Apple

Apple's much-ballyhooed first-ever talk at the Black Hat conference lacked any of the fireworks that the standing-room only crowd had been hoping for.

Dallas De Atley, manager of the platform security team at Apple, presented "iOS Security", the simply (but blandly by Black Hat standards) titled talk on Thursday morning. But it only took a few seconds to realize that that was Apple's plan. The company is uncomfortable publicly speaking about its security posture, so a talk like this was going to be all business from start to finish.

Getting Mountain Lion's new system-wide notifications to work best for your own needs may take a little adjusting. Notification Center gives developers an (official) standardized way to send notifications to the user, but also a way to consolidate and control those notifications. We show you how to make the most of what this first desktop incarnation of Notification Center offers.

L33tdawg: On a hackintosh and looking to upgrade? We've got a guide for you. 

Apple released OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" ($19.99, Mac App Store) today and we Mac users tend to be quicker than most to update our software. This blog post is a cautionary tale that you should heed if you use your Mac to earn a living or if your rely on it to be productive. 

Here's another category where Apple and Samsung go head to head: chip buying. And Apple's dominance is expanding rapidly.

Rip off the plastic, metal, and glass on any consumer device, and it's pretty much all chips. And if you're the No. 1 buyer of those chips, as Apple is, that means you hold a lot of sway over global chip manufacturing.

Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract.

Alongside the release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion earlier today, Apple has published version 6.0 of its Safari web browser for OS X 10.7 Lion, adding a number of new features and closing numerous security holes. According to the company, the major update addresses more than 120 vulnerabilities found in the previous 5.x branch. Among the holes closed are problems in the handling of feed:// URLs could have led to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks or users' files being sent to a remote server.

A new script-based malware threat for OS X has been uncovered by security company Intego. The malware, called OSX/Crisis, has so far not been found "in the wild," but it has the potential to do harm.

The creator of an exploit that let users purchase digital goods inside of iOS apps without actually paying for them said today that Apple's fix puts the hack out of business.

"Currently we have no way to bypass [the] updated APIs," creator Alexei Borodin wrote in a post on his development blog. "It's a good news for everyone, we have updated security in iOS, developers have their air-money."

iPhone 5 production reports are rolling in from Asia with more frequency. This time, a Taipei-based report claims that Pegatron has started making the next iPhone.

The Taiwan-based manufacturer has begun production of a new version of the iPhone at its factory in Shanghai, according to Digitimes, citing "industry sources in Taiwan."

Apple Inc. (AAPL) was ordered by a judge to publish a notice on its U.K. website and in British newspapers alerting people to a ruling that Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy designs for the iPad.

The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered designs, Judge Colin Birss said yesterday. It should be posted on Apple’s U.K. home page for six months and published in newspapers and magazines to correct any impression the South Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product, Birss said.