Well, that was faster than expected. iPhone 3.0.1 was released by Apple today as a security update to the Apple iPhone operating system. The update fixes a bug that apparently the vast majority (if not all) GSM phones are susceptible to. In short, hackers could run unsigned code by sending a simple text message, and before the update, there was not a damn thing anyone could do about it.

More surprising is that Apple did not use this opportunity to step on the the tethering hack which a lot of us have been using. If you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS, you can enable tethering by simply changing a setting, and it’s really easy to do. Still, we all know how Apple pulls applications and functionality because of AT&T, so imagine my relief when I found that 3.0.1 keeps this little loophole intact. But my pessimism isn’t dead just yet. I expect that Apple will kill tethering by the time iPhone 3.1 rolls out.

The United States’ Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into the whole debacle over Apple’s rejection of a piece of software which allows users to use the Google Voice service from the iPhone. Apple’s grounds for the application’s removal were that it duplicates existing functionality, ie that the iPhone is already capable of making calls.

The FCC’s investigation is almost certainly not into the legality of Apple’s policies, but rather into the whole smartphone ecosystem that has cropped up in the past few years. And it’s not like we didn’t see FCC involvement coming. One of concerns the FCC is expressing is that users in rural areas often do not have access to the latest devices, largely because the new SuperPhone 9000 is only available on some big name carrier which has terrible coverage in that area.

So don’t expect the FCC to force Apple to allow applications onto the iPhone. The FCC is merely gathering information at the moment. With that in mind, I would be surprised if the government doesn’t take some sort of action within the year.

(Info via Dow Jones)

We’re getting in reports that the earlier news we posted, that the Pirate Bay was blocking The Netherlands, is either no longer true or was never true. That’ll teach me to trust presumably reliable sources.

This makes a whole lot more sense given how the creators of the Pirate Bay tend to operate. For example, in response to the fine imposed by a Swedish court earlier this year, the Pirate Bay folks opted to pay out the cash via micropayments, causing the plaintiffs to spend a whole lot on transaction cost. So in hindsight, I probably should have posted doubts that reports of the Pirate Bay’s sudden complacency were probably not quite correct.

But, the rest of the story holds true. The Pirate Bay folks have been ordered to stop receiving traffic from The Netherlands, and more and more of a fine will be imposed for every day that they do not block Netherlands traffic.

In case you missed it, TechCrunch went down, due to some fun fun MediaTemple failing. Big Boy Arrington took it very well, chiming in:

I do love when the excrement hits the cooling implements. Recently, Allen Stern of Centernetworks was complaining about Rackspace/Mosso on Twitter. He raised enough ruckus that the damn CEO emailed him. The times, they are a changing. No formal work if TechCrunch is actually going to leave MT, but perhaps if they do, our reliability will go up.

If you are described by your lawyers as “UFO eccentric,” you might be a bit off kilter. Although odd that the belief in a second form of life in universe of an odd quadrillion stars or so is somehow insane, and forcing people to swear to a sky daddy not to lie is not, this hacker from the UK is in some trouble. Crazy, or not, he hacked into NASA and the Pentagon. And you thought that when you cracked your friends Gmail password was slick, this man is your boss.

However, he just lost a major lawsuit disallowing his trial in Britain, making it nigh certain that he will be tried in the United States. Dear me, this man is in it deep. Especially in the current political and military climate of the United States, he is going to have some explaining ahead of him. More as it comes.

Who would have thought that the curmudgeons at the business bastions of the United States would lower themselves to the point of “tweeting.”  I can imagine the board room now: tense, wavering eyes, empty donut boxes, and a CEO as bass akward as a Luddite in a Best Buy:

“You want us to do what, ‘tweet,’?”

“Yes sir,” the terrified intern pipes up, quivering in the corner, his nerves a wreck, and his brain overclocked on meth or coffee. “Competitor X is doing it, and has 1,000 followers!”

The CEO scoffs: “We did 17 billion in revenue last year. Know how many shits I give out 1,000 anything?”

