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The screenshots are presumably deleted after the application is closed, but they can be recovered with forensics techniques just like data deleted from most any storage device can be reconstructed for purposes of law enforcement, he said in a Webcast on Thursday in which he demonstrated how to break into password-protected iPhones.

Apple representatives did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

The
iPhone is recording everything users see and do on their devices for caching purposes, an iPhone hacker says.

Meantime, breaking into a passcode-locked phone took him nearly an hour to demonstrate and required creating a custom firmware bundle, the report said. The issue is different from a security hole discovered last month that allowed people to get access to e-mail, text, and voice messages on password-protected phones.

The device records screenshots of a user’s most recent action so that it can achieve that cool effect of applications fading away when the home button is clicked, according to Jonathan Zdziarski, who wrote the forthcoming book iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets.

“There’s no way to prevent it,” Zdziarski said of the screenshot caching, according to a Wired report. “I’m kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it’s a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it’s been useful for investigating criminals.”

In other words, we’ll soon see that 2009 won’t be like “1984.” With price tags that can reach nearly $3 million and the inevitable need to compete with garish offerings from food and beverage brands like Anheuser-Busch and its army of Clydesdale horses, Super Bowl ads are something that could disappear quickly from a budget amid financial panic, and that newer entrants in the industry might opt to skip. Or at least most venture capital firms and shareholders would hope so.

In the business world, that amorphous concept called “consumer confidence” is measured in dozens of metrics, algorithms, and white papers. In the real world, there are Super Bowl ads. So, unsurprisingly, if you look at the lineup of Super Bowl ads from tech companies this year, the outlook isn’t sunny.

Since then, on the scale of Silicon Valley silliness-to-be-avoided, coughing up the money for a Super Bowl ad has ranked up there with putting a basketball hoop in the conference room. It’s become clear in recent months that the tech industry didn’t learn all its lessons from the last market crash, but even though the open-bar launch parties and dubious business models came back, $3 million for a 30-second ad remained gauche.

Virtually all the electronic and digital brands running ads at this year’s game between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers have advertised at the Super Bowl in past years: domain giant GoDaddy, job search sites Monster.com and CareerBuilder, brokerage house E-Trade, and online auto marketplace
Cars.com. There’s a hype-filled new ad about “smart grid” innovation, but it’s run by General Electric, parent company of this year’s Super Bowl broadcaster NBC.

But as much as they might not admit it, more than a few media geeks are probably going to have their ears perked up in anticipation of the Hulu spot. These days, those of us in the digital business are hungering for some excitement, some innovation, and some good news–and some buffalo wings, and nachos, and nail-biting fourth-quarter moments on the field.

Some of those sticking around have changed their tune. “Last year we were really an occupational vigilante, the one who came into the room and shook you up,” CareerBuilder’s Castellini said of the company’s last ad campaign, which had a ‘quit your job and improve your life’ theme. “(This year) we’re launching an overall campaign that’s going to be more spurred toward helpful insights and your job search.”

As many anticipated months in advance, the Super Bowl ad lookout is dreary across the board. But there’s one potential bright spot: Earlier this week, video hub Hulu
announced unexpectedly that it would be running an ad. Hulu, joint-owned by Super Bowl broadcaster NBC, has kept its television debut conspicuously cloak-and-dagger other than to say the spot will “reveal the secret” to its product and launch its first television ad campaign.

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It might come across as a last-ditch effort on the part of beleaguered broadcast media, but the news of the Hulu ad certainly set off some speculation in the blogosphere. Will there be new content partners announced? Or some nifty new features? Cynics, all too used to disappointment and gloomy headlines these days, figured it will probably just be a marketing pitch to Super Bowl viewers who might not have heard about Hulu yet. They may well be correct.

Indeed, some of last year’s tech advertisers have opted not to participate. GPS manufacturer Garmin, which ran an ad in the second quarter of Super Bowl XLII, will not be running an ad this year. Neither will online lead generator Salesgenie.com, which was criticized for racially insensitive ads last year and first ran Super Bowl ads in 2007. Representatives from Dell, which ran an ad in conjunction with the Project RED awareness campaign last year and has made no mention of doing another ad this year, could not be reached for comment.

Making the most of digital tie-ins
The tech industry is still scrambling for the spotlight in this year’s game, but for the most part, it’s not by running ads: digital tie-ins, predictably, are a big deal. CareerBuilder has its Facebook partnership. There’s been another user-generated ad contest for Doritos, as there have been for the past few years.

E-Trade has bought a front-page video ad on the Google-owned YouTube to “tease” its Super Bowl ad, and YouTube will be encouraging viewers to vote on their favorite ads after the game. AOL, too, plans to aggregate all commercials on its Fanhouse.com sports property.

On the flip side, it’s not as though Super Bowl XLII in 2008 was stuffed with tech ads; the industry’s presence at the game has been quiet in recent years. During the Super Bowl in 2000, a whopping 40 percent of the ads came from dot-coms in a bubbly parade led by the infamous Pets.com sock puppet.

