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It may be the biggest snafu Microsoft's seen since Vista. In an interview with PCR, a British trade publication, a Microsoft manager implied that Windows 7 was based on the anti-Windows itself: Mac OS X.

The manager's name is Simon Aldous. And his remarks are igniting what could become a holy war among the world's most ardent fanboys.

So who is this Simon Aldous guy, and where did he come from? We did a little digging to find out.

The Windows 7-Mac Remark

We'll get to Aldous's background in a moment. First, let's dive into his present, and the PR nightmare he's inadvertently created.

In his PCR interview, Aldous stated that people often gloat about Apple's "fantastic" and "easy to use" operating system. Then came the words no Microsoft manager was ever meant to utter:

"What we've tried to do with Windows 7, whether it's traditional format or in a touch format, is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics."

The reporter followed up with a question that no doubt solidified the public's perception:

"So you've taken the style of the Mac platform and built it on the more solid foundations of Vista?"

Microsoft's Response

Microsoft didn't take long to spring into action. In a blog posted less than 24 hours after the PCR story, a company representative described Aldous's statement as "an inaccurate quote." And the internal smackdown didn't stop there.

"Unfortunately, this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7," the blog says. "I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed."

Ouch.

Meet Simon Aldous

Aldous's future is anyone's guess. We do, however, know a bit about his past and how exactly he came to work within the Microsoft machine.

Aldous — not to be confused with the producer/screenwriter of the same name — signed on with Microsoft around the fall of 2006, according to reports published at the time. Multiple sources indicate he had previously worked as the director of volume marketing at Computer 2000, a British IT product and service distribution firm. He reportedly left the company that July, citing "personal reasons" for his resignation.

Media stories describe Aldous as Microsoft's UK distribution chief, working primarily with vendors and catalogue partners. His goal, as stated by an October 2006 story in CRN: "driving the UK breadth of [Microsoft] partners in order to achieve double-digit growth and increase reach to and yield from end-users." Translation: not exactly an operating system development kind of guy.

According to a LinkedIn profile registered in Aldous's name, his full Microsoft title is SMB (small- and medium-sized business) and distribution director. The profile goes on to note that he is "an experienced senior manager working at director level within the IT industry and e-commerce marketplace."

Finally, in an unfortunate twist of irony given the current situation, the profile lists his strength as "identifying commercial opportunities and translating this into successfully implemented business strategy."

Defending Aldous

To be fair, at least one apparent associate of Aldous's has come forward to speak in his defense. A commenter writing on The Windows Blog under the alias "I-dont-do-tat" stated the following:

"I know Simon Aldous, having worked in the same UK subsidiar (sic) as him for a few years. He's a good guy who, for me, is telling it like it is. He's paying testament to the common view that a Mac is cool and a great template to copy.

"Then denying this to your customers just makes you look stupid because the very look and feel of Windows 7 is desperately trying to look like a Mac OS — just admit it."

Whichever side of the holy war you're on, I think we can all agree on one thing: Now is not the best time to be a guy named Simon Aldous.

JR Raphael is co-founder of geek-humor site eSarcasm. Though a PC user, he's not above occasionally imagining a world without Microsoft.

Late last week, an Australian hacker dubbed ikee deployed the Rickrolling worm– a harmless and humorous worm that installs a picture of 80’s one hit wonder Rick Astley to affected users’ home screens. Rickrolling serves not so much as malware but as a warning to jailbreak users who have installed SSH in order to gain root access to their iPhone’s file system from the internet but have neglected to change the default password, even though not doing so is clearly warned against in the installation documentation.

To the few users yet to heed the warning presented by ikee, it might be a good time to go ahead Intego reported the discovery of a much more harmful piece of malware that affects jailbroken iPhones and permeates in the same fashion as the Rickrolling worm.

Once again exploiting the fact that many users who install SSH on their iPhones fail to change the default password, the iPhone/Privacy.A worm quietly copies personal information from an afflicted device and spreads itself to other unsecured iPhones on the same network. Unlike Rickrolling, which announces itself by changing the wallpaper, this worm gives no indication when a device has been infected. Since an unchanged SSH password grants root file system access, iPhone/Privacy.A has the potential to access any file stored on an affected iPhone- including, but not limited to e-mails, text messages, photos, music, videos and calendars.

