How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175KB, 8,000-line JavaScript-based Flash player written by Chris Smoak at RevShock, a mobile ad startup, and to be open-sourced ‘in the near future.’ From Simon’s blog: ‘It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio, and turns them into base64 encoded data: URIs, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. … Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter.’ Badass!

Unfortunately, as the Mac OS continues to gain popularity, so does the desire to target the OS for malicious attacks.  I’m posting this to keep people apprised that if you download a file, you better trust the source.

Antivirus company Intego today announced that it has discovered a new spyware application capable of infecting computers running Mac OS X. The spyware, known as “OSX/OpinionSpy”, is downloaded and installed on users’ computers via the installation process for unrelated applications hosted on several popular download sites.

This spyware, OSX/OpinionSpy, performs a number of malicious actions, from scanning files to recording user activity, as well as sending information about this activity to remote servers and opening a backdoor on infected Macs. Read the rest of this entry »

As the pro- and anti-Flash camps have hardened their positions, the editors at InfoWorld have come up with a four-point peace plan that would allow Flash on the iPhone while addressing Apple’s very real concerns over performance, stability, and security. Readers can vote and comment on the peace plan, which InfoWorld hopes will result in serious talks between Apple and Adobe.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is reportedly looking to charge up to $1 million to companies interested in participating in the company’s forthcoming iAd mobile advertising platform. Those companies looking to be launch partners could be looking at sums of up to $10 million.

Apple is making waves on Madison Avenue with its price tag, which comes with initial demands for greater control over advertisers’ marketing campaigns.

“It’s a hefty sum,” says Phuc Truong, managing director at Mobext, a mobile marketing business owned by Havas SA whose clients include Sears, Choice Hotels, Amtrak and Volvo. “What Apple is trying to do is certainly above and beyond what’s been done in the past.”

The rumored premium pricing agrees with previous comments made by ad agencies who have received pitches from Apple’s iAd team, and confirms that Apple will be targeting major corporations for participation in the program rather than smaller entities frequently seen in mobile advertising in many apps on the iPhone today.

According to the report, Apple will be charging one cent per banner displayed and two dollars per interactive ad viewed.

Apple is planning to charge advertisers a penny each time a consumer sees a banner ad, ad executives say. When a user taps on the banner and the ad pops up, Apple will charge $2. Under large ad buys, such as the $1 million package, costs would rack up to reach $1 million with the various views and taps.

The report also notes that Apple itself will build the ads over the first few months in order to ensure proper functioning and aesthetics. But Apple does have plans to release a developer kit that will permit ad agencies to create their own ads down the road and submit them to Apple for approval.

While some ad directors have expressed reluctance at giving up control of ad creation during the initial stages, it hasn’t stopped a reported landslide of interest from agencies, who have participated in numerous pitch sessions from Apple’s iAd team around the country and have begun gearing up with ideas for their campaigns.

In 1987, Apple produced a concept video demonstrating a future computer called the Knowledge Navigator. The tablet-like device offered the user a natural language interface, video conferencing, multi-touch display and access to a global network of information.

While seemingly the product of an overactive imagination, Apple’s recent acquisition of Siri brings Apple a lot closer to that vision than ever before. Siri reportedly was born from the CALO artificial intelligence project which sought to fulfill a call for a “a cognitive computer system should be able to learn from its experience, as well as by being advised.”

Apple’s value in acquiring Siri appears to be focused on this personal assistance technology. Siri describes their technology

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today’s paradigm, we follow links on search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal; it uses information about an individual’s preferences and interaction history to help solve specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.
In fact, Siri’s Chief Technology Officer Tom Gruber uses Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video in his keynote and describes it as a “brilliant piece of vision work”:

Gruber demos Siri and how it can accomplish tasks using a conversational interface and apply context to provide useful and personalized interactions. He also walks through what’s possible today and how close we are getting. Given Apple’s acquisition of the company (and presumably Tom Gruber), the talk is of particular relevance to Apple’s future plans.

A nasty little exploit has hit a large number of GoDaddy-hosted WordPress blogs this weekend. The best part is that the exploit only executes when the traffic is referred by Google, making it the sort of thing that site maintainers won’t easily notice. Clever and devious.

“Adobe’s principal product manager Mike Chambers announced that Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development. The move comes after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. According to Chambers, Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.”

Daring Fireball points out approvingly Apple’s rebuttal to the claim that Flash is an open format, however convenient it might be for iPad owners. Related: The new app policy seems to be inconsistently enforced. Reader wilsonthecat writes

“Novell have released a new press release in response to Apple’s announcement that none-C/C++/Objective-C based iPhone application development breaks their SDK terms. The press release names several apps that have made it past app review processsince the new Apple SDK agreement.”

ITworld reports that the dust-up between Apple and Adobe over Apple’s refusal to permit Flash content on the iPhone and its recent move to block Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone packager in its forthcoming Flash Professional CS5 is set to move to the next level, with Adobe preparing to file suit against Apple over the dispute.

Usually I write about security here, but Apple’s iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple’s face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks.

It was bad enough when Apple said, in effect, that Adobe Flash wasn’t good enough to be allowed on the iPad. But the final straw was when Apple changed its iPhone SDK (software development kit) license so that developers may not submit programs to Apple that use cross-platform compilers.

While Adobe has officially remained silent on the new cross-platform compiler issue other than to note that it is looking into the ramifications of Apple’s move, a “platform evangelist” for the company strongly objected to the move, even going so far as to say “Go screw yourself Apple.”

For his part, Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly noted in an email exchange with a developer that allowing such intermediate layers inevitably leads to a substandard user experience and “hinders the progress of the platform.”

In a previous post, I’d wondered why Adobe didn’t spend their time building HTML5 Authoring tools rather than putting so much time/energy/money into their  Flash->iPhone Apps exporter tool for Flash CS5.

As it turns out, Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools as demonstrated in the video above.   Taking a simple animation, which is the beginning, middle and end of most Flash banner ads that we love, is an export/paste operation.

Now that Microsoft and their market leading IE browser are supporting HTML5, it would seem like a better move for web designers to export old Flash animations into HTML5, rather than miss out on iProducts/ClicktoFlash users’ eyes.  Thanks Timo!