“There’s not that many of us,” said Richard Castellini, chief marketing officer for CareerBuilder, which has partnered with Facebook and its “Engagement Ads” program to poll members of the social-networking site on both the game outcome and their favorite parts of CareerBuilder’s 60-second ad. “It’s a challenging environment, as we all know.”

Established consumer electronics and telecom brands have kept running Super Bowl ads, to an extent, but the Web companies have been largely limited to job-hunting and finance-related brands. After all, the Web 2.0 era has been defined largely by the rise of a company–Google–that has never run a television advertisement for any of its own products.

The PepsiCo.-owned brand SoBe LifeWater will be running the first-ever 3D Super Bowl ad, and said in a New York press conference earlier this week that it has produced nearly 130 million pairs of 3D glasses for it. Powered by Intel’s InTru3D technology, the goggles (emblazoned with Intel logos) are being distributed at LifeWater displays in supermarkets and big-box retailers. GoDaddy, a longtime Super Bowl advertiser, is accompanying its two commercials with a Web-only version that it claims is too hot for TV.

“Going to (Microsoft Research) will allow me to continue the research I do and it will give me a productive, collaborative, interdisciplinary environment in which to do it,” Boyd wrote in a post on her blog on Sunday night. “There’s amazing work at MSR concerning social media and even those at MSR-NE who are not working on social media are more than open to the topics engendered by it and more than ecstatic to engage with me. Being in a room full of scientists might not seem like the most obvious fit, but really, you have to meet them to understand how invigorating an environment it is.”

Previously, she worked as a researcher at both Yahoo and Google. Last year, she rose to Internet fame when she published a paper called “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” that explored the demographic and economic differences between young people who use Facebook versus those who use MySpace.

Boyd will keep her gig as a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, but she’s wrapping up her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley and moving to the Boston area full-time. She says she’ll join the Microsoft Research New England team in January.

Danah Boyd, a researcher best known for her ethnographic studies of social networks, has been tapped to be part of Microsoft Research New England, the company’s new research facility in Cambridge, Mass.

Looking ahead to the March quarter, the company followed a pattern familiar to Apple watchers in providing second-quarter guidance well below analyst expectations of $8.2 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $1.13. The company said it expects revenue between $7.6 billion and $8 billion, and earnings per share between 90 cents and $1.

On a conference call following the release of the numbers, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that Apple passed $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time and recorded its highest net income ever. Gross margins also increased thanks to favorable prices for commodities like DRAM, flash memory, and LCD displays, he said.

The iPod shipment totals were surprising to the financial analyst community, which was expecting something around 18.5 million units for the quarter. Perhaps that was because much of the growth took place overseas; iPod units actually decreased in the U.S. compared to last year’s first quarter. Overall iPod revenue fell slightly compared to last year, suggesting that the growth came from lower-priced iPods.

Apple continues to check out what’s happening with the Netbook market, Cook said, but at the moment isn’t interested in a product that is “principally based on hardware that’s less powerful than customers want, software that’s not good, cramped keyboards, and small displays. We don’t think people are going to be pleased with those types of products, but we’ll see, we’re watching that space.”

On the music front, the iTunes Store had a record quarter for music sales, Oppenheimer said. Music sales especially peaked on Christmas Day and that following week, he said, suggesting that more than a few people received iTunes gift cards this holiday.

For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected. Expected revenue was $9.75 billion.

Apple sold 2.5 million Macs during the quarter, 22 million iPods, and 4.3 million iPhones. The
Mac shipments were about in line with expectations, the
iPod shipments were significantly higher, and
iPhone shipments were slightly less than estimates that ran all over the map.

Apple reported on Wednesday first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance.

Investigators with the Securities and Exchange Commission are reviewing how Apple handled the disclosure of information surrounding Jobs’ health, according to a report Wednesday by Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Analysts wasted little time inquiring about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, who is on medical leave until the end of June to recuperate from what he described as health-related issues “more complex than I originally thought.” Without replying directly to the question, COO Tim Cook, who is running the company in Jobs’ absence, plunged into a monologue on Apple’s culture doesn’t “(settle) for anything less than excellence” and that “regardless of who is in what role, those values are so embedded in the culture of this company that Apple will do extremely well.”

Cook declined to comment on any launch plans for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next version of the company’s operating system that is expected to make an appearance around or before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Cook noted that Apple is willing to tinker with the price of the iPhone in certain countries, like India, where phones are not subsidized like AT&T does with the U.S. iPhone. But he also declared “we’re not going to play in the low-end voice subsidized business. Our objective is not to be the market share leader in the phone industry, it’s to build the world’s best phones.”

