MacRumors

As of January 26, it is illegal for U.S. mobile phone users to unlock newly purchased cell phones without express permission from their cell phone carriers. Cell phone unlocking used to be possible as part of an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), but the exception ended following a ruling by the Library of Congress's Copyright Office in October of 2012.

Sina Khanifar, co-founder of OpenSignal, is protesting the new law with a whitehouse.gov petition calling for the decision to be rescinded. In 2004, Khanifar started Cell-Unlock.com, a business centered around unlocking mobile phones.

The site led to a cease and desist letter from Motorola, which was successfully nullified by the founder of Stanford's Cyberlaw Clinic, Jennifer Granick, who went on to lobby for the now-defunct DMCA exemption for unlocking phones.

As Khanifar mentions in his petition, the loss of the exemption hinders mobile phone users who wish to unlock their phones for use abroad and it also devalues the devices.

Consumers will be forced to pay exorbitant roaming fees to make calls while traveling abroad. It reduces consumer choice, and decreases the resale value of devices that consumers have paid for in full.

The Libraran noted that carriers are offering more unlocked phones at present, but the great majority of phones sold are still locked.

Khanifar needs approximately 13,000 additional signatures on his petition, which ends on February 23, to receive a formal White House response. The White House has a policy of issuing a response to petitions that garner at least 100,000 signatures. The signatures do not guarantee a reversal of the policy, but they will ensure that the issue is officially addressed.

Though cell phone unlocking is now illegal on an individual basis for phones purchased after January 26, 2013, users are still able to have phones unlocked through carriers. Unlocked cell phones can also be purchased from carriers at unsubsidized prices.

In January, a number of Apple employees had their Macs compromised following visits to the popular iPhoneDevSDK forum. Employees from Facebook and likely dozens of other companies were compromised as well. In a blog post today, site owner Ian Sefferman shared some limited details* about what happened and what the site is doing about it.

Most notably, the attack was reportedly ended by the hacker on January 30, 2013, meaning the site believes that there is no ongoing threat.

What we've learned is that it appears a single administrator account was compromised. The hackers used this account to modify our theme and inject JavaScript into our site. That JavaScript appears to have used a sophisticated, previously unknown exploit to hack into certain user's computers.

We're still trying to determine the exploit's exact timeline and details, but it appears as though it was ended (by the hacker) on January 30, 2013.

As with Facebook, it's important to stress that we have no reason to believe user data was compromised.

Eric Romang has done some additional detective work on the the attack, laying much of the blame on Java itself. Last month, Apple twice blocked Java 7 from working on users' Macs, perhaps after the company discovered that its own machines had been compromised.

* URL to blog post: http://iphonedevsdk.com/forum/site-news-announcements/111889-iphonedevsdk-compromised-what-happened-and-how-we-are-dealing-with-it.html -- We've avoiding linking it due to the recent hack at that site.

Apple Chairman and longtime board member Art Levinson spoke Tuesday afternoon at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, including participating in a Q&A with Stanford students. Fortune published selected portions of the talk.

On Tuesday, he said that Jobs's absence remains tough to ignore even as the company has continued introducing new products and making fresh announcements. "I'm still not to the point where I walk into that board room and don't miss Steve," said Levinson, who finally started but has so-far failed to finish reading Jobs's biography. "He was a one of a kind guy... The Steve Jobs that was in the public eye was not, for the most part, the Steve Jobs that I knew."

Levinson, who has been on the Apple board since 2000, said the board does not have much input on new products. However, insights can be taken into account particularly as each board member has expertise in different areas. "The board is not there to define product specs," he said. "It's there as a sounding board. It's there as a resource. And ultimately, the board is there to hire and fire the CEO."

Levinson has been on the board for thirteen years and has seen Apple through the launch of the iPod, the switch to Intel, the launch of the iPhone and then the iPad. In November 2011, he was named Chairman of the Board. He also serves as chairman of Genentech, where he was CEO from 1995 through 2009. As of the beginning of February, he and his wife owned 164,199 shares of Apple stock, worth some $74 million.

Streaming music service Spotify is reportedly in negotiations to make its free subscription tier available on smartphones and tablets, according to a report from The Verge.

