In the past few days the charge has been levelled that Apple’s voice-command entity, Siri, is anti-abortion. This after it was noted that when people ask Siri for guidance to abortion services, ‘she’ is “unable” to find such services, or in some instances instead directs them to pro-life organizations.

iPhones are hot. Everybody knows that. But the crew and passengers of an Australian plane belonging to Australia’s Regional Express airline learned just how hot they are first-hand today, when a passenger’s iPhone began emitting clouds of smoke, and glowing red-hot.

As people lined up today to buy the brand new iPhone 4S, some people are wondering “Why?” Is it just for Siri, the “Personal Assistant” software (which Android users have had for ages with the “Genius Button”)? What is different about the iPhone 4S as compared to the iPhone 4 – after all, the number is the same. Is the iPhone 4S better than the iPhone 4? Should I upgrade to an iPhone 4S (or, if I don’t already have an iPhone, should I get an iPhone 4S?) Here’s what’s different, and what’s new.

As much of the world in general, and those of us in the tech industry in particular, mourn the passing of Steve Jobs, we turn to consider that the mortal man may be gone, but his legacy will live on forever. And how truly amazing this is for someone who is not a Nobel winner, not a head of state, but CEO of a tech company.

Steve Jobs has resigned today as the CEO of Apple. In Jobs’ letter of resignation, addressed both to the Board of Directors of Apple, and the “Apple Community”, Jobs mentions an already-existing succession plan, which includes naming Tim Cook as his successor as CEO of Apple, and requests to remain on as Chairman of the Board of Apple, a director, and an Apple employee.

Digital marketing analysis firm comScore has released a report showing that in terms of marketshare, there are now more (vastly more) Android phones in use than iPhones. With nearly 40% of all smart phones in the U.S. being Android phones, compared to the Apple iPhone having just a little over 25% of the market, Android seems to be eating Apples for lunch. Just how many people are using Android phones as to compared to the number of people using iPhones? Read on…

If you have ever suffered a forgotten passcode on your iPod iTouch, iPad, or iPhone, then you know how frustrating it can be when you are sure you could remember it if only you had enough tries, but your iPhone (or iPad or iTouch) has other ideas. “Forgot passcode? Bzzt..too many tries,” and then you get the dreaded “iPod iTouch is disabled try again in 1 minute” or “iPad is disabled try again in 5 minutes” or “iPhone is disabled try again in 15 minutes.” The “try again” timeout intervals increase with each wrong guess (the first 5 guesses are ‘free’, then each additional wrong guess imposes another time out penalty). Well, here is how to end run those disabled timeouts, so that you don’t have to wait, and can keep on guessing as many times as you need to until you finally remember that forgotten passcode.

The netosphere is a’buzz with the announcement of Apple’s new cloud-based streaming music service. The Apple music service is actually part of a cloudy storage service called iCloud (what else?). iCloud is an online storage and “syncing” service which allows you to “sync” calendars, contacts, email, photos, documents, ebooks, and yes, your music, across multiple devices. The music part of it basically allows you to store your iTunes library in ‘the cloud’ and access it from any capable device. (We put “sync” in quotes because technically it’s not really syncing, it’s having your data “pushed” and downloaded to each of your devices, on demand, but many users still think of it as syncing.)

Have you ever been reading a PDF file, or a website, on your Mac, and been frustrated at the lack of a “Page down” or “Page up” key? In fact, it’s very easy to page up or page down on a Mac, but it’s not obvious how to do it. Here is how to page down on a Mac (or page up on a Mac).

It’s so easy to end up with a big collection of apps, isn’t it? There are so many free applications, so many interesting looking apps, that you can eat ’em like candy. But eventually they start taking up too much space on your iPhone, iPod or iTouch, or on your hard drive in iTunes. Here is how to remove an app from your device, from iTunes, and from your hard drive.

The “Security Alert” trojan, sometimes known as a ‘rogue antivirus’ attack, is making the rounds again. First spotted a few years ago, until recently the “web security” antivirus alert trojan targeted mainly PCs, tricking Windows users into downloading the evil ‘BestAntivirus2011.exe’ file by telling them that “To help protect your computer Windows web security have detected trojans and ready to remove them.” (Note the poor language usage.) Now this same tactic is being used to attack Mac users – all that has changed is the “Windows” to “Apple” and the file name (‘MacProtector.mpkg for Macs’) – even the poor language remains the same! “To help protect your computer Apple web security have detected trojans and ready to remove them.” says the pop-up. Don’t fall for it, and whatever you do, don’t click on “Remove all”, which will cause the malware to be downloaded to your computer.

In response to the howls of outrage over the news that iOS4 is tracking and storing every location you visit with an iPhone or iPad, Apple has finally, more than week later, issued a statement on the matter,. In essence, they say that a bug made them do it, and they are going to fix it. Sort of.

While we are talking about how to lock down the Internet access on an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad so that you can safely let a child use it without having to worry about what they may access on the Internet, you may find yourself having forgotten the parental restrictions passcode (that allows you to reset parental controls to disable Safari, email, etc.), and wanting to reset it. If you haven’t jailbroken your iPod Touch or iPhone or iPad, then the standard advice – to do a factory reset through iTunes – may still be your best bet. But if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch, then you can actually remove and reset the parental restrictions passcode without having to reset your device! (Oh happy days!) Here’s how you do it:

If you are a conscientious parent who wants to let their child use an iPod Touch (or “iTouch”) or iPad, but who wants the iPod Touch wifi disabled before you give it to them, you may be frustrated at the lack of any way to disable wifi so as to lock down the iPad or iPod Touch internet access. You can’t password protect the internet access on an iPod Touch or iPad, as there are no passwords for iPod iTouch wifi. In fact, natively, there is no way to disable or password protect the iPod Touch internet access (how stupid, Apple, get on the ball here! Give us some iPod Touch wifi apps to disable wifi!) Oh sure, you can put parental control restrictions on individual applications (Safari, Email), but your child can still turn the iPod Touch wireless internet on, and for some parents, that’s still too much of a risk (and we say “Bravo!” to them for ‘getting’ it). There is, however, an iPod Touch hack that will allow you to disable wifi on your iPod Touch or iPad, by password protecting the iPod Touch wifi on/off switch, and here it is.

Researchers have discovered that Apple’s newest operating system, iOS4, is literally spying on iPhone and iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G users’ movements, using geolocation to create a file that records every place that the user carrying the device passes through. At least as bad, the file, called “consolidated.db”, not only is on your iPhone or iPad, but is unencrypted, meaning that anybody who can access the file can read your every move.