Apple

 Apple officially announced its agreement with China Mobile today. The world's largest carrier and most significant remaining mobile operator to not sell iPhones will begin taking preregistrations on December 25 and bring iPhone 5s and 5c models to retail stores for sale on January 17.

While previously hinted at by a series of leaks and promotions, the partnership is now official, according to a press release issued by Apple. The announcement described the deal as a "multi-year agreement."

Security researchers at Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated a unique new attack that can force the iSight cameras in legacy MacBook and iMac models to capture images without turning on the camera's accompanying LED.

Researchers Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway outline the attack, which targets the firmware inside the iSight camera's controller chip, in a paper entitled "iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED." The paper was first reported by the Washington Post.

In a report from Dan Lyons' blog HubSpot, an unnamed source at chipmaking giant Qualcomm said Apple's A7 "hit us in the gut," referring to the silicon's support for 64-bit processing.

"Not just us, but everyone, really," the person said of the surprise Apple's chip caused. "We were slack-jawed, and stunned, and unprepared. It's not that big a performance difference right now, since most current software won't benefit. But in Spinal Tap terms it's like, 32 more, and now everyone wants it."

Nearly two months after the initial release of Mavericks, Apple has issued the first major update for the operating system. OS X 10.9.1 can be downloaded automatically through the Mac App Store's Updates tab, but if you'd like to install it manually the package is also up on Apple's support site. The package for the 13-inch and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros is here, while the update package for all other supported Macs is here.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) will undergo a major change next year: the predominant interface will begin moving from SATA III to PCIe Generation 2.0 in data centers and higher-end laptops.

Stefan Esser, a security researcher known as i0n1c, is alleging that someone close to the evad3rs stole a jailbreak exploit and sold it to a private buyer. I0n1c is the hacker behind the untethered jailbreak for iOS 4.3.2. He also jailbroke the iPad 3 on iOS 5.1.

Yesterday morning Esser tweeted, "So apparently someone around the @evad3rs stole a jailbreak from them and sold it to a private buyer."

A Bitcoin mining hoax started by a prankster on the 4chan imageboard has reportedly led some Mac users into erasing all of their data within seconds.

The troubled mobile phone maker BlackBerry still has at least one very loyal customer: US President Barack Obama.

At a meeting with youth on Wednesday to promote his landmark healthcare law, Obama said he is not allowed to have Apple's smart phone, the iPhone, for "security reasons," though he still uses Apple's tablet computer, the iPad.

British artist Kyle Lambert spent quite a bit of time creating a digital painting and by the looks of it, it was time well spent. The drawing is an insanely realistic portrait of Morgan Freeman. The image you see above isn't a photo of Freeman photoshopped onto an iPad — that's Lambert's actual work of art.

A California federal judge has dismissed a consumer lawsuit over data privacy against Apple Inc, saying the plaintiffs had failed to show they had relied on any alleged company misrepresentations and that they had suffered harm.

The four plaintiffs claimed in 2011 that Apple had violated its privacy policy, saying the iPhone maker had designed its iOS environment to easily transmit personal information to third parties that collect and analyze such data without user consent or detection.