Spotify, the popular music subscription service, is due to meet in the coming weeks with its major counterparts in the record industry to renew their licensing agreements. The Verge has learned that managers at Spotify are expected to ask for substantial price breaks from the music labels as well as the rights to extend its free pricing tier to mobile devices.

Currently, Spotify Free is only available on computers, with a $9.99 Premium subscription required to access the service on an iPhone or iPad.

Spotify's argument will likely be that it needs this agreement in order to achieve profitability. Despite 5 million paying subscribers and a further 15 million free ones generating ad revenues, Spotify is believed to be operating at break-even.

Streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora have had an uneasy relationship with music labels and artists, with the latter complaining about the extremely low level of payments made for the right to stream music. Several major artists, including Coldplay and Adele, refuse to allow their music to be streamed by Spotify for this reason.

Apple is rumored to be planning to launch its own streaming music service to complement iTunes, but industry sources claim that the company has so far made little headway in agreeing terms with record labels.

Financial Times reported earlier today that Foxconn has enacted a hiring freeze at most of its Chinese facilities due to reduced demand for the iPhone 5.

“Currently, none of the plants in mainland China have hiring plans,” said Liu Kun, a company spokesman at Foxconn’s largest manufacturing facility, in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen across the border from Hong Kong.

Human resources officials at Foxconn’s largest factories, local government officials and external recruiters working with the company said there had been internal notices on Tuesday and Wednesday to halt hiring until at least the end of March, in response to reduced orders for the iPhone 5.

Recruiters specifically pointed to hiring freezes at Foxconn's massive facilities in Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, Taiyuan, and Chengdu, all of which focus on assembly of iPhones and iPads.

An expectation of hiring picking up again in late March would be in line with rumors of Apple beginning to ramp up production of the iPhone 5S, but a Foxconn spokesman told Bloomberg that the current hiring freeze actually has nothing to do with waning demand for Apple products.

Foxconn halted recruitment until the end of March after more employees returned from the Chinese New Year break than a year earlier, Bruce Liu, a spokesman for the Taipei-based company, said today in a phone interview. The decision wasn’t related to iPhone 5 production, he said.

The Chinese New Year festivities last for several weeks, with many factories running at greatly reduced capacity as workers return to their homes. The offical two-week festivities conclude with the annual Lantern Festival, which takes place this Sunday, February 24.

Back in November, research firm Strategy Analytics estimated that Samsung's Galaxy S III had topped the list of worldwide smartphone shipments for the third quarter of 2012, taking advantage of a lull in iPhone 4S sales ahead of the iPhone 5 launch to claim the crown.

Unsurprisingly, the firm's latest figures published today find that Apple easily reclaimed the title for the fourth quarter of the year with the iPhone 5 seeing shipments of 27.4 million units for 12.6% of the market.

Not only did the iPhone 5 top the market, but the iPhone 4S also saw more shipments than the Galaxy S III, as shipments of the previous-generation iPhone actually saw an uptick in the fourth quarter after Apple cut pricing.

Apple’s iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S together accounted for 1 in 5 of all smartphones shipped worldwide in Q4 2012. This was an impressive performance, given the iPhone portfolio’s premium pricing. We estimate Samsung’s Galaxy S3 was the world’s third best-selling smartphone model and it shipped 15.4 million units globally, capturing 7 percent share in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Strategy Analytics' numbers are of course an estimate, given that Apple does not break down iPhone sales by model and Samsung does not even release handset shipment data.

The leapfrog game between Apple and Samsung is likely to continue when Samsung launches its new flagship handset, the Galaxy S4, which is expected on March 14.

According to a report from Digitimes, Apple supplier AU Optronics has managed to improve its poor iPad mini display yields, finally leading to increased availability of the current iPad mini and a solid infrastructure for the production of displays for the next generation mini.

Due to AUO's yield issues throughout the second half of 2012, cumulative shipments of the iPad mini were less than Apple's originally estimated 10 million units. However, the sources said AUO has solidified higher yields as of the first quarter in 2013, which will help keep the iPad mini in supply as well as most likely push up AUO's tablet panel shipments on year in 2013.

The iPad mini has been in short supply since its release in October 2012, after some models sold out just minutes after pre-orders began. Reports cited display production as the limiting factor, which led to ship times of up to two weeks.

