Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was considering buying out AdMob before Google swooped in and picked them up for $750 million in stock. Apple contacted AdMob several weeks before the Google acquisition according to Bloomberg.

AdMob is a major mobile advertising company that integrates advertisements into iPhone and Android applications. Generally applications that are free tend to have built in AdMob advertisements. After buying out AdMob, Google has become the largest mobile ad company.

Ashley Towns is the first person to have created an iPhone virus, or so he claims. He does not regret writing it and he made sure to remind people that Rick Astley is here to stay. The iPhone virus is called “ikee” and it changes the wallpaper of iPhones to a picture of 80’s pop singer Rick Astley. A message on top of the wallpaper states “ikee is never going to give you up,” a pun on Astley’s popular song “Never Going To Give You Up.”

Towns, 21, said he created the virus out of boredom and curiosity. “I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that,” stated Towns in an e-mail to ComputerWorld. “So I ran a scan on my [Optus] 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that’s vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn’t changed their passwords.”

Then he scanned the Optus 3G network and found 26 phones that were vulnerable. Of those 26 phones, 25 of them did not have changed passwords. Many jailbroken iPhones have a Unix utility running called SSH (Secure Shell). SSH runs using the iPhone default password, “alpine.”

Towns stands by his virus because it does not do anything malicious, even though it is a form of vandalism. He initially started by spreading the virus on the Optus network in Australia, but then he started targeting networks on Vodafone and Telstra. Towns even claimed he heard a report about his virus hitting a phone in China too.

Apple recently filed a patent for “Advertisement in Operating System.” The patent date was October 22 and the abstract of the patent is as follows:
“Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s). The advertisement can be visual or audible. The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.”

Apple has $34 billion in cash and the company has been doing very well financially. However their operating system market share is not very large when compared to Microsoft Windows. And Google is expected to launch an open source operating system in the near future. Apple is also competing with the Ubuntu operating system as it continues to spread on netbook devices. It may be in Apple’s interest to make their devices and operating systems more affordable given that the operating market is starting to get saturated and consumers are getting more options.

This patent indicates that Apple is interested in selling computers with a low cost operating system sometime in the future. The user may be forced to watch an advertisement before continuing an operation. Apple products have carried a premium price for a very long time. Perhaps it is time to for them to make more money from those who were not willing to buy Apple’s products based on today’s prices.

The inventors of the patent include CEO Steve Jobs, Freddy Anzures, Mike Matas, Gregory Christie, and Patrick Coffman.

Joe Hewitt was the main developer of the Facebook iPhone application, but he recently decided to give up on that project. A couple of days ago, he wrote “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project,” tweeted Hewitt. The main reason why he decided to give up on the App Store is because of Apple’s policies.

In an e-mail to TechCrunch, Hewitt said that he is philosophically opposed to the existence of the App Store review process and believes that they are setting a bad precedent for other software platforms. He said that he would rather be known for making the best platform available rather than being seen as a developer that has to go through a middleman in order to showcase software.

Joe Hewitt is best known for his contributions to the development of the Firefox web browser. In 2000-2003, Hewitt did a lot of the UI programming for the Netscape browser as well. Personally I applaud Hewitt’s contributions to the Facebook iPhone App and the Firefox browser. I hate to see him leaving the App Store developer community, but I’m not surprised he left because Apple’s review process has been highly criticized since the beginning.

Apple iTunes is one of the biggest source of music sales today. Accessing the content on Apple iTunes was officially exclusive to the software that is required for download. But now the walled garden company quietly rolled iTunes music, movies, music videos, and TV episode descriptions to the web in a new feature called iTunes Charts.

iTunes Charts is not exactly the same content that is showed on the desktop software but rankings are being shown for the various categories. On the web you can browse the top 100 in each category.

The problem with iTunes Charts on the web is that you cannot preview audio clips or buy the track on the spot. You still need the desktop software for that.

Gameloft is a gaming company that designed Earthworm Jim and Shrek Kart for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now their latest game has more of a political theme. The new game is called Bailout Wars and it allows players to kill bankers by throwing them into the air or shooting them. Another option is to shake them to the point that their clothes fall off.

There is a free and paid version of the game. The paid version sells for $0.99. “Take revenge on bankers in this fast-paced castle defense game. Defend the White House and save the US taxpayers’ money before it gets stolen! It’s time for you to give them what they deserve!” states the game description. Above is a video clip. What do you think about the game?

In the United States and several other countries, Apple has sold millions of iPhone devices. But in China there has not been a good number of sales whatsoever. China Unicom reportedly sold only about 5,000 iPhones in a week. Two of the biggest problems with selling the iPhone in China so far is that the price is too high and it does not come bundled with WiFi.

The iPhone costs $1,025 in China while it costs $299 in the United States with an AT&T contract. China Unicom is selling the iPhone for a price that is 26% higher than what it is selling for in Hong Kong.