“But sir,” the intern continues, “we can brand you ‘visionary’ and a ‘future bringing genius,’ if we start using Twitter.”

“Do it. I now declare you Senior Vice President of something, now get the hell out of my office.”

Something like that, I am sure.  However if happened, 54 of the Fortune 100 are sending out updates through Twitter, or as least Reuters claims so. What does this mean? Dollar signs in the eyes of Twitter. There is one thing that the Fortune 100 have in common, large mountains of cash. …

Who would have thought that Michael Arrington’s small science fair project would ever see the light of day? Color me impressed, and dead wrong a year later. With a heft of just 1.2 Kg and a 12″ screen, the CrunchPad is real, functional, and hopefully coming to market soon. The sooner the better, in fact. Of course, not even on the shelves it is drawing fire for its lack of internal storage. Bollocks. Any so called “pundit” who does not get what this device is for, should retire.

The complete lack of internal storage (and physical keyboard) are due to their, repeating my words, complete lack of necessity. To begin: the tablet is to use the internet, not to use MS Word. You have GoogleDocs, or any of a fistful of competitors to work on documents with. There is no need to have physical storage to do this. The CrunchPad is akin to a cloud-portal. It is a firm step against the local file storage structure that we have become so accustomed to.

Secondly, the keyboard issue is also a nonstarter. This computer is meant for a purpose: browsing the internet. This is not a …

A Luxembourg court has handed out a ruling against a Danish newspaper clipping company stating that its practice of printing “11-word snippets of news articles” is reproduction in part under European IP law. The ruling stated the court’s opinion on how actually printing the article segments is different from publishing them online. According to the court, actually publishing something makes it more permanent than having it online does.

That ruling seems sort of backwards to me. News archives online, especially those for very short stories (it’s not even fair to call these stories), are way better than physical ones. I doubt that people are going to save hard copies of eleven word snippets when they can just access the same data online. I’m at a loss for understanding the logic behind the decision. Rather than making sense, this ruling just seems to reaffirm the European trend of coming down against the internet just because the old guys who run the legal system don’t understand technology.

Still, this story is nowhere near as outrageous as a lot of other recent news. The company in question was printing partial copies of someone …

A spokesperson for O2, the company which has the exclusive contract for the iPhone over in the UK, claimed that a fix for the iPhone SMS bug will be released to users this Saturday as an update via iTunes. This is the first news (to my knowledge) that a patch would be coming to fix this bug.

Still, I’m disappointed in Apple. The fact that they make the iPhone and yet cannot come out and say to their users “Yes, this is busted, and we’re working to fix it,” does not exactly inspire confidence. I shouldn’t have to wait for an Apple partner to tell me that my phone is going to be fixed. As I said yesterday, Apple has to ditch the denial and start admitting that they write code with bugs, just like everybody else does.

Oh, if you used that trick we posted a while back on how to enable tethering on your iPhone, be forewarned that if an update to the iPhone is indeed released on Saturday, it’ll probably try to disable tethering. I’m guessing that’ll be the case just because it makes sense as AT&T does not want users to tether their iPhones. Well, …

The Netherlands be crazy. A judge there handed out a ruling stating that The Pirate Bay had to block any traffic from the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay did so immediately, as for every day they ignored the ruling, they’d be fined 30,000 euros. On top of that, the judge ordered the Pirate Bay to pay 2.72 million euros in damages to the movie and recording industries. Of course, the Pirate Bay appealed, presumably on the grounds that this is a heaping pile of bullshit.

First off, special interest groups in general should not be allowed to collect fines on behalf of anyone. Have you ever heard about the RIAA’s actually paying the artists it claims to fight for? No. Likewise, the people who’d be collecting the imposed fines on the Pirate Bay are not actual movie makers who were arguably hard by filesharing, but a cabal of fatcat lawyers who’re profiting off absurd copyright laws.

Second, why should the Pirate Bay be held responsible for the actions of everyone in an entire country? If I’m hosting a website which is illegal to access if you’re based in Iran, it’s not my job to babysit my traffic on behalf of the Iranian government. Let …