geekosystem

We first heard about the uChek urine-testing iPhone app back in February. At the time the question was whether it would make it through Apple's rigorous and arbitrary app approval process, but it turns out nobody thought to ask the Food and Drug Administration to approve the app. The FDA sent the company behind uCheck a letter to say they feel left out.

Not more than a month after comiXology faced criticism for preemptively removing a installment of the critically acclaimed series Saga from their iOS app to comply with Apple App Store policies, they've now rejected 56 other titles, including a few that were revisited and approved last month. To put it lightly, this bums us out real bad.

The long-time excuse of husbands, boyfriends, and anyone else who subscribes to Playboy without wanting to admit they like looking at photos of naked women has been that they just read it for the articles. Well if that's the case, you're in luck, because Playboy's new iPhone app doesn't have any nudity at all.

Trademarks are important so that companies can keep people from stepping all over their brand, and few companies have their products as uniformly branded as Apple. They have the iPhone, iPad, iMac, iEtc. It made sense that they tried to get a trademark on the iPad mini, but they were denied one by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which said the addition of "mini" was merely descriptive."

Thorsten Heins, CEO of Blackberry, which was a popular business accessory back in the early 2000's, said in an interview he feels the Apple iPhone was outdated. This doesn't even count as a "pot calling the kettle black" situation. This is a whatever historically pre-dated the pot calling the kettle black, and it's awfully big talk coming from a company whose stock is trading at about three percent of Apple's.

The news out of SXSW is that Firefox for iOS is done, over, kaput. The app version of the popular browser was pulled from the App Store by Mozilla back in September over a dispute with some of Apple's restrictions on third-party browsers, and now Mozilla says it isn't coming back unless Apple changes their uptight ways. The more you tighten your grip, Apple, the more star systems apps will slip through your fingers.

Today would have been Steve Jobs' 58th birthday. There's no doubt that he had a huge impact on the geek world, and he's already missed. We can't help but wonder what else Jobs and Apple could have brought into the world if he hadn't lost his battle with cancer at a relatively young age. Jobs always managed to make Apple announcements exciting in a way they really haven't been since his death, and he managed to do it with just three simple words, "One more thing." Here's every "One more thing" moment from 1999 to 2011.

Between a still flagging economy, gun violence that seems more and more out of control, and hostile foreign powers edging closer to becoming nuclear threats, President Obama has a lot of ground to cover in his State of the Union address later this evening. But it's not like he's going to be the only important person on hand, and we're going to be on the lookout for a couple of celebrity guests in particular at tonight's State of the Union, including NASA's own Mohawk Guy.

Twitter's new Vine service lets people post six-second-long videos to the Internet, so people are obviously using it for porn. Apple goes out of its way to make it look like they keep porn off their devices, so they boot apps from the App Store pretty quickly if people start using them for porn. To avoid getting booted altogether, Vine has preemptively changed their rating to 17+, and made a few other adjustments in their new update.

Apple products like iPhones and iPads getting jailbroken is nothing new, but sometimes this freedom also leads to interesting discoveries within the digital bowels of these gadgets. Such is the case with a series of buttons within the iPad Music app found on jailbroken iOS 6.1 iPads by 9to5Mac. If these buttons are indicative of the future and not some leftover vestige of a former direction, it looks like some kind of radio functionality will be coming to the iPad.

I've used Macs for most of my adult computing life. They're normally very stable machines, but they're not perfect, and a new flaw proves it. It turns out if you type "File:///" (no quotes) into most programs on a system running Mac OS X, that program will crash. I tested this bug out in a number of programs, and almost all of them quit immediately. This reportedly only works in the current Mountain Lion version of OS X, so maybe it's a cool new feature? Will "File:///" replace Command-Q?

After being removed from the iOS App Store last week for problems with users submitting pornographic images, photo sharing app 500px has made some adjustments and is back in the game. The biggest change is that the app now features a way for users to report images that violate Apple's draconian terms. It's stupid for Apple to go to such great lengths to kill apps that people are using to share naked picture when Safari is still the best porn app for iOS.

This took... actually a little bit more time than we would have expected, but it looks like users have already started using Twitter's new Vine app to post sexually explicit material. Vine is a service that lets people post six-second videos to Twitter, and it seems that a lot of people have been using it to post six seconds of porn, once again proving that if you give people a new way to communicate, they will almost immediately use it to send each other pictures of their genitals.

The talk of the town this week has been the rumor that Apple would be manufacturing a cheaper iPhone in order to nail the low-end spectrum that the iPhone has traditionally eschewed. The idea would be to target the smartphone market in the same way that the iPad mini targets the tablet market. Unfortunately for anyone hoping this would actually pan out, Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing Paul Schiller told Chinese newspaper Shanghai Evening News that things like a cheaper iPhone will "never be the future of Apple products."

Whatever hangovers, hookups, or regrettable strikeouts your New Year's Eve may have had in store, we're prepared to say your evening was probably still better than that of Apple Store employees in Paris, who not only had to work the holiday, but spent it being held up by a team of armed robbers. Just one employee was slightly hurt, thankfully, but the robbers escaped in a van brimming over with Apple gadgets before police arrived on the scene. The company isn't sharing the particulars of just what goods were nicked in this Grand Theft Apple, but they have put the price tag for the whole theft at about 1 millions euros, or close to $1.6 million. What goods could a theft that big from an Apple store have potentially netted the thieves responsible? We do the math below.