Macworld Pundit Showdown VI

It's been far too long since we took off the gloves, threw out the rule book, and indulged in a little no-holds barred punditry. With iPads, iPhone SDKs, and misplaced iPhone prototypes in the news, what better time to turn our podcast over to another Macworld Pundit Showdown?

We've got a stellar panel of Mac industry heavyweights slugging it out for your amusement. Champion of champions Jason Snell puts his unbeaten record on the line against senior editor Christopher Breen, Macworld Lab director James Galbraith, and PCWorld reviews editor Tim Moynihan in a contest that awards points for bold opinions and punishes reticence.

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iPhone Worm is Rick Astley's Face

Rick Astley used to be a big star in the 80's but now, thanks to some people in YouTube, have become some sort of a joke because of the Rick Roll'd phenomenon. It seems to have died a natural death around late 2008, but it seems to have made a comeback, in a somewhat sinister way: he's become a worm for jailbroken iPhones.

"Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again."

What a way to have the iPod Touch/iPhone's first worm: an image of an 80's star.

If your iPod Touch/iPhone has it, fret not as all it does is install Astley's wallpaper. To remove it, you need to change your root user password and delete "LOCKBACKGROUND.JPG" from (VAR/MOBILE/LIBRARY).

What's interesting here is that the creator has a message for those who got the worm.

Is this for the users who have brazenly jailbroken their iPod Touch/iPhones or for Apple? Nevertheless, this is proof that the iPhone 3G's security is really bad.

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Palm's Lack of Good Games is Showing

Image by PatrickMoorhead via Flickr

Despite some security issues, the Palm Pre is a magnificent mobile phone. It's almost gone toe to toe with its main rival, Apple's iPhone 3GS. However, it does lack one feature that their rivals have: good games.

Should they be bothered with the lack of games in their phone? Both phones may not have been originally marketed for gamers, but let's admit it: a lot of gadget lovers are gamers as well! It may not beat the Nintendo DS nor the PSP, but if people get stuck in traffic or in a commuter train, some would wish for a game to whittle away their time rather than listen to some mp3s.

We're familiar with a lot of games for the iPhone 3GS, but none yet coming from Palm Pre. As far as we know only emulator hackers and homebrew heroes have tried using the Pre, but none yet coming from big time gaming companies or even from Palm itself.

It's nice to know that Palm Pre's really serious about putting games into their phones by posting a "webOS™ and Game Development" article on their site. However with the phone's WebOS, 3D games will surely be out of the picture. Instead, they are promoting "puzzles, word games, card and board games, innovative social games, and the list goes on – even simple arcade games." The question here, is how can they beat the iPhone's games with such?

Hopefully with Palm Central's list of Homebrew games for the Pre, it should urge the company and some developers out there to try using Palm's newest baby as a "somewhat" platform for gaming.

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