satuon writes "In a recently screened BBC documentary called 'Secrets of the Superbrands', UK neuroscientists found that the brains of Apple fans are stimulated by images of Apple products in the same areas as those triggered by religious imagery in a person of faith. According to the scientists, this suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion."

Wyvere writes "The folks over at Mac Mini Vault jailbroke an Apple TV, stuck lighttpd on it, and connected it up to the internet in the name of fun hacking. 'This project was a fun way to see how far we could take the A4 powered Apple TV. The Apple TV is running iOS 4.2.2 (obviously jailbroken) with lighttpd for a web server.'"

An anonymous reader writes with word that Apple, as reported by Reuters, has proposed a smaller SIM card standard. Says the Orange executive quoted, "We were quite happy to see last week that Apple has submitted a new requirement to (European telecoms standards body) ETSI for a smaller SIM form factor -- smaller than the one that goes in iPhone 4 and iPad." Hard to believe that any phone designed for the human hand could be much limited by the size of the current micro-SIMs, but this is one race to the bottom I'm pleased with.

dotwhynot writes "According to ZDNet, the volume of in-the-wild malware reports on discussions.apple.com is truly exceptional. With the launch of the first malware DIY kit for OS X earlier this month, and now this, has the malware industry threat finally caught up with the growth of Apple, and what do Mac users need to do?"

fysdt writes "Another day, another patent, this one from Apple for a very curious sort of keyboard that might be easier to type on because it'll know in advance which keys your fingertips want to hit. No, not a device built by Emmett 'Doc' Brown (as far as we know, anyway), or pulled back through time in a TARDIS—just a very special type of board with tiny inbuilt tactile sensors capable of detecting what your spider-formation fingers are about to tap before they actually do."

alphadogg writes "Thirty-five percent of Android and iPhone owners in the US use apps such as Facebook on their smartphone before even getting out of bed, according to a survey conducted by telecommunications equipment vendor Ericsson. The most popular in-bed activity is accessing social networks. Eighteen percent of users log in while they are still in bed, and the most popular application is Facebook, Ericsson wrote."

An anonymous reader writes "A bookseller and app developer has blamed Apple for writing its final chapter, claiming the iPad maker had pushed it out of business. 'Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device,' BeamItDown said. 'We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.' The company blamed Apple's decision to impose a 30% commission on books sold through apps for the unhappy ending."

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today, Apple's VP of software technology, Guy L. 'Bud' Tribble appeared before a congressional hearing on mobile privacy to address concerns that were first brought to the forefront following the 'location tracking' controversy that emerged a few weeks ago."

jfruhlinger writes "Ever since Apple forked the KHTML project to create WebKit, the rendering engine at the core of Safari, the company has been a good open source citizen, releasing the code back to the community after updates. But that suddenly stopped in March, with no code releases for the last two updates to the iOS version of the browser, for reasons unknown. This might remind you of Google's failure to release the Honeycomb source code. But at least Google announced that it was holding the code back, and Android is under a license that allows for a delay; the LGPL'd WebKit isn't." Update: 05/09 21:21 GMT by S : Reader Shin-LaC points out that Apple has now released the relevant source code.

fysdt writes "Four people were taken to hospital and a glass door smashed as a near-riot broke out at Beijing's top Apple store among crowds rushing to snap up the popular iPad 2 tablet computer, state press said Sunday. Angry consumers began rushing the store on Saturday afternoon after a 'foreign' Apple employee allegedly stepped into the crowd to push and beat people suspected of queue jumping, the Beijing News said."

An anonymous reader writes "HD Moore is at it again. This time the famous open source security researcher has set his sights on exploiting Apple iOS. The Metasploit 3.7 release includes 35 new attack modules in total."

An anonymous reader writes "Apple this Summer is expected to release Mac OS X Lion. As opposed to other OS X releases, however, Lion will also be available for purchase via the Mac App Store, further solidifying Apple's efforts to make the Mac App Store an integral part of the Mac user experience." A lot of questions surrounding this related to the ability to make bootable disks. And also, why don't they just use apt-get? I gotta admit: it makes me nervous getting my OS from an App Store — which is strange considering how many kernels I've downloaded, built and booted over the years.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has released a software update (iOS 4.3.3) to fix the much-talked-about iPhone Location Tracking bug. Apple faced a lot of criticism over the issue — iPhone and iPad secretly tracks users' locations and saves them in the device's cache as well as in a hidden file which is copied to the PC whenever the computer gets synced with device."

An anonymous reader writes "Employees at Foxconn facilities in China, used to manufacture the iPhone and iPad, were forced to sign a pledge not to commit suicide after over a dozen staff killed themselves over the last 16 months. The revelation is the latest in a series of findings about the treatment of workers at Foxconn plants, where staff often work six 12-hour shifts a week, 98 hours of overtime in a month, and live in dormitories that look and feel like prison blocks."

doperative writes with this quote from Steve Wozniak: "A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much ... In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach ... And then we find out RCA has a patent on a character generator for any raster-scanned setup .. And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ... and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."

Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from thinq.co.uk: "Spotify has made a surprise announcement, and while it's still not the long-awaited US launch, it will be making a splash over the pond: the streaming music service is morphing into an iTunes competitor. In what is a clear attempt at rattling Apple's cage, Spotify has unveiled a pair of major new features: the ability to synchronise Spotify playlists with iPods, and the option to buy MP3 files to own — both key features of the iTunes platform. Any playlist created via the Spotify player can be downloaded in a single step, making 'digital mix-tape' creation significantly simpler."

sproketboy noted that many years ago Michael J. Mahon built the AppleCrate — a parallel stack of Apple IIs — for no good reason. Recently he came back with the AppleCrate II, which more than doubles the number of motherboards, and at least triples the awesomeness.

BogenDorpher writes "It looks like Apple will be using Intel as a main processor manufacturer to power the iPad, iPod touch, and the iPhone. Apple, who currently uses Samsung, will focus on making a switch to Intel within a year."

Trailrunner7 writes "Crimeware kits have become a ubiquitous part of the malware scene in the last few years, but they have mainly been confined to the Windows platform. Now, reports are surfacing that the first such kit targeting Apple's Mac OS X operating system has appeared. The kit is being compared to the Zeus kit, which has been one of the more popular and pervasive crimeware kits for several years now. A report by CSIS, a Danish security firm, said that the OS X kit uses a template that's quite similar to the Zeus construction and has the ability to steal forms from Firefox." Mac users are also being targeted by a new piece of scareware called MAC Defender.

An anonymous reader writes "One of Australia's largest government technology buyers, the Tasmanian Department of Education, has gone to market for a security vendor to supply anti-virus software for its 40,000-odd desktop PCs and laptops, as well as servers. But the department's not just running Windows — it runs Mac OS X and Linux as well, and has requested that whatever solution it buys must be able to run on those platforms as well. But have we reached the stage were Mac OS X and Linux even need third-party security software? It seems like most Mac and Linux users don't run it."