This news shouldn’t be read as a chastisement of jailbreaking but rather a reminder to use common sense. Especially when it comes to installing hackish software, know what you’re getting yourself into, and always read the docs.

A Quick Guide To Changing Your Default Password:

1) Install Mobile Terminal

If you haven't done so already, install Mobile Terminal from the Cydia store.

2) Open and Login

Open the Mobile Terminal app. At the prompt, type "su" to login to root. Now type the default password, "alpine".

3) Change the Default Password

Once logged in, type "passwd" (the UNIX command to change the password of the current user). Now type the password you wish to change it to (please, anything but "alpine"). Re-type it when prompted. Don't forget your password!

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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they've discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the U.S.

The flaws they've found "represent a serious threat to the accuracy and completeness of wiretap records used for both criminal investigation and as evidence in trial," the researchers say in their paper, set to be presented Thursday at a computer security conference in Chicago.

Following up on earlier work on evading analog wiretap devices called loop extenders, the Penn researchers took a deep look at the newer technical standards used to enable wiretapping on telecommunication switches. They found that while these newer devices probably don't suffer from many of the bugs they'd found in the loop extender world, they do introduce new flaws. In fact, wiretaps could probably be rendered useless if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack.

Four years ago, the University of Pennsylvania team made headlines after hacking an analog loop extender device they'd bought on eBay. This time, the team wanted to look at newer devices, but they couldn't get a hold of a switch. So instead they took a close look at the telecommunication industry standard — ANSI Standard J-STD-025 — that defines how switches should transmit wiretapped information to authorities. This standard was developed in the 1990s to spell out how telecommunications companies could comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

"We asked ourselves the question of whether this standard is sufficient to have reliable wiretapping," said Micah Sherr, a post-doctoral researcher at the university and one of the paper's co-authors. Eventually they were able to develop some proof-of-concept attacks that would disrupt devices. According to Sherr, the standard "really didn't consider the case of a wiretap subject who is trying to thwart or confuse the wiretap itself."

It turns out that the standard sets aside very little bandwidth — 64K bits per second — for keeping track of information about phone calls being made on the tapped line. When a wire tap is on, the switch is supposed to set up a 64Kbps Call Data Channel to send this information between the telco and the law enforcement agency doing the wiretap. Normally this channel has more than enough bandwidth for the whole system to work, but if someone tries to flood it with information by making dozens of SMS messages or VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone calls simultaneously, the channel could be overwhelmed and simply drop network traffic.

That means that law enforcement could lose records of who was called and when, and possibly miss entire call recordings as well, Sherr said.

Back in 2005, the FBI downplayed the Penn team's loop extender research, saying that it applied to only about 10 percent of wire taps. The J- standard studied in this paper is much more widely used, however, Sherr said. An FBI representative did not return messages seeking comment for this story.

The researchers wrote a program that connected to a server over Sprint's 3G wireless network 40 times per second, enough to flood the Call Data Channel. They say that they could get the same results by programming a computer to make seven VoIP calls per second or to fire off 42 SMS messages per second.

These techniques would work on mobile phones or VoIP systems, but not on analog devices, Sherr said.

Because the researchers weren't able to test their techniques on real-world systems they don't know for certain that they could thwart a wiretap. But Sherr believes that "there are definitely dangers" in the way the standard is written. "Because it's a black-box system, we don't know for sure."

Of course, criminals have plenty of easier ways to dodge police surveillance. They can use cash to buy prepaid mobile phones anonymously, or reach out to their accomplices with encrypted Skype calls, said Robert Graham, CEO with Errata Security. Luckily for the cops, criminals usually don't take their communications security that seriously. "Most criminals are stupid," he said. "They just use their same cell phone."

Project Natal will be available worldwide November 2010, launch with 14 games, and sell for less than £50, or about 80 US dollars, according to games biz site MCV. Expect 5 million units for global ship at release, with at least two purchase configurations: As a solo upgrade, or bundled with the Xbox 360 console itself.

