Jan. 27th Apple Tablet PC Event Gets Official

Apple's confirmed the January 27th event at their Cupertino campus, scheduled to introduce, most believe, a new tablet or "slate" PC. There is also speculation that the event could announce iPhone OS 4, which may (finally) include background processing on the iPhone.

The tablet PC is rumored to be named iSlate, iTablet, or even iGuide. Rumors are that the January 27th event will announced the new device, which will then be released in March. The fact that the invitation says only "Come see our latest creation," implies its something new, not a refresh of something.

The tablet PC is rumored to run a version of the iPhone OS, which would, necessitate background processing. Of course, Apple could continue to withhold it from the iPhone, if they so desired. The reasons, so far, for background processing being excluded from the iPhone is primarily battery life.

Of course, jailbroken iPhones can run background processes already, but not all apps run well when backgrounding is enabled, as they were not designed specifically with background processing in mind. However, its lack is a major negative vs. other smartphone platforms, such as Android and webOS.

The blobs and somewhat surrealistic image on the invite might also indicate a refresh of iLife, which has also been rumored. It's only about 8 days until the event, so there will be plenty more rumors before that date.
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Another $1,000 App Hits The App Store

You may recall "I Am Rich," the somewhat bogus $1,000 iPhone app that made it into the App Store in mid-2008, then was dropped when Apple realized how silly it was. Despite that, six people actually purchased it before it was booted out. Now we have another $1,000 app, and this one might be worth it.

"I Am Rich" simply showed a screenshot of some bling. Anyone who would waste their money on that app had to be rich to justify it.

Meanwhile, the new $1,000 app, BarMax CA, so named because it currently only covers California, is an app designed to help law students study for and pass the bar exam. Bar exams are notoriously difficult, and the classes offered to help study for them typically run into the thousands.

For example, if you take a look at California pricing at BarBri, which also has an iPhone app, you'll see that the tuition is $3,600. The iPhone app is free, but you need to not just pay for tuition, but also a $750 upgrade to BarBri Mobile.

Here's how the BarMax CA app is described on the company's website:

Take 50 pounds of books and condense them into the palm of your hand. With BarMax, you squeeze thousands of pages of bar exam course material and over 1,500 real multiple choice and essay practice questions into your iPhone or iPod Touch. In addition, once you purchase the app, we send you a complete Welcome Packet with hundreds of pages of supplemental material, on-screen outlines, practice exams, and suggested as well as optional hard copy printouts.

Not only that, if you don't have your own iPhone or iPod touch, they'll send you one with the course materials. Of course, it's probably the lowest-priced iPod touch, but hey, it's something extra, at least, for your $1,000.
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Hacker Releases Tool So You Can Hide From Google

Hacker Releases Tool So You Can Hide From Google

Everything Google, with the exception of their business-quality services, is free. For that free service, you let Google monitor just about everything you do on the Internet. Now, a hacker who calls himself Moxie Marlinspike aims to make your tracks invisible to Google.

Of course, that's only for things that you don't have to login for. Services like Gmail or Google Voice, you have to login to access. But other services, like search, maps, translate, would all be hidden via a service he calls GoogleSharing.

GoogleSharing, announced Tuesday, mixes your behavior with those of other users, by using a custom proxy and a Firefox plug-in. You can access his site at GoogleSharing.net. Here's how it works:

The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.

This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.

Unlike most proxy servers, this service only redirects Google traffic. And while other services, such as Scroogle, hide your searches from Google, GoogleSharing goes further.

Of course, while you're hiding yourself from Google, you're exposing yourself to Marlinspike. To get around these fears, Marlinspike is also offering Googlesharing's code to anyone who wants to create their own GoogleSharing proxy.

As he says in his FAQ, "if you don't trust us, hopefully you can find someone that you do trust, or run a GoogleSharing proxy yourself."

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NVIDIA Refreshes Its Generic Notebook Drivers

In mid-December NVIDIA (finally) released a set of notebook device drivers, that supported 8- and 9-series GPU, promising an update in Q1 2009 that would support all mobile GPUs. On Wednesday they delivered it.

