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At least two other applications have been removed from the App Store in the past week with seemingly no explanation. Several blogs have reported that Box Office, a movie showtime resource, and NetShare, which let people use their iPhone 3G as a modem to connect their laptops to the Internet, have also been removed from the App Store. At least in the U.S., exclusive wireless provider AT&T has explicitly said it does not allow the iPhone to be used as a laptop modem.

I suspect the application was removed because Apple was afraid of being sued. Some people had already complained on the Web that they had clicked on the “buy” button for the application accidently. Considering that major wireless carriers, such as AT&T, have started settling class action lawsuits with plaintiffs who say they were hoodwinked into signing up for recurring charges for ringtones and other content, it’s not surprising that Apple would try minimize liability. The European Union is also cracking down on wireless operators that allow companies to sell bogus products via cell phones.

But even if Apple had a good reason for removing the application, developers are concerned by the lack of communication from Apple about how and why certain applications are allowed or denied access to the App Store and why some are removed.

Developer Heirnrich told the LA Times in an e-mail that he had no idea why Apple had pulled his application, since he was not aware of violating any rules of the software store. He claims that Apple has not provided an explanation as to why the application was removed.

Cyrus Najmabadi, developer of BoxOffice, also told MacWorld that he had tried to contact Apple to find out why his application had been removed, but he said he got no response.

The $1,000 application on Apple’s App Store, which lets people know how rich you are simply for buying it, has been removed without explanation, making some developers wonder what it takes for Apple to pull the plug.

testing usatoday link

Apple also did not respond for comment on this story.

(Credit:
Apple)

The “I am Rich” application developed by Armin Heinrich, a German software developer, does nothing more than display a picture of a red ruby on the
iPhone screen. After initially approving the $1,000 application, Apple removed it from the store this week. Eight people managed to dish out $1,000 to buy the useless application, generating about $5,600 in revenue for Heinrich and $2,400 for Apple, which collects 30 percent of each sale on the App Store, according to a blog on the Los Angeles Times Web site.

Nullriver Software, the developer of the NetShare application told MacWorld that it had tried for several days to reach someone at Apple to get an explanation for why its application was removed. The company said it finally made contact, and now is working with Apple to get NetShare back on the App Store.

When the App Store was first announced earlier this year, company CEO Steve Jobs said there would be limitations on what applications could be sold. Specifically, he stated that porn would not be allowed. And beyond that, he left it pretty open. Now these loosely defined criteria are frustrating some developers.

Of course, this evidence is entirely anecdotal, but similar stories have been showing up on the Web this week. Suffice it to say, it’s fairly improbable anyone will be able to waltz in off the street and buy an iPhone 3G from AT&T until at least the end of August. Though you could get lucky if someone happens to return a phone the same day you go in.

Still, the odds are heavily in favor of Apple being able to supply iPhones to their customers on the spot. So if you really, truly must have an iPhone as soon as possible, it seems pointless to bother with AT&T.

When asked if someone could walk in and buy a phone any time this week, an employee of an Austin, Texas, area store put it this way: “No way, no how, no store.”

Lines like this, taken on iPhone launch day, remain at Apple stores, while AT&T outlets across the U.S. are sold out.

That’s how two AT&T stores–one in Los Angeles, another in Denver–answered their phones Tuesday. But those stores are hardly alone in their lack of 3G iPhones. A CNET News survey on Tuesday and Wednesday showed that during their first week on sale, Apple’s latest iPhones are playing extremely hard to get.

In total, we contacted 50 AT&T stores in 21 cities across 11 states, and not one had any of the three models of the
Apple iPhone 3G. And none had good news about when one might be able to get the device.

“We are shipping tens of thousands of iPhone 3Gs each day to accommodate demand,” said AT&T spokeswoman Jenny Parker. “As we’re able to start re-stocking our stores, we will do so as fast as we can.”

CNET News’ Holly Jackson contributed to this report.

From what we can tell, the shipments vary. Though each store said it gets a shipment of phones every day, some said they hadn’t received any containing iPhones since launch day and didn’t expect any until next week. When they do arrive, “sometimes there are 10 iPhones, sometimes 100,” reported a Seattle-area AT&T employee who answered the phone.

That’s because of the huge back-order of phones. An AT&T representative confirmed that most of the company’s stores ran out of iPhones on Friday, the first day the devices were for sale. Since AT&T doesn’t have any in stock, its individual stores are taking “direct fulfillment” orders, which means customers can put in an order, pay for a phone, and will be contacted when it arrives. Most of the 50 stores said that process is running between 10 and 21 days before the phones will arrive.