Just today, we reported that Apple managed to reach supply-demand balance on the iPad mini. The tablet is now listed as "in stock" for immediate shipment from several online Apple Stores, which confirms the display yield improvements.

Digitimes is also reporting that AU Optronics has begun production of displays for the second generation iPad mini. Rumors have suggested that the next iPad mini will be equipped with a Retina display, and a report from November stated that AU Optronics was gearing up for production.

Retina is widely believed to be the next logical step for the iPad mini, and while there are no concrete hints on when an updated mini will be released, KGI Securities Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently predicted that both the iPad mini and the full sized iPad will be updated in the third quarter of 2013.

As reported by The New York Times, the software development website responsible for seeding malicious software to Mac computers at Apple, Facebook, and presumably Twitter has been revealed by a person who was involved with the investigation at Facebook.

The compromised site, iPhoneDevSDK, is an online forum designed for software developers. The site is still infected, and visiting it is not recommended.

At this time, it is unknown if the site had any involvement in the attacks, though it is likely that it was the work of third party hackers given the site's prominent standing as a dedicated community for iPhone developers.

Apple this morning announced that a small number of its employees' computers had been compromised through the Java plug-in vulnerability, an issue that has now been fixed with the Java update and malware removal tool released by Apple this afternoon.

Mac users can determine whether or not they have been affected by the security flaw by installing the Java update, which will notify a user if malware is found. Apple says that the Java update and malware removal tool will "remove the most common variants of malware."

As noted by The Next Web, iPhoneDevSDK is currently in maintenance mode.

Shortly after releasing a Java update to fix a vulnerability that allowed hackers to access the computers of Apple employees, Apple released iTunes version 11.0.2.

The update offers a Composers view for music, bug fixes, and enhanced responsiveness when accessing large playlists. It also offers a fix for an error that prevented purchases from showing up in the library.

The 54.2 MB update is available through the Mac App Store and it can also be downloaded from Apple’s support website.

iTunes 11 was originally released in November of 2012, with a major redesign of the store, improved search, a simplified MiniPlayer, and new iCloud enhancements. iTunes was previously updated to version 11.0.1 in December, fixing bugs with iCloud and iTunes Match.

Apple has released updated versions of Java for OS X, following a prominent hacking of Apple employees' Macs, plus the remote blocking of the Java plugin due to security vulnerabilities.

This is the standard quarterly update of Java 6 that Apple distributes, while customers looking for Java 7 should download straight from Oracle.

The update includes the malware removal tool mentioned earlier that will "remove the most common variants of malware". If malware is found, the user is notified -- otherwise, no notification is made.

About Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 13

Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 13 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_41.

On systems that have not already installed Java for Mac OS X 10.6 update 9 or later, this update will configure web browsers to not automatically run Java applets. Java applets may be re-enabled by clicking the region labeled "Inactive plug-in" on a web page. If no applets have been run for an extended period of time, the Java web plug-in will deactivate.

Please quit any web browsers and Java applications before installing this update.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5651 for more details about this update.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for information about the security content of this update.

There are two download packages available through Apple's software download site, one for OS X Snow Leopard and the other for OS X Lion or Mountain Lion. They may also be downloaded through Software Update or the Mac App Store.

NPD today released a report examining U.S. consumer technology sales for 2012. Among other things, the company said consumer technology sales have dropped by $4 billion since 2010, down to $143 billion.

Additionally, three of the top five categories based on 2012 revenue experienced declines from 2011 to 2012 -- the two categories that grew were smartphones and tablets, both of which are product lines that Apple currently dominates.

“While CE remains a dynamic industry the fact is that the stellar growth of the past few years has made growth today more difficult,” [said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.]. “Most market segments have high penetration rates and the demand for additional devices is slowing, or declining. Tablets and smartphones have been able to stimulate demand for additional devices, but unfortunately it hasn’t been enough, yet, to sustain positive growth trends.”

NPD went on to note that Apple accounted for 19.9% of U.S. sales, (based on revenue) an increase in share of 2.6% from last year. Samsung captured 9.3% of dollars spent, up from 7% in 2011.

The fall in TV revenue could be noteworthy given the recent rumors around an Apple television set. The company could be hesitant to launch a product in a shrinking category, though perhaps Apple might be able to drive double-digit growth like it has for smartphones and tablets.