Nevermind iPhone, worry about these

Columnist's corner: While throngs will be unboxing and powering up iPhone's this weekend, Oliver Rist coughs up two words and a question mark: Who cares? "It's just a phone ... An Internet surfing phone, see? With a badly executed access plan, batteries that can't live up to its feature set, and an apparent lack of APIs," he writes in Five technologies more pressing than the iPhone. "If you don't have a compelling business reason to manage one now, that's not going to change, no matter how many colorful TV commercials come out of Cupertino. Get a grip -- we have far weightier issues to worry about." Paris Hilton, Angeline Jolie and Lindsay Lohan, for starters. Oh yes, and Nigeria's Axis of Spam. I only listed two of the five, by the way.

Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely, once again, has the geek week in review. "The stupidity is only just starting," he reports about the 4,000 iPhone-related domains registered already and one being auctioned at a base of $25K. "Who knows, he might even get it." Paris Hilton finds her way into this post, too, though she is not the one trying to prove that "Chivas is not just for fat stogie-smoking businessmen from Des Moines." No, that would be MSN. Too bad for Cringe, who had more Paris jokes up his sleeve before she was freed.

Best of the blogs: How to catch a spy. The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX) has released a set of guidelines to help agencies identify potential threats to information security. It's no panacea but, according to government research, "most known American spies (roughly 80 percent) demonstrated one or more of the listed conditions or behaviors of security concern before they engaged in espionage," Matt Hines reports.

The news beat: BlackBerry maker RIM says that the iPhone has helped its business, and reports record high subscriber growth and strong device shipments. AMD says that its first quad-core server chip Barcelona will ship on time. And Microsoft.co.uk gets hit by a hacker by means of a SQL injection attack.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 29, 2007 10:42 AM