MCV says its sources for the information had access to a secret tour Microsoft's been conducting in the UK to demonstrate Natal's technology to certain publishers and studios. Apparently the tour was designed to drum up developer support for the device.

If $80 sounds cheap, a publisher told MCV Microsoft's trying to get it even lower, aiming for "impulse" territory that could drop the tag to as little as £30, or about 50 US dollars.

Microsoft unveiled Natal this summer at E3 in Los Angeles. The device uses various cameras and microphones to track player movement and audio, allowing for what the company calls a "controller-free" experience.

At the Tokyo Game Show last month, top-tier publishers and developers including Activision, Bethesda, Capcom, Disney, EA, Konami, MTV, Namco Bandai, Sega, Square Enix, THQ and Ubisoft committed to design games for the device.

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Nokia's N900, the next tablet/smartphone/whatever to bat against Apple's iPhone, ships today. It's a big occasion for Nokia, as the N900 is its most powerful smartphone yet, and the device's Maemo 5 open source operating system is a diversion from Symbian, which Nokia tends to support.

I've been intrigued by the N900 since Nokia announced it in August, but as I look over the features, I can also understand why it fell off the radar, plagued by delays and overshadowed lately by Motorola's Droid. Here's a look at what's promising and potentially disappointing with Nokia's N900:

Hot: Monster Specs

Nokia likes to call the N900 a "mobile computer," and that's partly due to the device's hardware. There's a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, 1 GB of application memory and a 3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL support. The 3.5-inch display has a resolution of 800 x 480, and there's a 5-megapixel camera with flash and autofocus for photos and video. Best of all, 32 GB of storage is on-board storage, expandable to 48 GB with a MicroSD card.

Not: Limited Portrait Mode

Most of the N900's functionality is confined to landscape mode, which is probably why the phone is occasionally referred to as a tablet. When you want to fire off a quick text message or look something up on the Web, needing two hands will become inconvenient in a hurry.

Hot: Maemo 5 Operating System

This thing looks smooth as it swipes among four home screens for your contacts, favorite apps, bookmarks and communications. Yes, it can multitask, and a handy button lets you see which programs are currently running.

Not: No MMS

It's puzzling that such a multimedia-capable smartphone doesn't allow for MMS. All that high quality photo and video is somewhat wasted when you can't immediately blast it out to friends and family.

Hot: Firefox and Flash

Check out this video of the N900's Firefox-based Web browser in action, and try to curtail your drooling. When you can play a Flash version of Tower Defense through the Web, who needs to pay for an app? I'm tired of the drawn-out wait for Adobe to bring Flash to smartphones. The N900 brings the smartphone to Flash.

Not: Ovi Store

Nokia's Ovi Store for apps doesn't compare to the iPhone's App Store or the Android Market, and it likely never will unless the N900 catches fire and developers suddenly decide that Ovi is the place to be. The N900's powerful Web browser somewhat offsets the need for apps, but If I paid for a phone with OpenGL and multitasking, I'd certainly want to use those features.

Google announced the latest in a barrage of free Wi-Fi promotions from the three online search engine giants–Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. This promotion provides free Wi-Fi at 47 airports around the country for weary travelers. The Wi-Fi altruism from Google and others is much appreciated, but it shouldn't be necessary. The Wi-Fi should be free to begin with.

Free Wi-Fi is apparently the gift that keeps on giving this holiday season. Google partnered with Virgin America to provide free Wi-Fi networking on all of its flights within the Continental U.S.. Yahoo is providing free Wi-Fi in New York's Times Square for one year. Microsoft is delivering free Wi-Fi for Bing users at random locations scattered around the country. And now, Google is picking up the tab for airline travelers to use Wi-Fi connections for free at 47 different airports.

Kudos to all of them, but free Wi-Fi shouldn't be a holiday treat or marketing promotion. I am not blaming Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo at all. They should be commended for capitalizing on a need, and providing a service while simultaneously fostering goodwill with customers and building brand recognition. None of the three will mind if you also happen to use their search services while taking advantage of their free Wi-Fi offers either–actually Microsoft insists that you use Bing if you want free WiFi.