With regards to the Mac, Apple saw a strong uptick in sales of notebooks following the launch of new systems in October, Cook said. Portables now account for 71 percent of Apple’s Mac lineup, an all-time high, and notebook sales increased by 33 percent compared to last year’s first quarter. Desktop sales fell, which Cook attributed to a tough comparison with December 2007, when Apple had just refreshed the iMac, and a general disenchantment with desktop computers in general.

It didn’t seem to matter as much as in past quarters, however, as Apple’s stock surged 10 percent in after-hours trading. Perhaps investors were actually expecting worse guidance based on the health of the economy, or were simply cheered that Apple appeared to skate past any worries over poor retail sales this holiday season.

Updated throughout at 3:30 p.m. PST with details from conference call.

iPhone sales, at 4.4 million units, were a little less than expectations of around 4.5 million units. But virtually everyone agrees that with just two holiday quarters under Apple’s belt selling the iPhone, it’s difficult to predict how the iPhone will fare in a given quarter. For example, about 2 million of the 6.9 million iPhones Apple sold during its fourth fiscal quarter were designated for channel inventory, and there was clearly pent-up demand in that quarter.

In particular, I liked reading about how IBM continues to improve Linux and open source for the mainstream:

Over the past year, as Linux adoption has moved from the edge of the network to mission-critical applications, business-critical workloads, such as enterprise resource planning applications, have become a growth area for IBM, Kuznetsova said.

Simultaneously, IT decisions have trickled down from IT chiefs to management. These managers have demonstrated greater support for Linux but also a stronger demand for security, availability, and services. IBM has met these needs, with hosted computing on demand on the mainframe running Linux, which is especially helpful for peak workloads, she said.

I don’t know that anyone actually knew what that meant at the time, in terms of where and how IBM would spend it, but one thing I knew as the employee of an embedded Linux vendor: with IBM in the Linux game, Linux was suddenly mainstream. IBM was putting its brand behind it, and IBM’s brand was rock-solid.

I still remember when IBM committed $1 billion to Linux.

The open-source community owes a great deal to IBM. Of course, IBM has benefited tremendously from open source. Perhaps we’re even?

Roughly 10 years after IBM first started dabbling with Linux in earnest, it has built up an impressive track record of open-source involvement. SearchEnterpriseLinux has a great interview with Inna Kuznetsova, the director of IBM Linux strategy, which covers a lot of ground relative to IBM and open source.

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Calling their action the “Revenge of the Flame,” a group of computer protesters in China appears to have learned from both last year’s cyberattacks on Estonia and the more recent anonymous attacks on the Church of Scientology. But Revenge of the Flame organizers stress that their attacks will not be a crime.

But the organizers themselves (Google translated page) appear to be waffling, and Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks reports that there has been little preattack activity within the last 24 hours.

Meanwhile, yet another Internet site, Anti-CNN.com, claims that protests in favor of China have not been published fairly by Western media in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States.

“We want to be patriotic,” one organizer wrote, arguing that they intend to link Chinese Internet users together against one target: CNN.com. Should the attack be successful, the Revenge of the Flame planners will then consider immediately dissolving the flame of revenge (”after all, cybercrime is cybercrime,” says the organizer), continue to attract more users, and “enhance the people’s awareness of network security.”

Several groups of Internet organizers plan to show on Saturday that they can mobilize patriotic Chinese Internet users and wield their influence worldwide against what they say is anti-Chinese media in the Western world.

A banner on the Anti-CNN.com says (translated from the Chinese), “We are not against the Western media, but against the lies and fabricated stories in the media.” The site includes example headlines from Der Spiegel, The Washington Post, and Fox News, in which it claims that photos of the police attacking the Monks are Napalese, not Tibetan.

In the real world, a separate, perhaps unrelated, group is planning (Google translated page) for simultaneous protests on Saturday in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Paris.

The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks the activities of Chinese computer hackers, is reporting that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on CNN.com is planned for 8 p.m. Beijing time, or 5 a.m. PT in the United States.

Verizon Communications suffered a major blow in its patent battles on Monday, when a federal court ruled that cable company Cox Communications had not infringed on its patents.

The telecommunications giant has accused Cox of violating six of its patents related to Internet telephony. But a jury for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia decided against Verizon on all six patents.

Many analysts and experts believed that Verizon had been emboldened by its Vonage patent battle and was looking to go after bigger players, such as cable providers. Companies such as Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable have been offering VoIP services for the past few years. And they’ve been very successful in converting millions of Verizon customers to their service.

“Despite the decision, we believe our patents were infringed,” Verizon said in a statement. “We will continue to innovate and protect our intellectual property.”

Verizon settled a similar suit against digital-phone service provider Vonage last year, squeezing about $117.5 million from the troubled provider of voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. Against Cox, it had been seeking past damages of $404 million.

But with this latest court decision, it looks as if Verizon may have to rethink its legal strategy. The company recently reached a deal with Comcast in which both companies agreed not to sue each other for a period of five years for any patent infringement. But there had been speculation that Verizon might target Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

The company also told The Wall Street Journal that it hasn’t decided whether to appeal the decision.