That nasty, nasty exploit that Charlie Miller pimped for all its worth demonstrated at this week’s Black Hat conference yesterday in, where else, Lost Wages (Las Vegas), Nevada, has been patched, and that’s pretty fast turnaround for Apple. Still, it’s well nigh impossible to see any of these players in a positive light.

Apple has reportedly finalized a deal with the Chinese government which will allow them to sell a slightly revised iPhone, specifically without Wi-Fi, in that country via China Unicom.

Here’s a blast from the past, a product from MetaCreations and its idiosyncratic founder Kai Krouse remade for the new century. Of course, Kai’s gone off to live the pastoral life and MetaCreations has been little more than a name for the last 10 years.

Apple has filed information with the U.S. Copyright Office which lays out grave consequences for the cell phone networks due to jailbroken and unlocked iPhones, including cell tower damage.

There is really no good way to spin this story, which is becoming a rallying point for critics of Apple’s often capricious approval app approval (and removal) process. Further, open platform and open network advocates have latched onto this case because of its obvious anti-competitive implications.

A security expert has claimed that some data on the iPhone is vulnerable to hackers, including deleted voice mail and email, using YouTube videos to spread the word on what he sees as security flaws.

This is probably going to be the lowest price available to the citizens of this fine country until Apple brings on one or more additional players sometime next year. Until then, this is probably as good as it’s gonna be.

Google has released its Latitude app, which lets users share their location with friends, for the iPhone, but Apple’s insistence upon not allowing third party background apps cripples its utility.

Although there may not be such a thing as bad publicity, the company’s users could quickly tire of the on again, off again nature of their devices’ iTunes connectivity. Also, whereas I always pull secretly for the little guy in these David versus Cupertino clashes, Apple has a long and strong record of prevailing against competitors both big and small.

What’s the difference between an orange? Before we can even talk about that, we first need to answer a few basic questions like budget and lifestyle, and there’s more overlap here than you might assume — come on inside.