“We believe that eventually China will emerge as a major market for iPhone sales, but it could take a year or two to gain meaningful unit traction as it did in the U.S.,” stated Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has officially announced today in a press release that the App Store on iTunes has surpassed 100,000 applications. These 100,000 applications have been downloaded well over two billion times. The applications are divided up into 20 different categories which includes travel, games, finance, and medical.

“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” stated Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketin Philip Schiller. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

Over the summer, the iPhone OS 3.0 was released and developers began to add push, in-app goods, MMS, copy and paste, and shake to shuffle features into their applications. Over 2 billion push notifications have already been delivered to iPhone customers.

The Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone is now available in China through the China Unicom telecommunications company. The problem with the iPhone in China is that there isn’t any built in WiFi. Apple did this in order to comply with a government regulation. In China the iPhone costs between 4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025).

Given the high price in China, it seems unlikely that the phone will be as big of a hit there as it was in America. That seems unfortunate considering that the iPhone is manufactured in Shenzhen. WiFi was banned by the Chinese government in order to replace it with WAPI technology. WAPI stands for WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure. WAPI was rejected by the ISO and was one of the reasons for a U.S. and China Trade dispute.

“We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year,” stated Unicom spokesman Yi Difei. Do you think that this will hinder people in China from buying the device?

John Carmack is the man behind Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He as the lead programmer behind the games and is the co-founder of id Software. Carmack has confirmed that Doom Classic has been submitted to Apple for approval in an interview with TouchArcade.

Doom Classic will be running on the OpenGL rendered graphics engine. The sound engine will have better quality and a crafted control system. It’d be cool if the modded versions of Wolfenstein 3D make it on the App Store too such as the Barney and Beavis/Butt-head version.

Great news for Canadian Apple fans. Bell Canada will soon start selling the iPhone 3G S. This 3G S announcement is coming fresh after the Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold announcement. So far the details have not been revealed about when it will be released on Bell Canada, but there is a details page where people can sign up for additional information.

Kris Rowley is the CISO of the state of Vermont. While she went hiking, a bear had approached her. Rowley backed away slowly, but the bear come coming closer. The only thing Rowley had to toss at the bear to distract it was her iPhone.

“In a semi-panic, I threw the phone at the bear,” stated Rowley in an interview with CIO.com. It turns out that there was an “app for that” bear. Because the phone distracted the bear while Rowley had a chance to escape. Later on Rowley wanted to get her phone back so she took a bat and went back to the scene. It turns out that the iPhone was not edible enough for the bear. The iPhone was laying in place where it was thrown with teeth and claw marks all over it.

Rowley took the iPhone to the Apple store to see if there’s anything they can do. But the Geniuses at the Apple retail store did not believe her story. “I had to buy a new phone or forfeit my contract if I canceled, so I purchased a new phone at full price,” added Rowley. “While saddened about my mangled iPhone, better the phone than me.”

Earlier this week, I wrote that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will be shipping iPhone 3G S devices that will be jailbreak-proof because it will be using a more secure bootrom. Whoa! That took less than a few days. The bootrom that Apple is placing on the iPhone 3G S devices does not prevent the 24kpwn exploit made by Dev Team hackers, it just interferes with it. But here’s the catch.

In order to boot up the jailbroken iPhone 3G S device, you will need to tether it using a computer in order to boot it up as of right now. The same thing happened with the iPod Touch 2G. Initially when the Dev Team created a jailbroken version of the iPod Touch 2G, it also needed to be tethered in order to boot but later on a more secure boot ROM was made.

Apple: 0, Dev Team: 1 (Points will be redistributed in follow-up posts about iPhone 3G S jailbreaking news)

There are rumors starting to surface that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is not messing around anymore when shipping iPhone 3G S mobile devices. The new 3G S devices will have a bootrom that resists the 24kpwn exploit that is used by the Dev-Team for jailbreaking iPhone devices. MuscleNerd, a member of the DevTeam said that the bootrom update which is known as iBoot-359.3.2 would make jailbreaking new iPhones “impossible” for now.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that Arthur Levinson is leaving their Board of Directors. Levinson is a Corporate Director at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and is a former Chairman and CEO of Genentech. I believe it is safe to say that Levinson’s departure has something to do with the FTC’s investigation of Google and Apple. Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple Board of Directors this past August.

Levinson’s departure from Google is effective immediately which ends his 5.5 year tenure on the Board. Levinson will continue to serve on the Apple Board of Directors where he has worked for the last 9 years.

The FTC said that they were prepared to sue Google and Apple if they did not take care of their potential conflicts of interest. “Google, Apple, and Mr. Levinson should be commended for recognizing that overlapping board members between competing companies raise serious antitrust issues and for their willingness to resolve our concerns without the need for litigation,” stated FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in an interview.