you can easily see which conversation you were in, just like what gmail did for multi-reply email.

Ahem… Camera?

Of course, being a modern cellular phone, it must have a camera… probably one of those dinky 640X480 ones that everyone loves to use, right? Nopers. You know Apple never does anything half-assed, and as such the iPhone has a big-ole 2 Megapixel camera. One oversight is that its a fixed-focus camera, which somewhat reduces the grandure of it all. I would think Apple would see this as a big downside. Also, the camera is on the back, which makes sense for taking photos with the viewfinder, but cuts out any hope of video chat/calling, something that could have really be a deal-maker for this device.

The photo management system that kicks the crap out your regular cell phone’s list-o-pictures. On the iPhone you get a thumbnail grid of photos. Select a photo to view it full-screen, and drag your finger horizontally to go to the next or previous photo. Grab a place on the photo with your thumbs and drag toward the edges of the screen to get a Minority-report-like zoom on that portion of the photo. You have to watch the QuickTour to see just how rad that looks (select the “Photos” tour on the right of that page).

You call that a smart phone?

Like your Daddy’s 4lb brick of a “smart phone”, the iPhone has web and email. Apple does it up proper with a rich HTML email client and a portable version of Safari, accessing the web with either Wi-Fi or EDGE (Its got Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR as well, of course, though I don’t know how integrated it is with things like iTunes and the photo app). It automatically syncs your email as well as bookmarks from your computer, and it’s fast enough to surf the net while downloading your email in the background. You can view websites either portrait or landscape, and can zoom as well. So i guess its more like an iPod blended with a phone and a Nokia 770 (though my 770 blows it away in resolution :p ) As for the email client, it is both intuitive and much easier on the eyes than a regular cell phone. It has a large enough screen to read text and view inline photos without strain.

The iPhone also comes with its own map viewing software that downloads maps, satellite photos, and points of interest from Google Maps. Its not GPS, so you have to know where you are, but it’ll definitely help you get to any destination.

Did I forget to mention it runs OS X? Oh, well it does… somehow. This gives it the ability to, among other things, run widgets. To you non Mac/Konfabulator… er Yahoo Widget Engine users, widgets are little applications that provide useful tasks like the stock widget that tracks your favorite stocks, or the weather widget that, well, tells you the weather of course! Calculators, notes, clocks, timers, RSS readers, and nearly anything else you could ask for are available in the form of widgets. No word yet on how whether all OS X widgets will run on this or not, and more importantly, we don’t yet know what 3rd party application support there is. It may not be open to anything but widgets, or it may run ported versions of OS X apps, or it may have a full SDK waiting to be unveiled. Nobody knows at this point.

And so faithful readers, thats all we know for now about the new Apple iPhone. I’m super excited about this thing, though I won’t be getting one any time soon, nor do I need one at the moment. Its got some really innovative new features, and a few downsides as well as a dash of question marks. However, as this slick gadget has been the subject of endless speculation, you can bet your copy of The Economics of Industry that many will pay any price asked by Jobs for this little gem. Oh, and be sure to go to the iPhone Website for QuickTours of all the features packed into the iPhone.

Update: Gizmodo has a ton of photos of the iPhone on display, and more at apple insider
and this is interesting…

Call me whatever you want to, but I love the Harry Potter series, and I want this iPod!

Mind you I don’t want the extra $249.00 of Complete Harry Potter Series audio that acompanies it, I already have all the audiobooks, and have no need for $249 of duplicate audio. I do, however, want that laser-etched hogwarts crest. Sure, sure I could get 2 lines of 27-letters each laser engraved text for free, but getting anything written on it would be nowhere near as cool as the crest on this baby. Not to say I’d turn down a new iPod, as mine doesn’t hold all of my music, and has some interesting quirks now and again like always playing the 2nd song in the list of whatever i click on to play, but if it could be bought without the audio books, I’d get this one.

