News has come out today via iPhone Atlas that Apple developer/writer Jonathan Zdziarski has discovered code within the iPhone 2.0.x software which allows it to “phone home.”

When it does, its going to a URL which seems to check a list of blacklisted apps. Zdziarski surmises that Apple could use this to kill apps remotely, which might also entail their removal from the device without user interaction.

This is highly inappropriate, in my opinion. There is no need for this, especially considering Apple already pours through every application before it gets into the App Store. Why do they need to essentially add what amounts to spyware after the fact?

Larry Dignan at ZDNet looks at it from a risk-reward perspective and seems to take the side of Apple. While I can see Larry’s point, it doesn’t justify allowing Apple to essentially snoop on its users. If they’re phoning home for this, what else could they be watching?

Olga Karif over at Newsweek says it gives her flashbacks to “1984.” She questions why something like this is needed, and I do too. The security excuse is a bunch of malarkey if you ask me. It’s just Apple needing to control everything from top to bottom, and I gotta say I’m tiring of it.

If Microsoft did this, the you-know-what would hit the fan. But instead, a lot of folks seem to be saying, oh its okay. That makes no sense to me at all. What’s different if Cupertino’s doing it than Redmond? Either way, “phoning home” is something I’m always leery about.

Looks like Redmond is looking for another way to boost its Live Search share, this time by renaming it. Mary Jo Foley (who on ZDNet is the only Microsoft blogger worth reading, she’ll give it to ya straight) says she has a tip saying thats exactly whats going to happen.

Some names considered were Bing, Hook, and Kumo (Japanese for either cloud or spider depending on the character). None of them seemed to have gained any traction, however. The Yahoo transaction would have answered that, she says, as search would have been branded under the familiar Yahoo name.

One thing is certain: Microsoft needs to fix its search offering, and not through paying its users to use it. Yes, thats going to give you a short term bump, but what makes you think those users who came in through and incentive will continue to search through Microsoft when that incentive’s gone?

Well it looks like the House has voted to make the FAA ban “permanent.” Score one for the cell phone haters, eh?

While it sounds all well and good, do we really think in-flight cell usage would become all that prevalent? From everything I’ve seen of the companies and airlines outside of the country already doing this, these calls would be still on the expensive side.

Essentially, my thoughts are that the use of cell phones would be no more prevalent than the GTE/Verizon AirFones, and that wasn’t all that much.

Color me stupid, but what is the point of Delicious? I’ve never understood why people would want to bookmark their sites on a website rather than their own computer. Now granted I see the value in having access to your favorite sites wherever you are, but still…

Regardless, the 2.0 version of the site is online as of yesterday, the first major redesign of the site since it was bought out by Yahoo all the way back in December 2005. Possibly the best thing here is the fact that they’ve finally chucked the del.icio.us domain name. I could never remember this URL to save my life.

The own company admits its URL was a problem, and acknowledges the fact in its own blog: “We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years, so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.” (It took you almost a half-decade to realize this? :))

Users will notice a cleaner design and faster loading times. More new features are also listed here.

I don’t know, but I have to agree with John Furrier here. The site needs something more… it’s just not useful to me as is. John seems to suggest to integrate it into its core services — that may be the best thing. As a standalone service, I don’t see much future in it.

Apparently its founder Joshua Schacter didn’t either. After being asked what he thought of the redesign by TechCrunch, his response: “Good luck. I hope it goes well.” Ow.

Well, David Worthington over at SD Times has struck again, this time with a new piece which describes Microsoft’s planned transition from the current Windows codebase to one based on Midori. From the looks of this, it is definitely not just a research project for Redmond, as Robert Scoble argued after the first piece..

Essentially, Microsoft looks to be favoring a very conservative transition — which would be essentially the opposite of what Apple did with Mac OS X. It’s not surprising considering the massive install base the company needs to worry about. It’s probably smart too: by gradually introducing its customers to Midori it can spot potential problems far before they become major ones.

David suggests three different possible ways Microsoft could introduce the next-gen technology, which I’ve summized below.