I appreciate the gesture from the three search providers, but the Wi-Fi should be free to begin with–not just in airports, but in public areas and retail establishments in general. My PC World peer David Coursey made a similar point when he said "Airports and airlines should offer free Internet because keeping customers happy, productive, and occupied is a good thing while they wait for their planes. Don't we already pay enough for everything else at airports?"

Precisely. Do you want me to show up a minimum of 2 hours before my departure time? Give me free Wi-Fi. Would you like me to grab some lunch at your over-priced airport restaurant while I wait to board my flight? Give me free Wi-Fi. Are you interested in having me hang out and grab some coffee in your shop while I wait for my connecting flight? Give me free Wi-Fi.

The same logic works outside of airports as well. Establishments like McDonald's and Starbucks have long offered Wi-Fi connectivity as a service for customers, but for a fee–a relatively high fee. Many restaurants and coffee shops do provide free Wi-Fi service for customers though, so those businesses get my money.

The businesses already have broadband Internet connections, and in many cases a wireless network already exists for internal use by employees. Opening access to share it with customers provides incentive for people to patronize the business, and builds customer satisfaction and loyalty without adding any additional costs or expenses for the business. The return on Wi-Fi is increased traffic and revenue for the business in general, but the Wi-Fi should not be viewed as a source of income.

The heroes emerging from this story of seasonal charity from Google are the Burbank and Seattle airports which are reportedly going to continue providing free Wi-Fi even after the Google promotion is over. I want to book a flight and travel to those airports just to show my support for their progressive customer focus.

So, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft–thanks for the holidays. Your generosity will make holiday shopping and traveling much easier on a weary and cash-strapped nation. Everyone else, take notes and stop being such a Scrooge with the Wi-Fi access.

Tony Bradley tweets as @PCSecurityNews, and can be contacted at his Facebook page
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Unveiling 61 new products and features for enterprise employees to communicate with each other and partners, Cisco Systems executives emphasized the importance of collaboration at an event in San Francisco on Monday.

Chairman and CEO John Chambers continued his mantra of the past few years that the key to both enterprise success and economic productivity is the ability of people to work together and share information easily. On Monday, Cisco had several new tools for those tasks, mostly for delivery within the next several months.

"This isn't a technology or product announcement today. This is an architectural announcement that enables change in business or government strategy at a much faster speed," Chambers told partners, analysts and media at the Cisco Collaboration Summit.

He underscored the importance of the company's broad set of introductions by tying it in to what he called an emerging recovery of the world economy.

"At a time that most people are just popping their head back up, saying it feels like the economy's starting to go again, what are we going to do? We're going to have the foot not only off the (brake) pedal, it is completely down on the accelerator, and we are going to go to the fastest and most aggressive we've ever done in the history of our company," Chambers said.

The company's true overarching goal is to add value to its infrastructure offerings — which now extend far beyond the routers and switches that initially built Cisco — so they don't become generic products that are hard to charge a premium for, according to Ken Dulaney, Gartner's lead Cisco analyst.

"If they don't provide more value to the network, then they're open to attack from vendors who want to commoditize what they have," Dulaney said. "If all you want is a pipe from Point A to Point B, you're crazy to spend all this money on Cisco."

Speaking to reporters on Monday night, Chambers gave a similar message by making reference to China's biggest networking vendor. Cisco's strongest competitor in collaboration is Microsoft and in devices is Apple, he said. But in the big picture, "It's Huawei, Huawei and Huawei," Chambers said. The Chinese maker of wired and wireless infrastructure has used its relative cost advantage to make inroads in the developing world, though it has had less success so far in richer countries. Chambers also said Huawei has easier access to financing than its rivals through the Chinese government, its part owner.

Cisco seems to be taking direct aim at Microsoft with one of the biggest new products it introduced Monday, the Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail service. WebEx Mail will let enterprise employees use their e-mail through a Web-based interface or their Microsoft Outlook clients. The service, based on technology acquired with PostPath, follows on from Cisco's gradual move into hosted services through its WebEx virtual meeting system.

It represents an alternative to Exchange servers owned and operated by enterprises themselves, Gartner's Dulaney said. WebEx Mail is also aimed at Google's enterprise Gmail and hosted e-mail that Microsoft is expected to offer. However, for most enterprises, e-mail works and doesn't need fixing, Dulaney said. "For most of our clients, change is something they fear," he said.