“Welcome to the new AT&T, we’re currently out of iPhones, how can I help you?”

Apple stores are faring moderately better. There are more than 1,000 AT&T stores carrying iPhones, and 188 Apple stores in the U.S. Of those Apple outlets surveyed in the same cities of the AT&T stores that had no phones in stock, seven Apple stores reported having the iPhone in stock and three said they just ran out Wednesday morning. Those that still had iPhones to sell reported lines with waits of one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half hours.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News)

The goal of the Race to Zero is simple: obfuscate a malicious code so that it evades well-known antivirus engines.

Contestants will be given a sample set of viruses and malicious code that they must modify and then upload through the contest portal. Once accepted, the sample will be sent through a number of leading antivirus engines (perhaps using VirusTotal.com to provide real time test results). The first team or individual who manages to evade all the antivirus engines wins that round. The organizers promise that each round will increase in complexity.

On the contest site, organizers list six reasons for hosting this event:

Reverse engineering and code analysis is fun.
Not all antivirus is equal and poorly performing antivirus vendors should be called out.
Signature-based antivirus products can be easily circumvented.
It’s easier to modify malicious software than it is to write signature protection for it. Signature-based antivirus is dead. Antivirus is just part of the larger picture, you need patching, firewalling and sound security policies to remain virus free.

DefCon 16 will be held August 8-10 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

But Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs, said: “Encouraging research that results in better evasion techniques for malware writers is not a good idea. How many identities will be lost and how much data will be stolen from users as a result of the new techniques and evasions that are created? Security research should center around bettering detection not evasion.”

A new contest to be held at this year’s DefCon in Las Vegas in August hopes to prove that signature-based antivirus is dead, a move that one leading antivirus researcher says is “not a good idea.”

Now you can make TinyURL vanity URLs too.

With the popularity of TinyURL and it’s automatic integration with services like Twitter, most of the good ones have already been snatched up, so if you’re looking to get a vanity mini URL from another similar service, your best bet is to go with one of the little guys. My CNET colleague Nicole Lee did a great roundup on some competitors back in March. Of the bunch, my favorite MooURL has always seemed to have the most open of any, but now that I’ve told you, the secret is out.

Not content to just sit around recovering from Independence Day shenanigans this past weekend, TinyURL released a much-needed feature to its URL-shortening service that others have had for ages: vanity URLs. This means the nonsensical shortened URLs it spits out from your 1,000 character-plus links can now be changed to whatever name you want after the forward slash–that is as long as it hasn’t been taken by someone else.

Fujitsu would sell all of its plants–including those in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines–for between 70 billion yen and 100 billion yen (approximately $660 million to $944 million), according to Japan’s Nikkei news service.

The deal would be finalized by the end of the year, according to Nikkei.

Solid-state drive suppliers such Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, and STEC are also beginning to target SSDs as replacements for hard disk drives in the enterprise.

Beyond the brutal price competition that is typical in the hard disk drive industry, there is a clear-and-present threat now from solid-state drives. Until this year relegated to digital camera and music player storage, solid-state drives are now making inroads–albeit small–in laptops, particularly ultraportables like the MacBook Air, Dell’s new E4200 line, and Netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC.

A Western Digital representative would not comment on the report.

Fujitsu is in talks to sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report.

This would be one of the largest business unit sell-offs for a Japanese electronics company, Nikkei said, adding that Fujitsu’s hard disk drive business has been posting losses.

Western Digital is the second-largest hard disk drive maker in the world behind Seagate Technology. Fujitsu’s HDD unit is ranked sixth.

(Credit: Belkin)

$19.99, available in September.

The magic of magnets!

You’re on stage, in the middle of your first song. The band’s tight. The sound’s dialed in. The audience is grooving. But you–idiot guitarist–forgot to do the Stevie Ray Vaughan trick of tucking your cable up through your strap, so instead it’s running straight down to the floor, next to your feet. Excited, you take a step forward to pose for your friends in the front row and step right on your cord. It comes out with an ear-splitting pop and buzz. The bass player rolls his eyes as you get down on the stage, pick the end of the cable back up, plug it back into your guitar–another loud pop–and finish the solo. Momentum lost. Show ruined. Chances of rock stardom zero.

Belkin’s got the solution: BreakFree connectors. They’re magnetic, like the MacBook’s MagSafe power cable. They can’t prevent you from stepping on your cord, but when you do there’s no pop, no buzz, and you can reattach them very quickly. They’re also excellent for guitarists who like to change axes between songs, but lack the roadies or foresight to do the busy work of turning on the bypass each time. Plus, you’re less likely to damage your input jack after hundreds of plugs and unplugs–and there are few things worse than an input jack failing on stage. (What’s that crackling sound?)