The first, and perhaps most complex, has applications that run on both Midori and Windows by following a program model that operates similar to Microsoft Research’s Accelerator project … a second approach to Midori would fork the executive responsibilities and require the development of an executive for Midori that is based on and would run in parallel with the Windows Executive … The most radical suggestion involves writing the proposed Midori Executive itself from scratch, which would transform the bubble into a truly legacy-free platform.

Under the first two, Windows still takes the primary role. Under the last, it is a complete rewrite, which analysts cited by David seem to cozy up to most. I also think this is the best route: if we’re going to make a clean break, make it complete.

David’s working on a piece on security, and I’m thinking that a complete move away from the Windows code if just for the sole reason of security is the best thing. It would send hackers back to the drawing board — having to completely relearn how to hack the OS. Legacy Windows code would be contained, thus damage to systems would be minor, if not negated if I’m not mistaken.

Honestly, (and putting it bluntly), It’s nice to see Microsoft finally growing a set if David is really portraying what the company is saying in its documents correctly.

This has my vote probably for one of the cooler free applications on the App Store, called Shazam. Check out the story here.

My experience with it showed it to be satisfactorily accurate — it knew a lot of less than commercial songs. Shazam says it has a database of about five million songs from which to work with.

While an offering it does in the UK costs money per use, and its port for AT&T customers seems to also charge per ID as well, the fact that this is free is pretty nice.

Shazam tag screen

Ohh man. Looks like things are about to get nasty quick between the blogosphere’s most prominent ex-Microsoftie and SD Times’ David Worthington. As you may remember, I blogged last night about David’s story. Well here comes Robert Scoble late last night with a stinging rebuke of the reporting.

Essentially, David plays Midori as the next coming of Windows, however he does not specifically say that it is anything more than research. It seems that Scoble did not pick up on this as you can read in his opening paragraph.

You are an idiot if…

…you believe Microsoft is actually going to have a completely rewritten Operating System before Bill Gates dies (which might be 20 to 40 more years).

I have to say one is much more of an idiot if they believe Microsoft will NOT do a rewrite of Windows in this period. In fact, I’d argue that a significant rewrite of the OS is coming sooner than everyone thinks.

Simply put, it’s time. This codebase is essentially the same as was first debuted 13 years ago in Windows 95. Portions of it are probably not far off from parts of Windows 3.1 either…. that is an eternity in technology.

Scoble seems to suggest a significant change to the Microsoft OS platform is all but impossible before 2020, if not later. That just seems ridiculous on its face. As it stands now, Windows is NOT built for today’s computer usage. Internet as it is now did not exist — when this codebase was first built the ‘net was not much more than an afterthought.

Maybe Robert would like to explain to his readers why Eric Rudder is heading this up? He’s not a researcher. Or maybe he would like to explain why Microsoft PR is in an absolute panic over the story’s release.

I can confirm Wilcox’s reporting as correct, although I can’t say much more. But to completely discount this story is at Scoble’s, and other’s, peril. I don’t think Dave is far off from what we know.

Bill Gates will not hamstring his baby. If you think that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’ll sell you. He will acquiesce if it means Microsoft’s survival and maintance of its dominance in the industry.

As the song goes, “there is something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

http://furrier.org/2008/07/30/microsoft-showing-some-sizzle-future-microsoft-os-not-windows/

Update: In one of those ironic little twists, John Furrier, who was Scoble’s former boss, says “This story tickles the old software engineer side of me … I love this post.”

My former colleague at BetaNews David Worthington has a scoop on the upcoming version of Windows over at his (fairly) new gig at SD Times. David claims that the new operating system, code named “Midori,” is being built completely from scratch and has no relation to the current Windows codebase at all.

This is huge. It essentially equates to an admission by Microsoft that Windows is indeed no longer working. To Microsoft, this project is important enough that Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft has been put in charge of it.

Midori is said to be internet centric, although it appears that it would attempt to at least support some legacy Windows applications. Such interoperability is almost a necessity as a switch from Windows to another platform would be on a scale infinitely bigger than Apple’s switch from the Mac OS 9 codebase to Mac OS X.

