If this is true, (or even just believed to be true,) then I feel sorry for the forthcoming generations of pandas who'll literally be being hung out to dry by this news. Poor bloody pandas.

I have read of a number of cases now where idiot thieves have stolen someone's iPhone, only to find the cops rock up at their place because the owner has looked up the location using 'find my phone' and reported that to the cops. Typically, in the stories I have read, the cops then find a whole load of other stolen stuff and evidence of further criminal activity. So it begs the question, who would be dumb enough to steal a device that knows where it is and that is capable of sharing that information with its owner? I assume 'droids and 'dows mobiles have an analogous feature.

Simply set your IG feed to Private and voila. No problem. IG / FB will only repost / profit from your public photos. Going private also eliminates that scourge that is IG spam.

Surely the simplest way to defeat this is for systems to only allow three wrong guesses before locking you out of the system. That's why four digit PINs are secure enough for a bank.

What idiot system allows a robot to try brazillions of passwords anyway?

I've always assumed that the word "law" in "Moore's Law" was being used ironically, or at least sarcastically.

You know you can solve those public transport issues with any number of routing apps right, that plug into the Apple Maps and are maintained by local providers so they are much more likely to be accurate. Google Maps is okay for PT but hardly perfect, and entirely missing from many places. I have a shortcut to Google Maps's mobile web app on my iPhone right next to my Maps app for those times when Maps can't find places (I blame Yelp for that mostly.)

I use a routing plugin called Transit Times+ which covers over 70 cities, including many in Australia (where I live), many in the USA, EU and more. And he's adding to the list all the time. It's a very good app and costs about $2 from memory so hardly going to break the bank. I see no reason to hold off updating to iOS 6 (My wife is also holding out, but she's weirdly neophobic), indeed the FaceTime anywhere ability of iOS 6 is very cool, and the killer app for me for iOS 6 is DND Mode. Now I never get calls between 10pm and 7am unless they are really urgent or from specifically white-listed numbers.

I've had very few problems with Apple's Maps app, in fact I found it absolutely amazing the other day when I was able to match the exact location of a photo we took on an old-style film camera to the exact spot on the roof of a building we took it in Madrid just by twisting and panning around the 3D view of Madrid. It took about 20 minutes and utterly blew me away that I could do that. There is simply no comparison for that, admittedly, limited use case.

The problem I have with Maps is actually Yelp. Here in Australia, and so far this also seems to be true in most of the world I've travelled to that's not the continental USA, no-one uses Yelp. So the location data in Maps is either missing, wrong, or seriously out of date. If Apple had partnered with FourSquare instead then it would be a very different story. Even the smallest little beach-shack in Cambodia is in FourSquare. The shoe-shine guy in Red Square Moscow is in FourSquare. The frakkin' cafe over the road from my house is in FourSquare. But it isn't in Yelp. In Yelp they still show the old Chinese restaurant that hasn't existed for over a year (it's a pub now).

Whereas I believe it's unlikely to work, probably expensive, and manifestly open to being gamed.

Sigh.

I feel for those 18,000+ workers but the fact is that Twinkies are disgusting and ought not be consumed by anyone ever.

Another purveyor of shit food goes under. That's a victory for common sense.

There is a long list of such companies that need to follow in Hostess' footsteps. Coke and Pepsie. Macdonalds et al, they are all a blight on the general public.

Tellingly Forstall was absent from the last Timnote too. Traditionally he would have been on stage doing his weak Steve Jobs impersonation (seriously it was cringeworthy watching him imitate Jobs' presentation style so slavishly, right down to the pauses, yet so unconvincingly) but there was, thankfully, no sign of him on stage last week.

I look forward to iOS7 and OS X 10.9 with none of that stitched leather crap, wifi syncing that actually works, file versioning that doesn't harass my file system and make dropbox cry when working on files that are held in a dropboxed folder, Calendars that work seamlessly, game center that doesn't look hideous, etc etc.

Also I wonder what this means for the release of the new iTunes. Hopefully when it is released it's nice and clean and stays the hell out of my way when all I want to do is play some music. From the demo Cook gave a month or so ago it has me worried.

Imagine a world without cars. How much damage has the car done to the planet. To people's waistlines? How many people are killed by cars every day? How many people die because of oil wars?

A few days after I bought my iPhone 4S I was cycling and had the phone attached to the handlebars with rubber bands. Coming down a steep hill the bands snapped and the phone dropped, hit my foot, and was punted some 200 feet into a tree. I spent 20 minutes looking for it then some guy, also on a bike, stopped and asked if I needed help. He handed me his new 4S so I could call mine (no luck) without hesitation. Then he spent another 20 minutes helping me find it. He eventually found it quite some distance away and handed it back. The SIM tray had come out due to the force of the impact but he'd found that too.

Not once did it occur to me that he'd steal my phone, nor to him that I might.

I have never heard of anyone here having their iPhone stolen from them. I have heard of thieves breaking into cars / homes and stealing iPads only to be caught along with all the other loot they've acquired due to the "find my phone" feature of iOS.

Why would anyone steal an iPhone when they are so easy to track?

I'm glad I live in a society where people still happily help strangers.

Just curious but which ISP did you end up with. I've been on Internode for years and their 160GB monthly cap (metered downloads only, non-metered uploads) is usually fine, and it's very fast. I've not seen any ISPs offering unlimited data and decent speeds.

Since reading about this I've been wondering just how long do Australian ISPs retain such data for currently, without these new laws in place? Given GSM phone towers supposedly retain 37 years worth of EMEI logs, I can't imagine many ISPs would totally roll their logs within two years anyway. Can someone here who actually works at an Aussie ISP clarify the current situation please?

From a practical sense, what is to stop him from archiving all those iTunes bought music files onto a backup drive and that just being handed over to his daughters when he dies? There's no DRM in iTunes and has not been for a long time. Yes I know he's making a point and a very good point, but from an absolutely practical perspective I'm not sure there is an issue. Still good on him; go Bruce!