The Depot of Talk

One of Foxconn’s servers was reportedly hacked, exposing usernames and passwords for clients and employees. The group that took credit for the hack is called SwaggSec who claims they weren’t doing it in response to working conditions or even for information on the iPhone 5, but simply for the enjoyment of it.

We encourage media, security experts, and other interested individuals to explore our leaks. Foxconn did have an appropriate firewall, but fortunately to our intent, we were able to bypass it almost flawlessly. Of course with funding ourselves we did have our limitations. But with several hacking techniques employed, and a couple of days in time, we were able to dump most of everything of significance.

9to5Mac was able to “verify these logins worked”, though the servers have now been disabled by Foxconn and logins no longer valid. The original exploit was reportedly through an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability from a worker inside Foxconn.

According to the original posting the logins and passwords could allow individuals to make orders under company accounts such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Intel.

Foxconn is the manufacturing partner for Apple and dozens of other major U.S. companies. Apple’s relationship with Foxconn has been under fire recently for the working conditions in their factories.

TuneCore president Jeff Price today wrote a blog post praising Apple’s iTunes Match service for creating money “out of thin air” for copyright holders. iTunes Match launched with all the major record labels on board, but some small labels refused to participate over concerns the service was legitimizing music pirates.

Price disagrees:

A person has a song on her computer hard drive. She clicks on the song and plays it. No one is getting paid. The same person pays iTunes $25 for iMatch. She now clicks on the same song and plays it through her iMatch service. Copyright holders get paid.

Price tells MacRumors that Apple keeps 30% of iTunes Match revenues for itself — the same percentage the company keeps from the iTunes and App Stores. The remaining 70% is divided, with 88% going to record labels and 12% going to songwriters. The royalties are split amongst artists based on “how many times someone accesses your song” via iTunes Match and it doesn’t matter if a song is matched or uploaded — the royalty is paid either way.

Price and other record industry execs are thrilled with the iTunes Match service, and by extension, Apple. Not only are artists finally getting paid something for pirated music, but for legitimate song purchases they are getting paid twice. If a listener purchases a CD, rips it to their computer, and then uploads it to iTunes Match, the record company books revenue for both the purchase and the small cut they receive from iTunes Match.

Regarding other music services, Price says, Pandora or Spotify customers are “paying a fee to listen to Spotify’s music collection.” iTunes Match customers are “paying a fee to have access to [their] own music collection.”

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RepairLabs reports that it has received a photo of what is claimed to the inside of the rear shell of the iPad 3, comparing the part to the corresponding version found on the iPad 2. The iPad 3 version demonstrates a few minor changes compared to the iPad 2, with one of the most notable being an apparently narrower logic board that could make room for an expanded battery.

A. You can see here that the mounts for the logic board are very different, which means the logic board shape will be different allowing for . . . .

B. More battery. The width of where the logic board sits on the iPad 2 appears much larger than that of the iPad 3. We have long heard that the iPad 3 was going to provide longer battery life, and this back housing seems to support that.

The report also points out slight differences to the locations where the iPad’s rear camera and LCD display mount to the rear casing. While those changes obviously do not offer any evidence of enhancements for the components themselves, they do suggest that Apple has at least tweaked their designs from the current iPad.

The photo does not show the backside of the rear shell that would be visible on the assembled device, nor does it show an edge view that would allow for a thickness comparison to the iPad 2. The photo’s source does claim, however, that there is no apparent difference in thickness between the two rear shells.

Rumors have disagreed on whether the iPad 3 will thicker, thinner, or the same thickness as the iPad 2, with some suggesting that the final result depends on what type of display technology and backlight system Apple has settled on for the device. The iPad 3 is said to be gaining a high-resolution “Retina” display that could require new solutions for powering and lighting the the screen.

Other rumors have claimed that the device will run utilize a quad-core processor on Apple’s next-generation “A6″ system-on-a-chip and that support for LTE cellular connectivity will be included on some models.

Apple sold 267,000 Macs in the UK in the final quarter of 2011, increasing its share of the PC market in this country to 9.1 percent.

Due to a reporting error, the story, “Maingear’s six-core laptop has 1.8TB of SSD storage,” posted to the wire on Tuesday, incorrectly reported the total hard-drive storage available on Maingear’s Titan 17 laptop. The laptop can be configured to include 2.25TB of storage through three 750GB hard drives.