Steven "Grinch" Jobs wants his share from starving children's meals

    In August, PayPal added a donation feature that allowed users to make charitable contributions from within the services's iPhone app. In late October, Apple made them pull the plug with no warning and little explanation.

    Anuj Nayar, on behalf of PayPal, would only say, "I can confirm that we added the donations feature to our iPhone app in version 2.5 in mid August. We removed the feature in version 3.0 of our PayPal Mobile iPhone app. This was done at Apple's request."

    A little background: to implement its donation feature, PayPal partnered with MissionFish, whose mandate is to help non-profits raise funds through online donations. In PayPal's case, users of the app would be given an option to donate to either a featured charity or one of nearly 18,000 organizations in the MissionFish database. Choose the non-profit, choose the amount, hit submit, and you were done. Because PayPal already has a payment method on file for the user, it was essentially a two-click operation. And in the few months that the feature was operational, it had raised more than $10,000 at an average donation amount of $12.

Steve Jobs: philantrope or hypocrite?

     It seems that the iPhone contractor, Foxconn cannot keep itself out of the news and for all of the wrong reasons. After several highly-publicized suicides by Foxconn workers, a new leaked report shows that not much has actually changed at Foxconn. The Beijing-based Global Times reported on a study conducted by 60 teachers and students from 20 Universities in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

     Fourteen investigators were able to enter the company and experience life inside Foxconn for themselves. According to the report, at least 16.4 percent of Foxconn employees have been subject to "some kind of corporal violence," like that seen in a recently released video of employees being assaulted by Foxconn security.

     More than 38 percent claimed that their privacy has been invaded and 54.6 percent felt indignant toward management. Foxconn had announced a 30 percent pay rise for its employees following a number of suicides, but the report states that raises only amounted to 9.1 percent and that workers were also deprived of, "many of their welfare terms like subsidies, bonuses and so on."

Apple vs. human rights - How unaware are you?

                                             
Eight suicide attempts seen at iPhone manufacturer in Q1 2010

 

     Already 8 new suicide attempts among the iPhone manufacturers at Foxconn in Cina in 2010. Six attempts have been successful. Its most publicized such death came in 2009 when a worker, Sun Danyong, 25, jumped off his dormitory roof after losing one device out of a set of iPhone prototypes

     Sure losing one iPhone prototype might not strike you as a big deal... well China is one big place where Apple goons can enforce company policy on  employees without being mediatized - or so they thought.

      According to the reports, Sun was given 16 prototypes by his superior. A few days later, Sun could account only 15 of them and reported about the missing iPhone to his higher-ups on July 13th. It is alleged that some Apple security employees searched Danyong’s apartment illegally, detained and even physically abused Sun.

     Going back on this old story(2009) makes no sense since a lot has been written about the first uncovered iPhone suicide and instead of repeating all this I’d rather like to refer you to Perspective on the iPhone Suicide, written by Jason Chen (the guy in who's house Apple just broke in to - great coincidence) on Gizmodo. 

      However if you live in the US, where the press has every company under a spyglass 24/7 and your work place does not resemble to a concentration camp, you can afford to play drama queen:  

Gray Powell's father: 'He was devastated'.

      So yes, it's ok to lose the million dollar prototype while you're getting drunk as long as you are a fat f*ck with an US citizenship. Take care Gary, people get run over by cars, mugged and shot in dark alleys for a fistful of bucks every day and get "devastated" for good; we wouldn't want for something bad to come to you, if you get our drift.

      But as Apple never forgets, and the same Jason Chen had "the luck" of recovering the lost iPhone for no less than 5000 US dollars, returning it was useless as Apple declared the prototype stolen. The San Mateo police reached the front door of Gizmodo's editor and blasted through it with an illegal search warrant, as part of the investigation, and took three MacBooks, one iPad, one iPhone, three external USB drives, Motorola A855, IBM ThinkPad, two Dell desktop PCs, HP MediaSmart server, two digital cameras, three USB sticks and more.

      According to Gawker Media the search warrant is invalid, because the Californian law protects the journalist's source. But we guess Apple probably used a tiny little trick called bribery to go above the law and find the guy who found the prototype and get even with Gizmodo since unlike Engadget.com and GSMArena(more like AppleArena), they are one of the few technology sites that wasn't "bought" by Apple... yet.

     But wait! This doesn't just end here!

How much of a hypocrite is Steve Jobs? [about Flash and censorship]

      Steve Jobs has posted a defence to his position on Flash and not surprisingly it’s full of errors and misrepresentations.

Let’s look at the points he makes:

First, there's open

      He asses that “Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc.”
      Sure, Adobe’s Flash products are only available from Adobe. That’s what makes them Adobe’s.
      But there are many open source IDE’s, compilers, RTMP servers and players available.

      Also he claims that “By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.”
      Flash is a complex system made up from many parts, but the most important part is the swf format. That is an open format, and you can write both a compiler and a player without needing a license.
So if the swf is open what is Jobs referring to when he says “100% proprietary”?
It cannot be the RTMP and AMF formats since they are open. And the whole SDK with compiler and Flex framework is open.

     The one thing that is not fully open is Adobes own implementation of a Flash Player. Since Apple is one of the licensors behind H.264 one would think that Jobs would be aware of why Adobe cannot release it publicly. It contains proprietary codecs and hence cannot be made open by Adobe.
But if Jobs is concerned with proprietary products, maybe he should work for making H.264 open to help Adobe open the Flash Player as well?

And let’s not forget that the canvas is Apple’s proprietary technology.