The 179.48 drivers are still festooned with a big BETA label, but as I said, they support GeForce 7, 8, GeForce 9, and DirectX 10-class Quadro NVS branded notebooks.

Drivers can be downloaded here, for Windows Vista and Windows XP, both 32- and 64-bit versions.

Necessary caveats are that the following notebooks are not supported in this release:

1. BenQ Joybook S42 (will be supported in an upcoming release)
2. Dell Vostro notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
3. Fujitsu notebooks – (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks). Note: Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) notebooks are supported in this release
4. Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi 3650 (will be supported in an upcoming release)
5. Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
6. Sony VAIO notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
7. Any notebook that is launched after the release date of this driver

When they first acknowledging tacitly what most already knew: that more consumers are eschewing desktop for notebooks, and that they want drivers now.

It was always painful to wait for the notebook OEM to provide updated drivers, as those were few and far between. It's still annoying to look at the list of "exceptions" above, however, and see Lenovo, Dell Vostro and Sony VAIO notebooks prominently listed.

Still, here are the release highlights:

• Beta driver for GeForce Go 7-series, GeForce 8M and GeForce 9M series notebook GPUs. Refer to the Products Supported tab for the list of supported GPUs and notebooks. Some notebooks are not supported by this release.
• Supports NVIDIA CUDA technology.
• Supports NVIDIA PhysX hardware acceleration on GeForce 8M and 9M GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory (this driver package installs NVIDIA PhysX System Software v9.09.0010).
• Experience CUDA and NVIDIA PhysX in several free applications and demos by downloading the GeForce Plus Pack.
• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI™ technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL.
• Please read the release notes for more information on product support, features, and known compatibility issues.

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How to Rid Yourself of Microsoft's Stealth Firefox Extension

I hate stealth installs, software components that are installed without your knowledge and frequently aren't all that easy to remove. Not content to muck around with its own software, Microsoft has decided to start mucking around with competitor software: in this case, Mozilla's Firefox.

A friend brought this to my attention after reading about it on Security Fix; once you install the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 update from earlier this year, you get an extra Firefox extension, the "Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce)." Besides not being too clear on exactly what the heck the thing really does, Microsoft has disabled the Uninstall button on the extension. You can disable it, but not uninstall it.

While Microsoft didn't elaborate on just what this extension does, I will. It adds ClickOnce support to Firefox. ClickOnce is what, you might ask?

ClickOnce enables the user to install and run a Windows application by clicking a link in a web page. The core principle of ClickOnce is to bring the ease of deployment of web applications to the Windows user. In addition, ClickOnce aims to solve three other problems with conventional deployment models: the difficulty in updating a deployed application, the impact of an application to the user's computer, and the need for administrator permissions to install applications.

Meanwhile, Annoyances.org describes this extension as follows (emphasis mine):

This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC. Since this design flaw is one of the reasons you may've originally choosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste.

I might not go as far as to say "most dangerous," but I do hate it when something is installed and I cannot uninstall it. In fact, since trying out BitDefender (and uninstalling it) I've been stuck with its antiphishing toolbar in Firefox, unable to uninstall, for the same reason. Once again, I've disabled, but not uninstalled it.

How do you remove the Microsoft extension? Here's what Microsoft says:

To uninstall the ClickOnce support for Firefox from your machine

1) Delete the registry key for the extension

• From an account with Administrator permissions, go to the Start Menu, and choose 'Run...' or go to the Start Search box on Windows Vista
  

• Type in 'regedit' and hit Enter or click 'OK' to open Registry Editor
  

• For x86 machines, Go to the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions (regedit image shown above, click to enlarge)
  

• For x64 machines, Go to the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Wow6432Node > Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions

iv. Delete key name '{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}'

OR alternatively

• Open a command prompt window (must be 'run as Administrator' on Vista and later)
  
