Just found a HUGE #security #hole w/ push & AIM. Someone got my sent messages and wrote back. DO NOT send confidential AIM msg to #iPhone

#iPhone #push #security #hole:my msg was received by an hacked iPhone w/ push service hack; msg seems to be broadcasted to all hacked phones

Take extreme caution when sending AIM msg to people w/ hacked iPhones. Push service broadcasts your msg to strangers. Pls RT

@martinhering there seems to be a brand new hack that reactivates push with the effect that received msg are broadcasted to strangers

Here's a screenshot the random receiver of my msgs sent me back http://twitpic.com/b3bct I used iChat on a Mac #iPhone #push #security #hole

The problem seems a result from a hack to avoid Apple's jailbroken/unlocked iPhone push blockade, so if you haven't used any of this, keep sending your kinky messages to your mistress or master as usual. Otherwise, zip it.

Update: Yes, it's confirmed. The problems are a result of the patch to fix the push blockade. [Twitter via CrunchGear]

Searchme: Searchme apps have been available for other mobile platforms—iPhone, Symbian and Android—for quite a while now, only now coming to Windows Mobile in free beta form. Searchme, for the vast majority of you who never stray from the comforting, safe embrace of Google, answers queries in screenshots of websites and various media, some of which can be played back in the results. Though the panel-based interface works best on the iPhone, the Windows Mobile version is far from ugly, and you may find it quicker for certain types of searches. Free.

TheChanner: A moderately useful mobile TV app saved by its price, TheChanner doesn't have a particularly compelling selection of channels—they're pipe through to your phone from a variety of preexisting free sources, though there aren't many names that you'll recognize. There are plenty to choose from, though, and a lot of them are fairly niche. The app itself is a bit glitchy, and as you'd expect, it's a huge battery hog. Free.

GPS Spot: I kinda love the concept of this app: press a button, and it'll save your location according to your device's GPS. When you're trying to get back to that location at a later date, it'll tell you how to get there with a compass and distance readout. Basically, it's for finding your car in a huge parking lot. It's four dollars, which you can't really escape paying—the trial version is fairly useless.

Skype 3.0: We covered this before, but it's worth mentioning again: there's a new Skype client for WinMo. You can text of SkypeOut credit, though unfortunately people can't text you back. The new file-sending/recieving feature, though, is what makes this release awesome.

AIM 2.0: The official AIM app for Windows Mobile has hit 2.0, landing an interface lift and a new "lifestream" feature. It's a separate tab from your main buddy list, which consolidates updates from tons of social media services (Twitter updates, Flickr friends, Facebook statuses) and presents them in a single stream, as per its name. I'm partial to multi-protocol apps like Palringo, Fring, and Nimbuzz (more on that below), although this official app isn't half bad if AIM's your messaging service of choice.

Numpty Physics : As a time-suck, it's hard to beat Crayon Physics. Sadly, it never made its way to Windows Mobile, leaving physics-minded, Microsoft-using puzzle gamers with no recourse. Well, open-source Crayon Physics clone Numpty Physics will do just fine, thanks. This may be obvious, but you'll need a touchscreen phone to play. Free.

Nimbuzz 2.0: This multi-protocol instant messaging app has been updated, and is largely unchanged: the interface is tweaked a bit, and you can now report your location to other Nimbuzz users. So why should you care about this then? One word: SkypeOut. You can now make calls using SkypeOut credit, which, assuming your carrier isn't too stringent about such things, will turn your phone into an ultra-cheap international calling machine. Of course you could just use the Skype app, but as is the point of these types of all-in-one apps, Nimbuzz could save you a few screen taps/button presses, and a little time.

Auto Call Recorder: Super-simple (and free!) call recording. I've had trouble finding a decent solution for this in the past, since apps are generally either paid, crippled trialware or not widely compatible, so it's a relief to find one that works. Indispensable for interviews, conference calls and the like. Note: this app is to be used for good, not evil. Thanks.

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend, everybody!

The app does what was touted this year at the iPhone 3.0 event: display notifications when the app is closed, show you how many outstanding messages you have and basically keep you "connected" to the AIM service even when you're not actively using the app. The free version is here and the pay version is here.

We personally would go with the free version until the pay version of the better IM apps (Beejive, for example) go live. Boy Genius says it's live now, but we're still seeing the old version in the store. [TechCrunch]

Laserdiscs

When Laserdisc player production finally spun down a month or so ago, it wasn't much of an occasion. I mean, aside from inspiring a little grade-school nostalgia and upsetting a hobbyist or three, the event wasn't materially notable. For us, that is. It turns out that Laserdiscs were much more popular in Japan than America during their heyday—about 500% more popular.

