Apple

After a worldwide outage left many BlackBerry customers without e-mail, IM, and Web browsing from Monday to Thursday last week, Research in Motion today unveiled its peace offering to customers: $100 worth of free apps to subscribers and one month of free technical support for enterprise customers. While the free software and services are nice gestures, the outage, which RIM acknowledged was the worst in its history, seems symbolic of the company’s slow downfall.

The Flashback Trojan first appeared last month. Posing as an Adobe Flash installer, it installed code that could send information about the computer, and also had the capability to download additional malware.

The latest variant - Flashback.D - hides its payload not in the user's Preferences folder (it could previously be found at ~/Library/Preferences/Preferences.dylib), but inside the Safari application bundle.

Now that I've had my iPhone 4S for a couple of days, I'm amazed with what Siri can do. I've asked a number of questions -- real ones, not questions like "What is the meaning of life?" -- and have been totally impressed with how my interaction with the iPhone has changed. But there are more things I'd love to be able to do with Siri, which is the reason for this post.

Apple on Wednesday issued much-anticipated updates for its Mac OS X and iOS mobile operating system, adding support for its new iCloud service and fixing a bevy of security flaws in the process.

The new mobile operating system, iOS 5, contains approximately 98 security fixes, according to the company's  release notes. The iOS update addresses a number of “noteworthy” issues, including flaws that caused users' Apple ID passwords to be logged in a plain text file, readable by applications, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a blog post Wednesday.

Planted in your shiny new iPhone 4s and in the iOS 5 are the seeds of tomorrow’s Mac of the future, and indeed the future of all computers. You can find them if you know where to look. (And I’ll tell you where below.)

It’s not supposed to be this way. In the Microsoft world, at least, new technology starts at the top and “trickles down” from bigger and more powerful computers over time to mobile devices and eventually cell phones. If you’re focused on the machines, this makes sense, as larger computers are more capable of handling powerful new features.

Apple is launching the iPhone 4S this week with the recently unveiled integration of Siri, a voice activated "assistant." Siri accepts voice input and can perform a range of actions on your iPhone, including looking up information, adding calendar events, and even composing short texts and e-mails.

Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve." His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family...We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."

Apple announced that iCloud, a set of free cloud services, will be available on October 12.

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, contacts, calendars, documents and more, keeping them up to date across all your devices. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated automatically and wirelessly. iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your most important information to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi whenever your iOS device is connected to a power source. Once you plug it in, everything is backed up quickly.

Apple announced the next iteration of its iPhone, the iPhone 4S, at an event today in Cupertino. The phone’s body and screen are virtually identical to the iPhone 4, though it receives some significant internal spec bumps and a virtual "intelligent assistant" named Siri.

Despite the fact that he is no longer CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs is "expected" to appear at Tuesday's iPhone event alongside current Chief Executive Tim Cook, a new report claims.