Apple

Firefighters worked until Wednesday morning to extinguish a three-alarm blaze on the top floor of an Apple computer office building in Cupertino, a fire captain said.

The fire broke out around 10 p.m. Tuesday in the area of a heating and air conditioning unit on the roof of the two-story Apple Six building at 20604 Valley Green Drive, Santa Clara County fire captain Daron Pisciotta said. Construction crews had been working on the unit when the fire started, he added.

In what would surely be a blow Research in Motion, HSBC is considering a move that would strip its employees of their BlackBerry handsets and equip them with some 200,000 Apple iPhones instead.

"We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective ... and when I say that, I mean globally," HSBC's Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush told ZDNet.com.au on Tuesday.

Apple's MobileMe suite of Web services suffered another outage Monday that affected an unknown number of its users.

Of the included services, Mail was inaccessible for approximately two hours. Earlier in the day we had received scattered reports from users who were unable to access their mail. Those reports were later confirmed both through Apple's MobileMe status ticker and Twitter's real-time search tool. For those affected, all other aspects of MobileMe were reportedly up and running.

On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook. I wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks?

Hackers working to develop software that unlocks the iPhone for use on non-approved networks and in order to install unauthorized applications are warning users not to install iPhone Software 2.0.1.

The iPhone Dev team - developers of the popular PWNAGE application - issued a statement to this effect last night, warning that included in the firmware up date that there is a baseband update. What this means is if users try to update an unlocked or jailbroken phone with the Apple software, there's a strong chance their device will be bricked.

I was all set to give this week's column over to a new register-direct implementation of a JavaScript interpreter that's many times faster than all currently available implementations. It's not exactly growing hair on a billiard ball, but a nitro-boosted JavaScript will put a shine on AJAX and keep my most beloved language on track to becoming the gold standard for dynamic languages.

A former Apple employee is filing suit against the company for violating labor laws.

The ex-network engineer is claiming that the company asked him and other employees to work beyond the standard 40 hour work week without properly compensating them for the overtime. The man also claims that he and other network engineers were required to be on call for stretches of up to seven days at a time.

In a move that could backfire, according to one security expert, Apple pulled out of a prominent hackers' convention taking place this week in Las Vegas.

Mac users should scrap Apple's Safari and replace it with a browser that offers anti-phishing protection, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Opera Software's Opera, Consumer Reports said Monday as it unveiled its annual Internet security survey.

Although Americans reported fewer spyware attacks and malware infections in the last year than in the past, phishing attacks remain a serious concern, said the magazine, which polled more than 2,000 American households with Internet access.

Apple has released the 2.0.1 firmware update for the iPhone and iPod touch, and as you can see above, it brings the much-awaited "Bug fixes" feature to bear. We first heard about bug fixes way back at WWDC '07, and since then there's been much speculation on Apple blogs of all kinds as to just what effects a feature like "bug fixes" will have on the market.

We're just kidding of course -- "Bug fixes" could mean anything. But the update is surprisingly large (242 mb) so as soon as we get it installed, we'll pick it apart.