Why? The Japanese success of the Laserdisc (or Videodisc, as they were marketed there) comes down to the two things: money and anime. From launch, Laserdisc prices were lower in Japan than in most other markets, which accelerated adoption. Anime fans appreciated the format's improved fidelity, which drove sales at the time and eventually led to the still-active secondhand LD market. Laserdisc players, though no longer produced, are still available in the shops of Akihabara and elsewhere. At a Best Buy in Akron? Not so much.

Nokia Phones

When Nokia does something interesting, we take notice. Otherwise, in the US the company exists in an awkward netherworld of ultra-high name recognition and almost infinitesimal relevance. To most Americans, Nokia looks like a budget-phone maker. To most of the rest of the world, they're the undisputed king of cellphonery, and not just in name—they're by far the largest manufacturer of handsets on the planet. They literally dwarf their competition, selling double the volume of their nearest competitor, Samsung.

By the numbers: Nokia moved 113 million mobile devices in the last quarter alone, their entry-level 1100 handset has sold over 200m units, and at one point the N95, a precocious, clunky do-it-all handset topped the mobile phone sales charts in the UK. Where does the US stand in all of this? Of those 113 million mobile devices sold last quarter, just five million found their way to North America. Even the iPhone matched those numbers while RIM's BlackBerry nearly doubled them. Nokia is the gadget equivalent of the BBC—most Americans know about it, but the rest of the world depends on it.

Mobile TV

I'm not talking about expensive, pixelated video-over-3G services here. No, I mean full-fledged digital TV streamed straight to your handset, PC or PMP. Brazil has it, South Korea has it, and of course, so does Japan. The tech used in Japan and Brazil is known as 1seg, and it broadcasts over UHF alongside regular HD content. In Japan, more than two thirds of new mobile phones support the standard, which is a part of daily life for many people. Here, it's basically unheard of.

DMB is a alternative standard, targeted at a much wider audience. Developed in South Korea, the satellite and terrestrial version of the tech (S-DMB and T-DMB, respectively) are already in widespread use there and T-DMB is being deployed across much of Western Europe—trials appear to be going fairly well. Unfortunately for us, the VHF and UHF bands used by the T-DMB standard have already been claimed by preexisting TV programming and the military, so don't expect to see terrestrial TV on AT&T or Verizon phones anytime soon, though yours might be capable of the pay-for-play MediaFlo service that nobody uses.

Osaifu-Keitai, or, Your Phone Is Your Wallet

In much of the world, including the US of A, mobile payment systems have been ignored or abandoned after fitful starts. Not in Japan (if you're noticing a trend here, good job!). Osaifu-Keitai, the e-wallet standard adopted by Japanese telecom heavyweights NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank and au, essentially renders wallets obsolete. Phones equipped with Osaifu-Keitai can be charged with money, download tickets for anything from a sporting event to a plane trip, serve as official identification or link to a credit card.

Due to uncertainties about demand for such a service and loads of red tape , no comparable standard has emerged stateside, and it's a shame: If you can come to terms with the nebulous privacy issues associated with carrying so much private information on a losable device, it does seem like the plain, obvious and fundamentally good type of technological progress that is probably, with or without our assent, inevitable. Oh well.

Next-Gen Instant Messaging

AOL (emphasis on the A), burdened with decades-old stereotypes about its tech-tarded users and a persistent association with both geriatrics and late-'90s Meg Ryan movies, doesn't have the best public image. But they do still run the nation's most popular messaging platform! AIM, despite being a vestige of a service that its parent company doesn't really care much about anymore, is the de facto standard for messaging in the US (and Israel, strangely). As we saw earlier though, that doesn't always mean much.

Worldwide AIM/ICQ/iChat numbers are massively outclassed by MSN, or Windows Live as it's been called for the last few years. In China, the largest IM market, most people don't bother with either, opting for the Tencent QQ service. Both were born a solid five years after AIM, but their extra features—mostly messaging add-ons meant to appeal to a younger set—are questionably useful. It's not so much that sticking with AIM has left Americans on an inferior service, it's that it has isolated us, in a small way, from the rest of the messaging world.

MiniDisc

The story of the MiniDisc epitomizes tech regionalism: A solid, capable contender for recordable audio format dominance, the MD was met with enthusiasm in Japan. It was extremely advanced for its time, rolling fantastic, CD-like audio quality with the recording abilities of a cassette, all in a package that was more portable than either. Despite being introduced in the early '90s, the format held up well against the first generation of MP3 players, which, with their limited capacities, slim feature sets and high prices, didn't really provide a perceptible advantage over the venerable MD units. Sony had a solid product—and even a bit of a hit—on its hands.

At least, that's how the story went in Tokyo. Despite Sony's best efforts—and what seemed like an endless string of product revamps—the MiniDisc was never more than a marginal player in the US. Sure, it earned plaudits from audiophiles and musicians (check out the recording information for the thousands of concerts on Archive.org if you don't believe me), but the format never took off, either as a recording medium or, due to risk-averse record companies and the high cost of the actual media, as a competitor for the CD. When MP3 players came of age, the MD's door to America finally latched shut for good. Sony, of course, took a while to get the message, and Steve Jobs was laughing the whole time.

