Linked List: February 3, 2010

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Shut Up 

Steven Frank:

shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention.

H.264 to Remain Fee-Less for Free Internet Video Through 2016 

MPEG LA

MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2016.

Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress 

“Now that democracy is truly for sale, Murray Hill Incorporated is offering top dollar.”

More on iPad Widgets 

Dimitri Stancioff, speculating on iPad widgets last week:

Can you imagine a full-screen Weather app (in its current incarnation) running on the iPad? Or a full-screen clock or calculator? Weird, right? Of course, Apple wouldn’t do that. They would have to improve on those apps to make them do more to better take advantage of the large screen. But doing so would actually stray from the purpose of these utility apps by adding complexity where simplicity is desired. In short, most utility apps don’t have any need to be any larger than they are on the iPhone.

iPhones Vulnerable to Forged Signature Certificates 

Apple has a list of 224 root certificates that it trusts. As part of the attack, the anonymous researchers obtained a signature certificate from VeriSign for a company named Apple Computer. They backed the certificate up to disk, then used iPCU to create a mobileconfig file called “Security Update,” and attributed it to Apple Computer. They then exported it to disk without a signature as an XML file. They then signed the file and its CA trust chain and uploaded it to a Web server.

Opening the file with Safari on an iPhone results in the phone trusting the configuration file.

Charlie Miller verifies that it works, but also states it doesn’t lead to remote code execution. What popped out at me is that VeriSign issued a security certificate in the name of “Apple Computer” without, you know, verifying that it was Apple.

Softbank’s Net Profit Jumps 41 Percent on iPhone Sales 

Kenneth Maxwell, reporting for the WSJ:

“When we launched the iPhone [in the summer of 2008], some people said those phones were not suited for Japanese cellphone users,” said [CEO] Masayoshi Son at a news conference. Most Japanese cellphones are smaller and lighter than the Apple device.

“But those [skeptics] have been proven completely wrong ... The iPhone is selling so well that we are really feeling the boost from it,” Mr. Son said. He declined to say how many iPhones Softbank had sold, but described the handset as “the biggest contributor to third-quarter handset sales,” and “a major contributor to growth in data communication revenue.”

And here’s Apple COO Tim Cook from last week’s 2010 Q1 conference call:

In Japan what is going on there is the iPhone has been a runaway hit. The iPhone was up over 400% year-over-year during the quarter. So that is what is driving the huge revenue growth you see in Japan.

The Lost iPad Icon 

Charles Ying reminds us that Apple only announced the iPhone YouTube app nine days before it shipped. The idea being that when they pre-announce something, they like to keep something back to have a new announcement just before it actually goes on sale. That’s what’s fueling this mania over the iPad secretly containing a camera. If there’s anything Apple hasn’t revealed about the iPad yet, I think it’s far more likely to be software than hardware.

Update: The site is back up.