Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty Monday when they announced it was lawful to hack or “jailbreak” an iPhone. Jailbreaking is hacking the phone’s OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including applications not authorized by Apple. The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the U.S. Copyright Office 19 months ago to add jailbreaking to a list of explicit exemptions to the Digital Millennium... 

REDWOOD CITY, California — Police closed in on the man who found and sold a prototype 4G iPhone after his roommate called an Apple security official and turned him in, according to a newly unsealed document in the ongoing police investigation. The tip sent police racing to the home of 21-year-old Brian Hogan, and began a strange scavenger hunt for evidence that a friend of Hogan’s had scattered around this Silicon Valley community.... 

Update: Roommate’s Tip Led Cops to iPhone Finder A California judge Friday ordered the unsealing of the search warrant affidavit that led to a police raid on the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, who paid $5,000 for a prototype 4G iPhone. Wired.com, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Time and other news outlets had sought the document’s unsealing. Under California law, search warrant records are normally made public after the search... 

California prosecutors investigating Gizmodo’s purchase of a prototype iPhone have offered a new argument for keeping details of the probe a secret: Public disclosure could compromise “the identity of an informer.” The claim, made in a court filing Thursday, is the first indication that police cultivated an inside source prior to raiding the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, whose employer paid $5,000 for a prototype 4G iPhone... 

Wired.com and other news outlets are asking a California judge to unseal the search warrant affidavit that led to a police raid on the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, who paid $5,000 for a prototype 4G iPhone. Under California law, the public has a right to see the documents that led San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Clifford V. Cretan to approve the police search, we argue. We&#…  Read More →

People identifying themselves as representing Apple last week visited and sought permission to search the Silicon Valley address of the college-age man who came into possession of a next-generation iPhone prototype, according to a person involved with the find. “Someone came to [the finder's] house and knocked on his door,” the source told Wired.com, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case is under …  Read More →

Police raided the house of an editor for Gizmodo on Friday and seized computers and other equipment. The raid was part of an investigation into the leak of a prototype iPhone that the site obtained for a blockbuster story last week. Now, a legal expert has raised questions about the legality of the warrant used in the raid. On Friday, officers from California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team in San Mateo, California, appeared at... 

Led by Berkeley, Calif., at the end of 2009, college towns are among the fastest cities in the U.S., according to Akamai’s latest “The State of the Internet” report. In order to qualify, Akamai put a filter of a minimum of 50,000 unique IP addresses. Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Stanford (California), Durham (North Carolina) and Ithaca (New York) made up the top five cities in the U.S. The U.S. might not rank top in most broadband... 

The Internet as we know it is not only getting bigger and faster, but it is also becoming more mobile with more and more people accessing Internet-based services from their smartphones. These are some of the key findings of Akamai’s “The State of the Internet” report for the fourth quarter of 2009. The report uses data collected from Akamai’s global content delivery network to draw conclusions …  Read More →

At a Council of Foreign Relations event in New York, Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Verizon Communications, spoke to Alan S. Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Online, Wall Street Journal. He touched upon various topics including the iPad and the iPhone. His comments on the iPhone were pretty telling — revealing a kind of wistfulness. “In our view, over time, is that as the devices come to... 

Smartphones, including iPhones, were all the rage at SxSW in 2009. Last year, the hordes of South by Southwest-attending geeks toting iPhones blew out the AT&T network around the convention center in Austin, resulting in dropped calls and crappy connections for many attendees. The subsequent news coverage showed off Ma Bell’s network failures for the entire world (or at least the world that cares about such things.) This year, having... 

As more people pick up smartphones and shell out for mobile data plans, carriers, application developers and phone manufactures need to keep one thing in mind: Speed matters. Even if it’s mobile, a connection to the web still needs to feel like broadband. Otherwise, people aren’t going to use their phones as often, or for as long. But speed is a double-edged sword because as newer, faster networks are deployed, the data tsunami already... 

Aspera today launched a version of its rapid file transport software for the iPhone, which will allow iPhone users to squeeze their picture and video files through the crappiest connection that AT&T may have to offer. And it makes the transfer fast! Aspera says it can make file transfers over 3G networks three times faster than existing HTTP or FTP transfers. I’ve long been a fan of Aspera, which has a proprietary method for moving... 

Updated : The  SlingPlayer application will come to the iPhone, thanks to Sling Media working with AT&T to adjust the way its video application uses bandwidth on AT&T’s overburdened 3G network. This will be great for people who want to stream television content from their Slingbox at home to their iPhone while traveling, and marks a turning point in the mobile application world, whereby developers and carriers work closely to... 

Updated : AT&T this morning said its earnings rose 25 percent in the fourth quarter thanks to its wireless business, and told consumers, if not investors, what they wanted to hear by detailing plans to spend $18-$19 billion in capital expenditures, with a $2 billion increase aimed at the wireless network and backhaul. The carrier, which has the dubious honor of being the exclusive provider of the iPhone, has been the …  Read More →