Among the many products introduced and demonstrated Monday, Cisco focused on being able to access content and communications on many platforms. Chief Demonstration Officer Jim Grubb retrieved the same voice mail on a BlackBerry, an iPhone, a Cisco desk phone, Cisco WebEx Connect desktop software, Microsoft Office Communicator and other clients. He also moved a videoconferencing session from Cisco's Telepresence high-definition videoconferencing system to WebEx and a Cisco desktop phone.

Another key trend Cisco hopes to lead is social networking within enterprises. Chambers showed off the Enterprise Collaboration Platform, which lets employees set up profile pages that keep others up to date on their activities and areas of expertise. The platform is designed to help users form groups and find the right person to turn to on a given problem.

The Enterprise Collaboration Platform takes advantage of a technology Cisco calls Pulse, which can analyze data such as e-mail, text messages, documents and video transcripts and look for words the organization considers important. Employees can rate each others' expertise in particular areas to make it easier to find an subject expert. Pulse can be used to show what important issues each employee has been working on and let users search for all types of content by topic. Enterprises can choose to turn it on for all employees or let them opt in.

Cisco believes social networking will be the main way employees find each other and form groups. However, Chambers told reporters he doesn't lead with that angle when selling the company's vision to enterprise CEOs. Instead, he offers them a way to face growing competition with costs already cut to the bone. Collaboration is the best way to quickly invent new products and enter new markets, and especially with younger workers entering the workforce, social networking increasingly is the best way to foster collaboration, he said.

Windows 7 users got a nice surprise on Tuesday when Microsoft released its first set of security patches since unveiling the new operating system last month. Of the 15 bugs patched, none affected Windows 7.

When Microsoft launched Windows 7, it was billed as the company's most secure release ever — the culmination of a nine-year "Trustworthy Computing" effort to shore up a product line that had been riddled with major security holes.

But does stress-tested software really matter to Microsoft's customers, seemingly besieged by more online attacks than ever before? Microsoft had years to improve Windows XP, but the Conficker worm, which began spreading last year, is now thought to have infected more than 7 million Windows machines. And for every Windows bug that gets squashed, hackers seem to find new problems in the software that runs on top of Microsoft's operating system — Flash Player, QuickTime and Java.

"Windows 7 is definitely by far the most secure system they've shipped," said Dave Aitel, chief technology officer with Immunity, a security company that spends a lot of time finding the latest software bugs. "I guess the question that everybody is asking right now is, 'Is this enough?'"

The man behind Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, says the industry still has work to do. "We've made huge progress with respect to security around the core OS technology in the Windows PC," he said in a recent interview. "But as we did that and the 'Net became more prevalent, the bad guys continued to evolve their attacks."

This is Microsoft's conundrum. Windows may be safer, but cyber-criminals still have plenty of other places to attack. And when you can hit hundreds of millions of users with a single attack, why change the game plan? So most of the worst attacks today still target PCs running Windows, whether the OS itself is secure or not.

Take spear-phishing. Attackers are getting so good at sending these highly customized e-mail messages, complete with malicious attachments, that the underlying security of Windows is almost irrelevant.

"The problem with the targeted attacks is that there's so much money that they can actually trump the security," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training company. "The amount of money that governments and large industrial crime groups have to spend is enough to trump any of the defenses we have."

In a report released last month for a congressional advisory panel, Northrop Grumman analysts detailed exactly how this happens. Looking at known attacks, the report found that targets are carefully selected, and then sent very believable e-mails with maliciously encoded attachments that exploit bugs in a product such as Adobe Reader — something that's outside of Microsoft's control. The victim opens the .pdf and suddenly attackers have a foothold on the network.

Microsoft customers like Paul Melson think there will be much broader enterprise adoption of Windows 7 than there was with Vista, which was largely ignored by corporate users. But while Microsoft has its own house in order, security is still a problem on the Windows platform, according to Melson, a manager of information security with Priority Health.

"As long as third-party patching continues to be a challenge, client security will continue to be at the forefront of information security defense and incident response," he said via e-mail. "Windows 7 won't significantly reduce client-side attacks that lead to compromises, but I don't think that Microsoft should bear the burden for it, either."

