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Apple Inc. filed a federal challenge to New York's trademark application for a new "Big Apple" logo, saying it's too similar to the stylized emblem found on iPhones, iPods and iMac computers. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., says the symbol for New York's "GreeNYC" initiative promoting energy efficiency and recycling is confusingly similar to the logo used by the electronics maker since 1977.

NYC & Company Inc., the city's nonprofit tourism and marketing office, filed the trademark application in May, seeking to play off of New York's "Big Apple" nickname. New York already has begun using the logo, which morphs the symbol for infinity (similar to a figure 8 on its side) with the outline of an apple, a stem and a single leaf. The New York logo will cause "consumer confusion resulting in damage and injury" to Apple, and would "cause dilution of the distinctiveness" of Apple's trademark, the company said in a challenge filed Jan. 16 in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as previously reported by Wired.com.

New York responded on Feb. 26, asking the Trademark Office's appeals board to reject Apple's challenge and cancel one of Apple's 22-year-old logos, saying it was acquired through fraud, and isn't being used for its intended purposes. Read more »

On Wednesday the Mozilla Foundation announced that the fifth beta of its upcoming Firefox 3 browser is now available for download. Remarkably, the new release includes more than 750 changes from the previous release, though beta 4 was widely praised for its improved speed and stability. The beta is thought to be the last before final GA release. Though the media has reported that Firefox 3 beta 4 was ready for general use, it seems that with beta 5 it's still only suitable for developers and testers, and that further enhancements will appear in the final release.

New features in beta 5 include native Windows icons and interface widgets, and on the Macintosh a more native OS X look. In addition, Mozilla is offering Firefox 3 in 45 languages, up from 40. Firefox 3's "Places" feature has once again been updated. This window for organizing your bookmarks, history, and searches has been augmented with full backup capability. Mozilla says performance of the browser's JavaScript engine now makes browsing twice as fast as Firefox 2 for some highly interactive Web applications. For more details, release notes, and the list of known issues, head to the Mozilla Developer Center.

Source: PC Magazine

If there's one thing Apple users love to taunt Windows users about, it's security. Mac owners giddily flaunt their lack of virus scanners and lack of worries in front of their PC comrades, whose machines look comparatively bloated with virus scanners, firewalls, and daily patch updates to fix the exploit du jour. Bad news for those Mac users, then, as a recent hacking competition showed that the new MacBook Air is able to be completely compromised in under two minutes.

The hacker in question, Charlie Miller, achieved this feat as part of a hacking competition called PWN 2 OWN. Miller hosted a malicious Web page privately, accessed it from the MacBook Air, and then, within two minutes, was able to take full control of the machine remotely and make it do his bidding.The culprit here is apparently an undiscovered flaw in the Mac Web browser Safari, which has shown to be somewhat lacking in the security department on both the iPhone and on Windows.

Charlie won $10,000 for his troubles, and he got to keep the laptop, but as part of the deal, he was also required to keep secret about the details of exploit, so hopefully there's little chance of it getting into the wild and taking over Macs around the world.

Source: Switched

The heated debate over whether Apple is tricking you into believing you can see millions of colors on your Mac has come to a quiet conclusion. The Chicago Tribune noted last week (spotted by AppleInsider) that Apple has settled a lawsuit brought by two professional photographers claiming that the company falsely advertised the capabilities of their MacBook Pros as being able to display "millions of colors." The plaintiffs claimed that Apple could achieve those heights only through "dithering."

How many colors can you see? Thousands? Millions? There's an option in the Displays screen, under System Preferences in Mac OS X, in which you can set the Colors option to "millions." The thing is, the MacBook Pro uses a 6-bit display, and Apple can get to that "millions" number only by using a technique called dithering, which basically blends pixels together to create a shading effect. Read more »

Ever since the release of the iPhone developer kit, software companies everywhere have been trying to figure out just what they might be able to bring to the device. The list of interested parties includes Microsoft.

"It's really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone," Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Specialized Devices and Applications Group, said in an interview with Fortune. "To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we're actually in the process of trying to understand that now." Asked for further comment, a representative for Microsoft's Mac business unit told News.com the company is "excited to see improved and updated products and services for its customers" but had nothing to announce as far as its roadmap. Read more »