Microsoft first demonstrated the browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are malware protection, better standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice. It also supports having private sessions that don’t get logged in a browser’s history.

“We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release,” he wrote. “We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.”

Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of
Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday.

The first beta version was released in March, with a second beta arriving over the summer.

Hachamovitch said that Web site developers should test their sites and report “any critical issues” to Microsoft.

The next test, essentially a “release candidate” version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won’t hit Microsoft’s initial goal of finishing the browser this year.

Hachamovitch also called on technical users to download the current beta 2 version and let Microsoft know how that goes.

“Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period,” general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting. “We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done.”

Manu Thapar, former vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as MySpace’s senior vice president of engineering, a role that involves architecture and security management as well as the creation of an offshore development team. Another Yahoo veteran, Tish Whitcraft, has joined MySpace as senior vice president of customer care and will oversee the construction of a “self-help” tool for MySpace users.

But the revolving doors at MySpace are moving fast. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that the company was looking to lay off as much as 5 percent of its workforce, which chief operating officer Amit Kapur confirmed to the blog later in the day. But the exec classified the move as “performance driven,” meaning that fired employees would be replaced and that MySpace was actually looking to hire as many as 300 new employees.

The hiring announcement comes so close on the heels of the layoff reports that conspiracy theorists might speculate MySpace put out a release about fairly recent executive picks to temper any bad press. But when asked, a MySpace representative classified the hires as “very recent…or are locked and loaded to start soon,” so it’s more likely that personnel changes just happened to fall into the rumor mill at an opportune time.

On the media side, Angela Courtin has been hired as MySpace’s senior vice president of marketing, entertainment, and content. She comes from MTV Networks, where she was vice president of integrated marketing. Jason Oberfest, a former biz-dev guru at Los Angeles Times Interactive, has been hired as vice president of business development to work in both deal making and developer relations. And Abe Thomas, a former employee of eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, has been hired as vice president of online marketing.

MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team–three senior vice presidents and two vice president–in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They’re coming from a mixed background of media and tech.

SlyDial, a straight-to-voicemail call service I covered back in early April, has opened up its doors to everything this morning after undergoing three months of beta testing. New on Monday is a premium service heavy users can subscribe to in order to get all the perks of the service without having to listen to the in-house ads that run before connecting you to a call. There are a few plans available: either a 15 cents per call one-time fee, or a $4.95 monthly or $29.95 yearly plan, which only makes sense if you think you’re going to be sending more than 30 SlyDial calls a month.

SlyDial now lets you plug in your contacts and be connected with them just by clicking the SlyDial logo on the left.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

I still hold true to what I said about SlyDial in my initial hands-on. It’s a potentially evil service for people who misuse it (see the guy in the video embedded after the break), giving anyone the excuse that they “tried to call you” without having to approach actual conversation. That said, it can be wonderfully convenient if you want to send someone the equivalent of a voice text message without interrupting what they’re doing.

SlyDial is a creation of Mobile Sphere, the same folks who did Joopz, the PC-to-mobile phone text-messaging service and Webware 100 2008 finalist.

More useful might be the new quick-dial functionality included for registered users. You can add any contacts from your phone book and have the service automatically connect you to their voice mailboxes. It saves you from having to enter the number or make a phone call in the first place; it’ll simply call you instead.

A spokeperson for Google said “Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network.”

In its Security Threat Report for the first half of 2008, Sophos says it finds just over 16,000 malicious pages each day, mostly the result of malicious SQL-injection attacks on legitimate Web sites such as the attack on Sony’s U.S. PlayStation site in July. Tricks used by criminal hackers include using simple HTML code to place via SQL-injection a 1×1 pixel element (about the size of a pin prick) on an infected page. In loading the page, the Internet browser would then contact a server running exploit scripts and malicious code. But because the sites are legitimate, some security vendors struggle with blocking infected Web pages.

According to a report out Wednesday, antivirus vendor Sophos says it detects one Web page with malicious content every 5 seconds–a trend that is up 300 percent from 2007.

As for illegitimate sites, Sophos notes that Geocities and Blogger both make it easy for anyone to set up a Web site without much identification. Blogger, owned by Google, is particularly problematic, says Sophos, with the blog site alone accounting for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts. It is not only possible for the Blogger sites to host malicious code, but criminal attackers can also inject links to malicious sites in the comments sections of the blogs.