Microsoft thinks it can go a long way toward solving this type of problem by improving the way people identify each other on the Internet. For the past few years it has promoted an idea it calls "end-to-end" trust, saying it wants to develop better identification mechanisms for people, computers and software on the Internet.

Microsoft has taken its first step in this direction with its Windows CardSpace identity management software. It could help give people a better sense of who they're really dealing with on the Internet, but whether the rest of the industry will buy into this vision remains to be seen.

"This is the next phase in the battle for trustworthy computing and that is still getting ramped up," Mundie said. "Clearly there's always more to do."

(Nancy Gohring in Seattle contributed to this story.)

In a world where computing goes "cloudy," can Firefox survive? What if Chrome OS successfully merges browser with operating system to create a new Google world order?

This is all highly speculative, but on Firefox's fifth birthday, I fear for the browser's future. (I am not alone; Tony Bradley also worries over Firefox).

The coming war between Microsoft and Google is likely to be fought in the cloud, perhaps with browsers tuned to support each company's vision–and defy the other's.

Google's Chrome browser and OS seem to be a step in this direction, to a desktop that is optimized for software and data that reside in the Internet cloud. In such a world, operating systems–as we know them today–might not matter so much.

That plays to Google's strength and against Microsoft's. Whether it is a good thing for businesses and their users remains to be seen. For many, cloud computing forces a reassessment of what they expect from applications and how they are used.

I am thinking specifically about the feature gap that exists between Google Apps, hosted online, and Microsoft Office, which resides on the user's computer. This gap may not exist forever, but somehow I do not see Google ever competing with Microsoft on a feature-for-feature basis.

The biggest danger to Firefox, as it enters its second half-decade, is the changing role of browsers, from surfing the Internet to running applications. This makes me wonder whether Firefox will be a casualty in the battle between Google and Microsoft.

Chrome OS may be an environment specifically built to run Google's cloud apps and those built to some future Google specification. I can see Microsoft moving in the same direction, though it is unlikely to abandon Windows for something more Chrome-like.

If the two superpowers are going to fight it out in the clouds, with browsers and browser-based operating systems their weapons of choice, what is a mere open source browser to do?

It all depends on how things play out and is, of course, dependent on cloud computing actually becoming if not the dominant business-computing model, at least something close.

When Java was introduced, there was much discussion over how it might supplant Windows and become the environment of choice for applications. You may remember when "write once, run everywhere" was supposed to trounce Microsoft Windows with a wave of portable desktop apps.

That did not happen, but this might: Future-generation browsers, and I am thinking Chrome and Chrome OS here, might work with cloud applications to effectively neutralize the desktop OS. In so doing, the choice of a browser may become more one of whose cloud you want to use than the features of the browser itself.

Maybe Firefox can prosper in such a world, either by being the browser that supports both Microsoft and Google on equal footing, or simply by avoiding the fray. I cannot accurately predict the future of cloud computing, but my guess is the browser of five years from now may play a different role than the Firefox of 2009.

I would appreciate your take on these issues.

David Coursey tweets as

@techinciter

and can be

contacted

via his Web site.

Hoping to bring holiday cheer to harried travelers, Google is footing the bill for Wi-Fi access at 47 U.S. airports through mid-January, so that people can connect free to the Internet while they wait at airline gates and other areas.

Google is working with airports and Wi-Fi providers like Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group and Airport Marketing Income to offer this in cities like Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte.

As part of the service, people who log in to the free Wi-Fi service will have the opportunity to make donations to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google will match the donations up to US$250,000.

The offer ends Jan. 15, except at the Burbank and Seattle airports, which will offer free Wi-Fi indefinitely as a result of this initiative, Google said Tuesday.

Last month, Google and Virgin America announced free Wi-Fi service on the airline's flights during the holidays.

Well, that didn't take long: Just three days after the Droid dropped, and we already have our first leaked-document-style rumor. What is this, the iPhone or something?

The new Droid buzz, as tends to be the case with these things, comes by way of an anonymous tipster. The alleged insider tells Android fan site Phandroid.com an over-the-air update will hit all Droid devices on December 11, with a possible second update scheduled to follow in January.

