Is this evidence of Apple’s controversial Killswitch in action?

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?

The amazing geohot has done it again. This guy has more talent in his little finger than I have in my whole body. His latest achievement is to have unlocked the iphone’s 05:11:07 Baseband. This is particularly important to those iphone users who want to jailbreak and unlock their iphones who accidentally updated their phones to the 3.1.2 firmware and lost the unlock.

Now through a stinging attack on the unlocking community Geohot is calling for information warfare on all the sites and sellers (SCUM) who continue to sell his and the Dev Teams freeware Software to unsuspecting users.
This was started in his recent blog posted at http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ where he publicly refused the $10,000 reward offered for the development of the unlock on the ground of his own integrity. Good on you! He is calling on all to inform the public that they should never have to buy any unlocking software as it will always remain FREE from the Dev Team and Geohot, and the more people who know this the less of a market these scum will have. So read his article, and pass it on!

Apple have very quietly purchased an online mapping company, Placebase.

The news was only confirmed recently but speculation is now growing that this indicates a desire by Apple to reduce its reliance on Google services including of course Google maps.

The former Placebase CEO is now on-board with Apple in the ‘Geo Team as his Linked-In profile confirms.

There are clear commercial reasons why apple would want to bring a mapping company into their portfolio. iPhoto has geotagging support using Google Maps and the iPhone/iPod Touch of course both use Google Map data.

With mapping experience in the family we may possibly see more map enabled functionality in Apple but of course, buying a small online mapping company does not give you access to world-wide map data so Apple have some way to go before we will see ‘Maps by Apple’ in the copyright.