No, it doesn't use Apple's long lost push notifications. Instead, it uses SMS notifications, for up to 24 hours after you sign out of the iPhone app (you can pick shorter intervals, as well as limit to pinging you only when you get IMs from new buddies, not the people you were just talking to). Hopefully, they'll get a bit more sophisticated, since right now they just tell you to fire up AIM 'cause you got mail.

Other notable new stuff—free SMS texts to anyone in iPhone contact list, multiple account support and location awareness, so you'll see buddies in a special new group called "near me." (You can limit this to buddies, everyone or no one.) It seems to be a little bit more responsive than I remember, too.

Also, AIM is splitting into a paid and a free ad-supported version. So far, I've just seen occasional pop-up on the bottom of my buddy list, but nothing while actually IMing, so not too annoying. If you hated AIM before, you're not gonna like it now, but it's definitely better. [iTunes, Hat tip Ars Technica]

AM is extremely easy to set up and has lots of options so you can choose which contacts you see. It supports Gtalk and AIM protocols in addition to ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber. AM even logs your IM sessions so you can refer back to old conversations. But best of all, it keeps your IM conversations going, even when you are on a call or out of the program, and sends Mail style notifications alerting you to how many IMs came your way while you were gone. All in all, an extremely good experience for IMing on the go, so jailbreak if you haven't yet, and install this puppy. [Google via Lifehacker]

First, we already know that apps running in the background as a process is possible on the iPhone. The iPod app, SMS app, and various other apps all run in the background now and continue running no matter where you go in the phone. Also, user-made Installer.app apps like Apollo (an IM client) already run in the background just fine. So why did Apple make this limitation that all apps have to quit whenever the user switches out? Memory management. From Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for the iPhone:

Apple has no idea what combination of applications you could possibly install on your phone, and they can't control it. If you were to install two apps that took up loads of the iPhone's memory (we're talking RAM), and they both ran in the background, it would slow down the phone's other, more important tasks such as calling or iPodding. If this were the case, Apple would be blamed for making a slow or non-responsive phone even when it's not actually Apple's fault. This is exactly the thing that goes on in Windows Mobile devices. It's fine when you're just running normal, natively-installed apps, but when you get to multi-tasking with your own installed programs, the phone becomes sluggish and everyone curses Microsoft. Apple wants none of this.

So the implication to you, the end-user, is that you can't have apps running in the background, constantly checking the internet. This means no RSS reader that's always up-to-date and no IM apps that always sit in the background, listening for messages. If you're wondering Exchange's push email and calendars are going to work in this scheme, it'll be integrated into Apple's first-party Mail system, which can be allowed to run in the background.

But in the end, it's only a small portion of apps that are really affected by this rule. Games or utilities can save their app status to disk often so that you can resume where you left off when you start it back up. But until the iPhone allows SDK-applications to run in the background, you're probably better off using a web-based chat application in Safari (which already has permission to). [Tech Crunch]

Best of all, it can recognize up to eight different emotes and act accordingly, meaning you can gauge your sig-other's mood at you ignoring her IMs all the way from across the room because you are tired and at CES and don't have time to talk.

They've gotten rid of problems such as having to hit a key to bring up the keyboard, the editable chat history and the sound/vibration preferences not holding. In short, it's actually quite usable now. You get alerts when the program's in the background, and the whole app's been sped up many times over.

There are still a few things to work out, however.

• No tabbed chatting
• You can't see who IM'ed you unless you scroll down the whole list
• Occasional freezing at sign in
• AIM only (they're adding more IM networks soon)
• Return button doesn't send the message (only inserts a newline)
• Send button too small
• Autocomplete is beneath the words, so it's covered up by the keyboard
• No contact list grouping (doesn't follow the grouping from the server side)
• Occasionally locks up your phone

Once they can get these issues worked out, it's going to be a pretty fantastic AIM client! [Google Code]

Once you do manage to load a chat screen with a buddy that happens to there (thanks, Adam Frucci), there are some amateur features/early bugs like having to hit a button to bring up the keyboard, and being able edit the chat history. This version is a fantastic proof of concept, but definitely a lousy chat client.

Oh, and the first IRC client has been released as well. But unless this is 1999 again, most of you will have no use for this. But you can make IRC commands and chat, so there's that.

You can install both with Installer.app, which you can see how to use here.

[Google Code via TUAW]

In our own tests, the IMs came in super speedy and in iChat-esque bubbles (like the SMS app). There's even chat icons on the top to represent tabs, so you can cycle between different conversations. It's still in alpha, which explains why there aren't any options for, say, hiding offline contacts, but it's still good enough to earn our recommendation as the best chat app so far. [BeeJive]