Articles by Glenn Fleishman

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I've always been annoyed by Apple comparing the number of visitors to its retail stores in units of Macworld Expos. That's because that specious comparison is all about Apple, not its customers.Read more... 

Another laptop-recovery program provides location information derived from Wi-Fi signals around a stolen computer.Read more... 

Despite the keynote focusing on Mac news, Apple also announced the removal of DRM from songs in the iTunes Store, tiered pricing, and downloads over 3G as well as Wi-Fi.Read more... 

The Roku Player continues to change: after upgrading customers to HD output, Roku has forged a partnership with Amazon to offer the retailer's on-demand video. The addition will appear in early 2009. Amazon allows all devices associated with an account to access the same video library.Follow link

Dead Zune, dead Zune, watcha gonna do, watcha gonna do when they come for you? Macworld picks up the story of 30 GB Microsoft Zune players spontaneously failing early this morning, December 31. Microsoft determined it was a leap-year bug, and affected Zunes should function normally on January 1.Follow link

Security researchers successfully created a forged digital certificate for a Web address they don't control that browsers accept as authentic. Did they break the Internet? Not quite, and an easy fix should take care of the problem.Read more... Listen  

Ignition from LogMeIn brings high-quality remote access to Macs and Windows systems from an iPhone or iPod touch.Read more... Listen  

If you're trying to use Quicken for the Mac with some banking and finance sites, a security certificate may trip you up. It turns out that Quicken doesn't support Extended Validation SSL/TLS certificates, which renders it non-functional for downloading transactions from banks that rely on these more-secure certificates. A fix is in the works.Read more... Listen  

Roku has updated its $100 Netflix Player to handle high-definition video content from the movie rental and delivery service. Netflix Player streams video from Netflix via the Internet to a TV or monitor. Roku also confirmed that companies other than Netflix will be providing HD content in the next three months.Follow link

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is shifting from suing alleged illegal downloaders of music - as well as dead people, elderly without computers, and others - to getting ISPs to disconnect subscribers who the RIAA says are illegal uploaders. The RIAA won't gain any personal information about putative offenders, but ISPs that participate will put the RIAA's interests ahead of their customers's interests, and are relying on the RIAA's accuracy in identifying violations.Follow link

Apple said that Steve Jobs won't be presenting the keynote address at the 2009 Macworld Expo trade show - and that Apple won't be an exhibitor at future shows. Goodness. We're a bit shaken, but the word is that Macworld Expo is still on for 2010.Read more... Listen  

AOL finally releases an updated version of AIM. It was in a public beta test for a few weeks. It's nothing special; move along.Follow link

Leopard gets another update just in time for the holidays, with Apple releasing Mac OS X 10.5.6 and a set of security fixes. This update would be less than notable, except that Apple slipped in a nearly instant sync option for calendar, contacts, and bookmarks for MobileMe subscribers.Read more... Listen  

Veteran New York Times technology reporter John Markoff, long one of the paper's main Apple watchers, is changing beats to cover the intersection of computation and science, as well as the social implications of technology and so-called cybersecurity and cyberwarfare. It's terrifying that the risks of computer security exploits to individuals, companies, and even countries are great enough to warrant such mainstream coverage.Follow link

You can now avoid an in-store visit at an Apple or AT&T Store to buy an iPhone 3G - so long as you're adding a line to an existing account or are a new AT&T customer. You can purchase an iPhone online and activate it at home. For those with existing phones (a first-generation iPhone or otherwise) who want to convert service, you have to visit a store still.Follow link

The T-Mobile G1 running the Android OS can't keep applications from downloading data even when a user has turned off the data roaming option, useful for avoiding heavy charges when traveling outside one's home country. Individual applications can override this setting without warning; you're only informed of this when a program is downloaded from the Android Market. Engadget has more.Follow link

Listen: I don't go to novelist, comedian, actor, and director Stephen Fry's house and perform spot-on period interpretations of Oscar Wilde, nor, I might add, do I bombard him with screen adaptations of the works of Evelyn Waugh. So why, I must ask, does Mr. Fry persist in being all the things that he is so marvelous at - and a bloody interesting writer on things technological, too? Follow link

John Gruber reviews Deep Green, a chess program for the iPhone and iPod touch that started life a decade ago on the Newton. The new version was rewritten from scratch by its developer, Joachim Bondo, but Gruber writes it has "the same attention to detail, graphics, simplicity, and fun that marked the Newton version."Follow link

Employees at Walmart have slipped the news to reporters that the economy-dominating chain of stores will sell the iPhone. Earlier rumors suggested Walmart might have a less-expensive model containing only 4 GB of memory. Sales might start before Christmas.Follow link

Occasionally, we get angry. Or, more often, we think we're being funny. Either way, we try to use our iPhone to employ a certain Anglo-Saxon expletive, and are thwarted by spelling correction. Tim Luoma figured out that by creating a fictitious contact with the air of barnyard epithet about it, he'd save a cancel strike in his exuberant style.Follow link