Apple

The national press, the tech blogosphere, even normal, ordinary human beings on Twitter are railing against Systemgraph, a support company officially approved by Apple to be its reseller and authorized service provider.

Dimitris Papadimitriadis, a physician in Greece, was apparently having a little trouble with his iMac, so he took it to Systemgraph in order to enjoy its authorized servicing skills. According to the Greek newspaper Proto Thema, Papadimitriadis discovered dark patches on the screen of his machine.

US soldiers may be issued an iPhone alongside their MREs as part of their standard pack in the near future.

A program spearheaded by the Army Capabilities Integration Center aims to improve fighting capability, as well as general efficiency, by making smartphones standard issue among both deployed troops and soldiers garrisoned on home bases.

Cases purported to be for Apple's next-generation iPad that were posted to a Chinese trade site are being removed after the site received a "legitimate takedown request," possibly lending credence to their authenticity, according to a new report.

Earlier this week, international business-to-business trading site Alibaba.com received a request to remove the case listings, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Steven Troughton-Smith writes on his personal weblog that he may have discovered a way to put his iPod nano into some kind of DFU-like recovery mode. By holding down the restart buttons through two reboots, iTunes will see the device and alert the user. Entering DFU/Recovery mode allows hackers to submit customized software to iOS devices and doing so with the nano offers the promise of adding modified software.

iOS 5 isn’t even here yet and we might already be looking at plans to jailbreak the upcoming iOS version and the devices it will power, the iPhone 5, the iPod touch 5G and the iPad 2. Rubyra1n is apparently the name of the next-gen jailbreak tool that’s about to be released at some point in the future by Geohot.

According to the latest fear-eastern whispers, Apple is preparing to capitalise on the success of its iPad with three new designs lined up for early 2011. iPad 2 will arrive during the first quarter of the year, with some units heading for Apple outlets as early as January, if mutterings within earshot of Taiwanese news outfit Digtimes are to be believed.

Little is known of the three flavours of device mooted and the difference betwixt and between the three may simply be one of which network each supports, with combinations of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA suggested.

McAfee has compiled the wisdom and insight of its security researchers and produced the 2011 Threat Predictions Report. The report contains a variety of forecasts, prophecies, and educated guesses on what to expect for computer and information security next year, but one of the most notable is that Apple has achieved some level of critical mass that makes it a prime target.

It's been a busy week or so for coders hacking AirPlay, Apple's media streaming protocol. We've seen code posted to allow streaming from Macs to Apple TVs, from iPads to Linux boxes running XBMC, and now we have an iPad-to-Windows link enabled.

The app you need is AirMediaPlayer, with runs under Windows XP, Vista and 7, and it requires Apple's freely available implementation of its zero-config tool, Bonjour.

Apple has removed a WikiLeaks app from its store on the grounds that it violated the company's developer guidelines for applications for use on its iPhones and iPads, the company said Tuesday.

The action places Apple among a group of major US companies who have cut ties or services to the whistle-blowing website and have subsequently been targeted by hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks.

Among the information security trends expected next year, PandaLabs predicts increasing malware threats to Mac users. As Mac market share continues to grow, so will the number of threats, predicted Luis Corrons of PandaLabs.

“Of most concern is the number of security holes affecting the Apple operating system. Let’s hope they get ‘patching’ as soon as possible, as hackers are well aware of the possibilities that such vulnerabilities offer for propagating malware”, Corrons wrote in a Panda Security blog.