Apparently, the Aurora Feint game would send your contact list unencrypted to the company’s servers. Hopefully the developers will fix this properly and get their game back in the App Store.

Did you hear about the mess that involves Loopt.com users spamming their contact list at the expense of their recipients and without prior consent from their recipients? You need not have ever tried or even heard of Loopt in order to become a victim of their spam.

Loopt enable users to broadcast their exact location to their friends via text messages by installing the Loopt software on their mobile phone. I’m not sure I see why anyone would want to do this, but apparently there are people that want to broadcast their location. Hopefully their recipients actually give a damn.

Individuals who do experience an unwanted barrage of Looptspam from someone who was previously their friend before using Loopt can opt-out. According to Loopt:

Your friend may contact Loopt at privacy@loopt.com to request that Loopt remove this information from our systems.

Well that’s convenient, isn’t it? Email a company to stop receiving text messages that you didn’t ask for in the first place.

Merlin Mann has a more detailed post about the Loopt issue. Check it out.

Update: Loopt “[has] since disabled that functionality due to customer feedback and confusion”

My wife and I added AT&T’s Smart Limits for Wireless to our daughter’s phone last night. After reading about it, and watching the demo, I thought it sounded like a useful feature for my daughter’s phone. Her mom and I were mostly interested in the “Time of day” restrictions for school time and bedtime. We enabled Smart Limits last night, and tested out all the different settings.

Unfortunately this feature is pretty much crippled by the fact that incoming calls and text messages still get through to the phone during restricted times. This doesn’t make any sense at all. She will learn soon, if she hasn’t already, that she simply has to tell her friends, “After a certain time, I can’t call you, so you should call me.” I find this flaw in Smart Limits extremely asinine. This would be simple enough for AT&T to implement if they had any desire to give their customers what they wanted. I know that I am not the only one who feels this way.

The only solution that has been offered is to add numbers to the blocked list, that I don’t want calling during the restricted hours.

I understand that I can add a number to the blocked list to block it, but there are 2 flaws with this “solution”. First, the “restricted” time of day should be just that — restricted (except from allowed numbers). The second problem with adding a number to the blocked list is that there is a limit of 15 numbers. My daughter has more than 15 friends that wouldn’t hesitate to call her during the restricted hours, and adding their numbers to the blocked list will block them at all hours, not just during the restricted hours.

Before anyone calls me out and says that I should have known how Smart Limits works based on AT&T’s documentation, I read and pretty much understood what Smart Limits could and could not do before adding the service. I’m not implying that AT&T misled me with their Smart Limits documentation. My complaint is that the service itself is not quite what it should be. Only after trying the Smart Limits service do the flaws become apparent. In my opinioin, AT&T only halfway implemented the features that would truly make this service useful.

“Disappointed with Smart Limits” thread at the AT&T forums

Staples is set to begin selling self-destructing DVDs, made by Flexplay, which will render themselves unplayable within 48 hours of breaking the packaging’s seal. The discs will go on sale sometime this month for $4.99 each.

Flexplay claims that the discs are “fully recyclable and conform to all applicable EPA environmental standards.” Unfortunately, just because something is said to be recyclable, that doesn’t mean that consumers will always recycle it. These discs will inevitably amount to more trash in landfills.

It will be interesting to see whether the majority of consumers will embrace this technology. My gut feeling is that they won’t. Consumers may be more inclined to spend the same money with Netflix or Blockbuster and not increase waste.
[via PC World]

What’s up with the There Will Be Blood cardboard case for the standard edition DVD? Who wants to buy that? It doesn’t stack nicely on the store shelf, and of course it isn’t going to sit nicely on my own movie shelf.

Granted the standard edition is $7 less than the collector’s edition, but if the standard edition is missing a nice, protective case, it should really be priced lower than what it is.

There Will Be Blood 2-Disc Collector’s Edition at Amazon.com
There Will Be Blood Standard Edition at Amazon.com

Two Apple Store employees were convicted of stealing and selling 332 iPhones from the store totaling $132,468.
(link)

It’s Friday. I deserve a chance to let off some steam before the weekend.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know the saying, “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch.” This happened yesterday with an ill-conceived PR stunt.

Again, today we see can see an example of another type of “bad apple”. When one member of a community spews hate and disdain at other communities, it tarnishes even the innocent bystanders.

As I briefly skimmed over a post yesterday about Jarvis’ reasons for not wanting a Mac, I thought to myself that this is definitely not a new sentiment. I’ve heard this before, and I once again discounted it and went on about my daily tasks.

Today I find that someone who calls himself “Max” and is suffering from Acute Maturity Deficiency has reacted to that post with hate. Other unrelated posts also fell victim to Max’s rantings.

I wish that I could apologize for the actions of “Max”, but only he can do that, however it is highly unlikely that he ever will as the internet provides him with an imaginary shroud of anonymity, and he is a long way off from having the maturity that is needed to apologize for one’s actions. It shames me when some (Mac) fanatics come out of the woodwork to try to force their beliefs on others.

I use Macs for both work and recreation, and only rarely use a PC. However, I will not deride anyone for having or using a PC. Macs and PCs are simply tools for getting a job done. In my case, the Mac is the best tool for the job, and in some rare cases a PC is the best tool for what I am trying to accomplish.

After this series of events, I have to accept Jarvis’ reasons for not wanting a Mac as completely valid.

I don’t believe that Apple in any way fosters or condones the hostility shown by Max. As ridiculous as some of the “I’m a Mac” commercials are, I see them as promoting a coexistence between Macs and PCs.

I want to set the record straight by saying, “PCs are just as good as Macs for many different tasks. Just as we all have our own strengths and weaknesses, the same is true for the platform of your choice.”

Over the past week some Mac sites (four that I know of) were defaced by someone calling himself “malcor”. This, in turn, brought about some panic in the security and Wordpress communities. A couple security firms blogged about the incident (Avert Labs, Blogvis.com) which only served to increase the awareness/panic.

The so-called hacker named “malcor” was actually a fictional character created by MacHeist to promote their upcoming MacHeist II shareware distribution. John Gruber wrote an interesting article last year documenting what some might consider “shady” business practices. Last week’s events only serve confirm the foolishness and selfishness of the MacHeist team.

Apologies can be found here:

• MacHeist.com
• MacApper.com
• GlennWolsey.com
• AppleMatters.com

Stunts like this do nothing but tarnish the Mac community, and scare off potential Mac adopters. This I’m sure has also resulted in bad PR for some hosting companies and CMS providers such as Wordpress.

My recommendation to all is to avoid supporting organizations like MacHeist. Do independent developers a favor and support them by making donations directly to the developers and/or paying them for licenses.

Update: It seems that others share some of my sentiments:

• Tea Leaves
• Someone Else

Why, Apple, did you swap the eject and menu buttons on the Leopard version of DVD Player.app? I find myself many times ejecting a DVD when I am intending, out of habit, to go to the menu.