News Roundup for December the 12th

Wow. It really is difficult to decide what the big news of the day is, since most of the stories I have to write about are equally dull. Here, watch this new Apple advert while I decide. Oh, and by the way: I’ve tried doing that near the Yahoo home page with my iPhone, and since nothing waved around like the ad shows I’m complaining to the ASA.

It’s all go right now in the iPhone world, isn’t it? For those of you who want a mobile phone but don’t really like leaving your house, the news that AT&T is bringing back home activations should come as a relief. I’m preparing my ‘rush of new iPhone customers brings phone company’s servers to their knees’ story right now and setting it to auto-post on Christmas morning. Meanwhile, those lucky few of us who manage to get their phone activated will be pleased to hear that Cut & Paste has finally made it onto the device. Again. Sort of. Using a couple of bookmarklets, the ‘Pastebud’ — do you see what they did there? — technique will allow you to copy from Mobile Safari into Mobile Mail. Yay? Finally, for those of you worrying that the iPhone’s Wal*Mart debut might devalue the brand, causing people to no longer hold you in awe, De Veres has the solution. For a mere £9,520 you can get an unlocked 16Gb diamond-encrusted model. Next to which, the £799 black bezel version seems almost reasonable.

Filed under ‘holy s—, the sky’s falling’ we have the news that household name Opti have kicked Apple’s backside in court. The (pre-)trial, which went down in the Eastern District of Texas, involved ‘Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses’, which sounds really kind of sinister to us. Like, secret society sinister. Why Apple would want to snoop on Opti’s secret initiation rites is total beyond us here at Æ — we can only presume it’s relevant to Steve’s ongoing war with the Illuminanti, who many believe are the real power behind Psystar.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’m off to check Software Update for Mac OS 10.5.6, which is rumoured to be releasing sometime today. See you on the other side.