It also looks to take advantage of emerging technologies in computing, according to David’s reporting:

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

What I’m not clear here yet on is whether or not Microsoft is planning an entire sea-change as far as UI goes — where our perception of what a Windows OS is now is completely thrown out the window. The report seems to suggest in some way that a complete overhaul could be in the cards:

At the presentation layer, Microsoft is making a clean break from the existing Windows GUI model, where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time, and the associated problems that affect OS stability and make it more difficult to write multithreaded applications.

The Midori documents indicate that the company has not decided what user interface abstractions are appropriate when applications cut across boundaries, or how to combine the best qualities of rich client applications and Web applications.

Much more can be found in the actual article itself. Now Dave, mind telling me how you got ahold of this document?

(One of the nice things about blogs is when you have them you can say what you want, without an editor telling you what to do.)

The Apple CEO calls a reporter at the paper, but his insistence on not talking unless the conversation is off the record does little to assuage the fears of investors. Is this any way to treat Wall Street?

Steve Jobs is Apple, to put it simply. In each of the past several scares over the executives health — and there’s been a few — investors have been forced to ponder life beyond him.

The answer has been the same each time, and it’s not good. The stock has dropped, and investors have demanded more.

Last week was no exception. Following last Monday’s earnings call, and financial chief’ Peter Oppenheimer’s now oft-repeated phrase “Steve’s health is a private matter,” the stock opened Tuesday down 10 percent from its previous day’s closing price.

The question continued to dog Apple the entire week. Stories in the media — including here on BetaNews — began to ponder life after Steve. The New York Times chimed in with additional information, essentially laying out the CEO’s health history for all to see.

While Jobs’ cancer surgery has apparently removed the disease from his pancreas, as the NYT put it, there are no guarantees with cancer. Those with the disease can tell you, even though you may be “cancer free,” there’s no sure bet that it won’t return — and worse than before.

It’s the company’s dismissive nature of the question that seems to rub investors the wrong way. By continuing to dodge it publicly, Apple only contributes to the rumor mill, allowing for speculation of Jobs’ health based on his appearance — which arguably has been sickly as of late.

But that’s been the company’s modus operandi under the venerable executive for as long as many of us can remember. It says little about its affairs, little about its products until they are released, and little about anything related to the company.

This has gotten it into trouble already — and some could argue that the MobileMe fiasco is a result of this secrecy. With little to no widespread public testing (its not even clear if the service was tested outside of Apple at all for that matter), what was supposed to be one of the companies standout releases became a public relations nightmare of near-epic proportions.

Now its getting them into trouble again, and this time its over a facet of the company that could shake Apple to it’s core. With so much conflicting information out there, the company’s stock price is being driven now by rumor rather than actual facts.

Jobs’ effort to take on the NYT didn’t help. While his conversation was of length from the reporting Joseph Nocera did on the call, none of it could be republished.

What Nocera did say is troubling, however. He took the “common bug” excuse Apple used for Jobs’ appearance at WWDC and turned it on its head. It seems to be worse than that, although none of it contradicted the Times’ earlier reporting.

He said whatever was wrong with Jobs was more serious than that. Unfortunately, we will likely never know because he won’t share it publicly. That seems like a big problem. Essentially, Jobs calling Nocera and the NYT raised more questions than it answered.

Maybe its time for Mr. Jobs and Apple to come clean. After all, it is the investors who continue to pour money into the company that are making its rapid growth all the more possible.

Shareholders deserve some answers, and Jobs needs to give them. On the record.

Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) announced Thursday it would be selling nearly all of its wireless communication towers to TowerCo for $670 million in cash.

Under the terms of the deal, TowerCo will take over the operating and maintenance of approximately 3,300 towers that use Code-Division Multiple Access and Integrated Digital Enhanced Network technologies.

Sprint Sells Cell Towers For $670 Million — Cellular Networks — InformationWeek.

Probably not a bad idea considering the financial shape Sprint is in. In addition to receiving a cash infusion, the sale would save the company money. Instead of having to pay for the upkeep of these towers, the carrier can just lease them, and leave that to another company.

Makes sense, and they’ll probably save some money too.