Infopirate.org

Lots of hullabaloo on Friday about Google bringing voice search to the iPhone. Friday came and went, the blogs and media all jumped, and yet, no app appeared in the iPhone store. What’s up?

Tough to say. Speculation runs the gamut of Apple playing stupid games with Google, the way they have with some other developers, to the app not being ready at the last minute. It is interesting that Google released a flood of PR on the app on Friday, so I’d discount the later, and of course everything from Google is, say it with me now-Beta.

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2008/11/16/update-on-th... 

The layoffs at Spot Runner are a lot worse than we expected. Instead of 50 to 75 people, Spot Runner is cutting much deeper—eliminating 115 jobs. Co-founder and CEO Nick Grouf characterizes this as “under 30 percent” of the company’s total headcount (which he declines to specify, but must be at least 384 people). The majority of these cuts, he tells me, will come from the company’s local-search advertising business, which came out of the acquisition of Weblistic back in March.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/03/update-115-peop... 

One of my personal gripes with iTunes 7 and earlier versions was that the “retention” rules for podcasts were global. You could choose to keep all episodes, all unwatched episodes, the 5 most recent, etc. but that choice would be applied universally to all your different podcasts. Thankfully, the new iTunes update addresses that situation and provides you with the opportunity to customize the settings for each podcast individually.

http://theappleblog.com/2008/10/31/itunes-8-makes-po... 

Security fixes and minor changes ahoy
Google has released a beta update of its Chrome browser, as it looks to correct security flaws and usability issues.

Although it quickly picked up over one per cent of the browser market at release, Chrome has slipped back to a reported 0.7 per cent, still ahead of Opera but a long way behind market leader Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple Safari.

Chrome version 03.154.9 is a beta release to fix security bugs including the widely reported vulnerability that let sites potentially spoof addresses.

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/google-releas... 

WordPress has released a security update to their blogging software. A vulnerability was discovered in the Snoopy library. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Control Panel Dashboard.

http://www.johnchow.com/wordpress-263-available-for-... 

Apple recently started seeding to developers the second beta version of its 2.2 software update for the iPhone and iPod touch and it’s becoming more clear what will be included in the update. (The first beta included a slightly different version of the Safari web browser.) Right now, it looks like the key new features focus on the Maps application which is built for the iPhone by Google.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/25/whats-in-the-iphon... 

Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_3DOT1_Alpha_Pr...