Motorola Droid: The Updates

According to documents published on the Phandroid site, a laundry list of Droid-related fixes will be made within the upcoming patch or patches. Among the glitches said to be up for correction:

• The character count doesn't show up in the messaging tool until you've reached 160 characters.

• Initiating a three-way call doesn't work properly in certain regions of the country.

• You can't currently transfer contacts directly via Bluetooth.

• Camera autofocus doesn't always work on the first try.

• Sound occasionally echoes back during a voice call.

• Disconnecting a 2.5-mm headset adaptor can cause the media-playing software to launch automatically.

• The phone can lock up when you're editing recurring appointments with large invite lists in an Exchange-synched calendar.

• Videos uploaded to the phone via Bluetooth show an incorrect date and time.

The documents mention a handful of other issues, most of which are relatively minor problems that appear to affect specific subsets of users.

Droid Discussions

Are you a new Droid owner — or thinking about becoming one? Check out these Motorola Droid resources for more information:

• My First Weekend With the Moto Droid: A PC World editor's detailed thoughts on his first few days owning a Droid.

• Verizon's Droid Launch: Your Complete Guide: A collection of Droid specs, pricing info and purchasing information, along with reviews from all around the Web.

• Verizon's Droid: 10 Apps to Get You Started: Ten top-notch Android applications to consider when getting started with your new Droid phone.

JR Raphael cooks up geek humor at eSarcasm. He highly recommends the Sweet and Sour iPhone, a delicacy any Droid owner would enjoy.

At Research in Motion's BlackBerry Developer Conference Monday, the company made a slew of announcements that aim to boost the platform's appeal to developers. But more APIs, a better advertisement service and new Adobe and Eclipse toolsets don't seem too exciting to the average consumer. Fear not, faithful BlackBerry user–there are some enhancements that will directly benefit you. Read on:

New APIs

RIM launched a few new APIs to third-party developers including the ability to build push notifications into apps, an enhanced advertising and payment service and three location-based services. Most of these new APIs will be available to developers in the first half of 2010.

BlackBerry's Push Service API isn't new, but it was previously available only on core apps. Now that it is open to all third-party developers (and free), more applications can take advantage of its services. Developers can choose to have these notifications appear as alerts at the top of the BlackBerry home screen, as a badge on the actual app itself, or sent directly to the users' inbox.

The biggest perk for consumers from the new payment service is the ability to buy an app and have it charged to your carrier bill. That way, you can pay for your apps, service and data all at once. The new payment service also allows for in-app payments for subscriptions or unlocking levels in a game.

Adding the platform's solid location-based services, RIM announced three new services. When GPS fails, cell site geo-location estimates your phone's location based on cell tower triangulation. Reverse geo-coding then translates your phone's location to an actual address on a map. Lastly, travel time estimates how much time it will take to get from one location to another–a boon to users who heavily rely on their phone for driving directions. A beta version of reverse-geocoding is currently available in SDK 5.0 while travel time and cell site geo-location will be available in 2010.

OpenGL ES Support

Who says BlackBerrys are strictly business? The latest beta of BlackBerry Java SDK 5.0 (currently available via an update) will support OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D gaming. At the keynotes, Electronic Arts demonstrated their racing game "Need for Speed" on the Storm. While the BlackBerry might never be a threat to the iPhone in terms of mobile gaming, at least the platform is trying to keep up with its competitors.

BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0

Soon you'll be able to spruce up your BlackBerry with better themes and widgets for purchase in the App World. BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 lets developers import Adobe Photoshop files to the BlackBerry Theme builder for richer graphics. They can also incorporate ringtones and even build screen transitions such as zooming, fading, etc. into a theme. Ringtones and screen transitions are only supported for phones running OS 5.0 or higher, however.

These new features might not be ground-breaking, but they are essential to the BlackBerry platform. It will be interesting to see how these new capabilities manifest and if BlackBerry can stay viable in the apps space.

On November 9, 2004, Mozilla's Firefox 1.0 debuted and quickly became a serious contender in the ongoing browser wars. At the time, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a 99 percent market share. Five years later, Internet Explorer still reigns at 65 percent, but Firefox comes in second with an impressive 23 percent.

