MacRumors.com

Gizmodo publicizes an iPhone security flaw that was publicly posted last night to MacRumors' Discussion Forum. The vulnerability allows individuals to easily bypass the built-in passcode protection offered by Apple to lock your iPhone.

The workaround allows unauthorized individuals access to the iPhone's Safari, Contacts list, SMS, Maps, and Mail.

MacRumors has been told that this security flaw was already reported to Apple earlier this month and has been acknowledged as an issue. A fix will presumably be included in a future firmware update.

Update: A simple fix is available in the meanwhile. Users should set their "Home Button" double-click preference to "Home" or "iPod" rather than the default "iPhone Favorites".

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The Guardian reports that a television ad for the Apple iPhone has been banned by the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority after receiving complains about misleading claims.

The television ad which can be viewed online claims that "all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone." The complaints about the ad pointed out that the iPhone does not support Flash or Java which may be required for some websites. The Advertising Standards Authority concluded that "the ad gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone".

Apple responded by saying that the purpose of the ad was to point the iPhone's ability to access standard websites and that it could not ensure compatibility with "every third-party technology in the marketplace".

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Orange France is admitting that they are capping iPhone 3G speeds to 384kbps; this as a recent survey has showed significant regional differences in speed.

Orange will be bumping the cap to 1Mbps on September 15, however that cap is still under HSDPA's theoretical maximum and less than what European T-Mobile users have been experiencing (up to 1.8 Mbps).

[IT Wire via France Info (French)]

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For online movie rental enthusiasts, two applications are now available to manage either your Netflix or Blockbuster rental queues.

iFlix

Flix [App Store] is a $1.99 application that allows you to manage your Netflix queues. The developer describes the app:

Add, remove, and reorder movies with a few easy flicks of a finger. You can rate movies you’ve seen recently, see ratings and descriptions for all the Netflix “top” lists, and even search for a particular title to learn more about it before popping it up to the top of your queue.

Also provided is an extensive tutorial with screenshots on how to accomplish various tasks on the iPhone.

Dashbuster

Dashbuster [App Store] is a $3.99 app that allows you to manage either Netflix or Blockbuster movie queues. Features detailed by the author include:

• View your shipped, queued, and saved movies at a glance, including cover art
• Drag and Drop Queue Reordering
• Swipe to Delete Movie removal
• View movie details quickly and easily; Stars, Director, Description and Cover Art
• Quickly add movies from popular RSS feeds
• Search for and add movies on the go

The developer does offer a free version called Dashbuster Free [App Store] which does not allow you to add or change movies from your iPhone, and will incorporate ads in the future.

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Silicon Studios offers a series of tools for audio enthusiasts to provide Midi controls from their iPhone or iPod Touch.

• iTM MidiLab (Free) - free demo of the tools
• iTM Keys ($5.99) - Midi keyboard
• iTM Matrix ($5.99) - Button matrix
• iTM XYPad ($5.99) - Touch Pad
• iTM MCU ($5.99) - Mackie Control Emulation

The apps requires a host Mac running their iTouchMidi OS X application that is available on their website.

A video is available demonstrating its use with Ableton Live.

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China.org.cn reports on the photos posted to our forum last week of a Foxconn factory worker. Forum user markm49uk had found the photos on his brand new iPhone.

This led to speculation on the identity and the fate of the factory worker's job. Fortunately, it's been confirmed that the employee was not fired based on comments from a Foxconn representative:

"She is definitely not fired," an unidentified representative from Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen, southern China, told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao.

The representative did confirm that she was an employee at the Shenzhen factory and that it was likely that the test photos were left on the iPhone's memory "accidentally".

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Jeffrey Grossman's Movies [Free, App Store] has been acquired by Flixster and been rereleased last night as a complete rewrite.

Version 1.5 adds a number of new features:

- Expanded list of movies and theatres
- Movie posters and descriptions for all movies
- Trailers for all Box Office leaders and upcoming movies
- Search of over 50,000 movies with posters, description, cast and dierctors
- Support for Canada and UK

It may be worth looking at this free application again: App Store

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Noah Witherspoon, the developer behind the current #1 application on the App Store, has revealed that Tris [Free, App Store] will no longer be available as of Wednesday, August 27th.

The Tetris-clone caught the attention of the Tetris® Company who claims a "copyright" claim on the game.

The trouble is, I'm a college student, and not an affluent one, and I simply do not have the time, energy, or resources to fight this battle right now. There's a point at which I am willing to give up and be practical, to let the world have its way with that ever-mistreated little ideal of “principle”. Thus, it's with great sadness that I must announce that I'll be pulling Tris from the App Store on Wednesday, August 27th, to remain in Apple's systems but publicly unavailable until I work out a solution to this.

As a result, if you had any interest in Tris, now's your last chance to get the popular game.

[Download]

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