  • Copy and paste the appropriate command below and hit 'Enter'
    
  • For x86 machines:
  • reg DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions" /v "{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}" /f
  • For x64 machines:
  • reg DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions" /v "{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}" /f

2) Reset the changes made to the Firefox user agent

• Launch Firefox, go to the Firefox address bar and type in 'about:config'
  

• Scroll down or use 'Filter' to find Preference name 'general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet'

• Right-click on the item and select 'reset'

• Restart Firefox

3) Remove the .NET Framework extension files

• Go to the Start Menu, and choose 'Run...' or go to the Start Search box on Windows Vista

• Type in 'explorer' and hit Enter or click 'OK'

• Go to '%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\'

• Delete the 'DotNetAssistantExtension' folder and all its contents

All that because someone didn't see fit to allow easy uninstallation. Sigh. I'm still stuck with the Bitdefender toolbar if anyone knows how to uninstall that easily.

READ MORE - How to Rid Yourself of Microsoft's Stealth Firefox Extension

iPhone App Ad Hoc Distribution End User Instructions

Have you ever been invited to beta test an iPhone application? Because of the way that Apple distributes apps, only through the iPhone, developers trying to run an iPhone beta program have to jump through hoops to do so. End users trying to participate might be annoyed, as well.
This is called an "ad hoc distribution." First, the developer will need your iPhone's UDID. He'll have to create a special "provisioning profile" so that you can install it on your phone. This profile will be provided to you as a file you will have to install. To find your UDID, sync with iTunes and, looking at your device information, click on the Serial Number. Your UDID will appear.

Once the developer has that info, he'll send you the app and a provisioning profile. So how do you install it? Here's what you do. The assumption is that he'll provide you with a .ZIP file for the app.

Installing the Application

1. Drag-and-drop the .mobileprovision file onto Library / Applications in iTunes. On the Mac, you just drag the file to the iTunes icon in your dock.
2. Extract the .zip file. I'm going to assume you know how to do this. In Windows Vista, it's been widely reported that Vista corrupts the application if you use its built-in-command. I'm unclear if this occurs on 7, but there's no reason to not use a separate (read: better) zip utility anyway. I'd recommend the open-source 7-Zip if you don't want to buy one, such as WinRAR.
3. Find the .app folder, which will usually be AppName.app.
4. Drag-and-drop the entire .app folder onto Library / Applications in iTunes. Once again, on the Mac, you can just drag it onto the iTunes icon in your dock.
5. The application should now show up in Library / Applications. Note that it will have the default App Store icon.
6. In iTunes, select the iPhone, select the Application tab, and verify that the new application is checked.
7. Sync your Device.

Uninstalling the Application

1. The most difficult part of this is removing the provisioning profile, not because it's that difficult, but because unlike what you might assume, removing it from the iPhone isn't enough. It will simply be reinstalled by iTunes.
2. To remove the provisioning profile from your iPhone, go into Settings, General, and scroll down. Just above Reset you will see Profiles. Click through, and remove the profile from your device.
3. Then, you have to find the file on your computer, to delete it from there. Naturally, the location is different in each OS, just to make life interesting.
• On MacOS X /Users/username/Library/MobileDevice
• On Windows XP /Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Apple Computer/MobileDevice/
• On Windows Vista /Users/username/AppData/Roaming/Apple Computer/MobileDevice/
• On Windows 7, I would assume it's the same as Vista, although I have not confirmed it
4. You can then delete the app from the iPhone in the same way you delete any app: press on an icon until the icons start to shake, then tap the X in the upper left hand corner of the appropriate app.
5. Finally, to be absolutely sure it's gone, go to iTunes, under Library / Applications, and remove the app from there, as well (right click on the icon and delete it).

Definitely more difficult than the typical beta program you might see on a Windows PC, for example. There, you just install, and then uninstall. There's none of this provisioning profile jazz, which makes like hard for both developer and end user. It's just another ramification of the iron-fisted attitude of control Apple has over the iPhone.

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