The battle is far from over, as the field is bloating with more competition. "With additional entrants, most notably Google and Apple, joining the fray there's a massive amount of competition in the browser market that is fueling constant innovation and envelope pushing, from speed and features to the development of the mobile browser," Mozilla wrote in a statement.

Firefox's philosophy is that the Internet is a public resource and should be as accessible and open as possible. Mozilla spreads the word with wide-open arms to developers, who have beefed up the browser's capabilities with more than 7000 add-ons.

Firefox currently has 330 million users worldwide, and celebrated its 1 billionth download in July.

Mozilla is making headway in releasing the latest iteration of its browser, Firefox 4.0. In preparation for 4.0's late 2010 release, Mozilla released the Firefox beta 3.6 last week, bringing with it loads of new features that serve as a hint of what's to come. Interface mock-ups for 4.0 are sure to set salivary glands into overdrive as it borrows crisp aesthetic cues from Microsoft's Vista and promises massive increases in speed.

Keeping up with the world's current obsession with Internet-ready smartphones, Mozilla is also working on Fennec, a mobile browser.

The celebration doesn't stop with press releases and birthday candles — Mozilla is launching a worldwide campaign called"Light the World with Firefox" that will blast the Firefox logo into the skies of cities across the globe. Mozilla also released an illustrated YouTube video telling its story over the past five years. Check out the Spread Firefox site for Mozilla's game plan for the next five years.

There's a lot in store for the little browser that could, and I'm certain millions of people are closely watching its evolution as history unfolds before our eyes.

A mischievous iPhone worm that targets Australian jailbroken phones is changing the phone's wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley.

Above the changed wallpaper is the text, "ikee is never going to give you up," according to security company Sophos. According to a post from the company, which includes an image of ikee's effect, the phone searches for jailbroken phones whose users have not changed the default password after installing SSH, a tool used to remotely log in to computers and other devices. Like other worms, after finding a victim phone it will automatically attempt to find other phones to infect.

Per Sophos, the worm can only infect jailbroken iPhones that have SSH installed, and other phones will not be affected.

According to Computerworld's Australian site, the prankster creator is a 21-year-old programmer named Ashley Towns. Towns said he created the worm out of "curiosity and boredom," according to the article.

Neither Sophos nor F-Secure, which also put up a post on the worm, says it has yet seen ikee pop up outside of Australia. However, F-Secure says Towns has released the full source code for four different variants, so the worm may well spread.

Installing SSH on a jailbroken phone without changing the default password is the digital equivalent to installing a new door on your house and hanging the key to the lock from the door handle. Breaking in would not require complicated machinations, but only a simple login over the network using the already-known password. F-Secure has posted instructions on how to change the root password.

This simple worm ties back to the early days of computer malware, when creations like the Melissa worm didn't have a direct malicious intent. Melissa's major disruptions came as a secondary effect when the e-mails it sent flooded and clogged networks.

But aside from novel throwbacks like ikee, today's malware game has changed. It's out to quietly make a buck by stealing passwords or sending spam, rather than make a splashy statement.

WarMouse, in collaboration with the OpenOffice.org community, revealed on Friday a new open-source mouse developed specifically for users of the OpenOffice suite.

The corded pointing device, memorably dubbed the OpenOfficeMouse, features an unconventional amount of inputs, and will no-doubt be more than welcome in the line-up of the worlds weirdest mice. It packs in a massive 18 programmable buttons, all of which can be double-clicked, in addition to a scroll-wheel, 512k of built-in flash memory and support for over 60 separate configurations. With that many buttons let's just hope its target users are incredibly dexterous.

Adding to the devices overall appeal is the ability to not only make OpenOffice users lives easier, but equally cater to the gaming crowd. The OpenOfficeMouse can make light work of various gaming hits, including popular titles like World Of Warcraft and Call Of Duty. Mouse designer, Theodore Beale detailed that "you can do far more with this mouse than most people are likely to realize at first".

Sadly, OpenOffice failed to detail when the confusing new point-and-click would be hitting stores, but we did learn that when the multi-button mouse does arrive it will set you back $74.99.

[Via Engadget]

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