Look. —>

Did you just cry out in unbridled joy and astonishment? Did the people around you all turn and stare?
I did. From my mouth flew an undecipherable gibberish that could only be described as “colloquial”.

Yes me boys, ’tis an iPod. Aye, she plays video. We knew it may come soon, but not this soon. I was all set to write an in-depth, lengthy run-down on big-eyed, petite vixen, but one of my favorites, Webfroot, beat me to it.

In that right, you really should read about it there. And I will give but a few facts to whet your appetite:

• It comes in 30GB and 60GB models
• It can still hold music, album art, and photos, as well as 150 hrs video (60GB model)
• It has a big ole’ 2.5-inch display
• It has 5 more hours battery life than the 4th Gen
• It comes in black, sans Bonno (yes!)
• The 30GB is 45% thinner than the 4thGen and the 60GB is 10% thinner than the 20GB 4th Gen!

What may be even more stunning (at least it was to me) is the news that Apple has been building an x86 version of OS X with each PPC release they’ve done!

via Arstechnica:

Speaking to developers, Jobs said that every build of OS X has also been built on the Intel platform. Jobs said that Apple had dedicated teams for a “just in case scenario,” and that the company had decided a long time ago to make sure that the OS was platform independent. This “secret double life,” as Jobs referred to it, means that a transition can be done smoothly over the next few years, and Jobs seemed to exude some confidence, showing Tiger running on an Intel demo box.

The justifications for this move include the lackluster performance of the PowerPC 970 (IBM’s inability to break 3.0GHz), and heat/power issues that have prevented the creation of a G5 PowerBook.

Oh god oh god oh god, despite whatever Apple may attempt, I pray my rig will be running OS X in a year. Of course, it goes without saying (though I’ll still say it) that this is a major development, and be sure I’ll stay up to date with news as it comes to my attention.

thanks Webfroot for the rundown! Go there now, or go to Arstechnica’s article.

UPDATE:

Apple’s Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really.

WWDC: What developers are saying

via the IT Observer

A California judge ruled on Friday that Apple Computer could force bloggers to turn over e-mails from their sources inside the company, which leaked sensitive information about Apple’s new products.

In a lawsuit filed in December 2004, Apple accused unknown people of disclosing its trade secrets to three popular web sites. The sites – PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret – had published details about an upcoming product code-named Asteroid based on insider information.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg justified the ruling, saying, “trade secret laws apply to everyone regardless of their status, titles or chosen profession.”

According to Apple, the question of whether the sites were blogs or news magazines was irrelevant. “The judge ruled there is no license conferred on anyone to violate valid criminal laws,” an Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, who represents the sites, said they would appeal to block Kleinberg’s order on the grounds that the web writers are journalists. “The broad brush threatens all reporters. Anyone who reports on companies or the trade press should be concerned about this ruling,” he said.

You knew it would come some day, now here it is.
a color iPod, dubbed the iPod Photo.
This would come in very handy photo enthusiasts such as myself if one coupled it with a Belkin Media Reader or similar card reader and a digital camera. Though I’ just want to upgrade to a 4th Gen with a clickwheel.

Update: Kevin, my Apple instigator has informed me that while transfering photos from a memory card to the iPod photo works, it won’t display them on its screen, or even have access to them, until you synch with a computer to resize and store thumbnails to view on the iPod. bummer!

DifferentSky has some funny epitaphs for the geek. Not being one to steal a person’s thunder, you’ll have to go there to see it.
While you’re there, check out the innovative, cute, and just plain fun guestblock. He’s releasing an install package for it soon, and I can tell you right now, this thing is gonna be big.

and this is sad: Paper macs for people who cant afford real ones. What makes it so sad, of course, is that I am one of those people, and I’ll probably throw the G5 kit on my rig for a few laughs… okay, because I’m a pathetic loser.

Loooooooookieeee: 4th generation iPods are in the Apple Store!
I have no need for one (the battery life of mine is great, and I can use my top-row buttons fine) but the lower price tag should bring more people around to the light… Get one Jalbey! heh.
(^_^)