According to AppleInsider, Apple will finally be bringing a “full-on solution” to multi-tasking with iPhone OS 4.0 which is set to debut this summer. Presumably that means that third-party apps will finally be allowed to run in the background on the phone. The sources were scant on details about how it would remedy performance, battery life, and security issues, but they did say that the multi-tasking would use an interface similar to that in the Mac versions of OS X.

At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.

The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China.

Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States.

Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. “In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment,” Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

When Jason Kincaid tried out the iPhone app online music streaming startup Grooveshark built and showed off in July 2009, he wrote that it was great but that he “wouldn’t expect this to pop up in the App Store any time soon”. He was right on both counts.

Grooveshark now says it has given up on its ambitions to get approved for the official App Store, claiming that Apple has been “ritually rejecting” the app for “primary selfish reasons”. We’ve heard that song before.

The startup says it spent many months developing the iPhone application, and on occasion went months without a hearing a peep out of Cupertino.

Denied access to the App Store, Grooveshark decided to head underground and is today releasing the app on Cydia, enabling people who have jailbroken their iPhone and iPod touch devices to enjoy it – and it is actually pretty cool.

Owners of unlocked iPhones who want to upgrade to the recently released OS 3.1.3 and want to retain the ability to use whatever Sim meets their needs can now do so. The iPhone Dev Team have released a suitable version of its PwnageTool utility.

The Team cautioned against updating. The iPhone OS update is claimed to improve the accuracy of the iPhone 3GS’ battery level readout, and if you’ve not noticed any untoward readings, the Team say, “there’s no reason to update to 3.1.3″.

If you must, PwnageTool 3.1.5 is what you need.

Apple’s iPhone is vulnerable to exploits that allow an attacker to spoof web pages even when they’re protected by the SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol, a security researcher said.

The fault lies in a feature that makes it easy to configure large numbers of iPhones so they meet an organization’s IT policies, said Charlie Miller, a researcher at Independent Security Evaluators. Not only does the provisioning feature work over the internet, it can be tricked into accepting malicious configuration files.

Steve Jobs has dubbed Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra “bullshit.” Or at least “a load of crap.”

According to multiple reports, Jobs unloaded on Google last week during an Apple “town hall” meeting at the company’s One Infinite Loop headquarters. As originally reported by Wired, the Apple cult leader attacked his former Mountain View ally for its recent entry into the phone-selling business, before landing an unprompted blow on Google’s much-discussed “don’t be evil” corporate motto.

“We did not enter the search business,” Jobs said in reference to Google. “They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

According to Wired, an Apple employee then popped up with a completely unrelated question, but Jobs wasn’t done with Google. “I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing,” he said. “This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra: It’s bullshit.”

But other reports insist Jobs didn’t actually say “It’s bullshit.” According to the Apple-obsessed Daring Fireball blog, he said: “‘Don’t be evil’ is a load of crap.”

Apple Inc is talking with Microsoft Corp about making it the default search engine provider for the iPhone, replacing Google Inc.

If Apple displaces Google from its preferred status on the smartphone, it would be perhaps the clearest sign of the growing tension between two Silicon Valley icons, which were considered allies in a common cause against Microsoft.

Talks between Microsoft and Apple have been going on for weeks, the article said, citing two people familiar with the matter. Negotiations might not conclude quickly and might still fall apart, the article said.

Two titans of the tech world, Google and Apple, may soon be engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Or, more precisely, handset-to-handset combat.

Google plans to begin selling its own smartphone early next year, company employees say, a move that could challenge Apple’s leadership in one of the fastest-growing and most important technologies in decades.

Google’s new touch-screen Android phone, which it began giving to many employees to test last week, could also shake up the fundamentals of the cellphone market in the United States, where most phones work only on the networks of the wireless carriers that sold them.

The company, using the power of its brand, plans to market and sell the new phone directly to consumers over the Internet, and buyers would be able to sign up for service from any compatible provider, the employees say.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed by Apple, which confirmed the purchase on Friday.

ITunes is the leading music service in the United States with more than 70 percent of all digital music sales and it is the leading music retailer overall.

But newer music streaming services from the likes of News Corp’s MySpace Music and Spotify have begun to win over music fans in the last year.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

A source familiar with the matter said the iPod, iPhone and Mac maker is seeking new ways to expand iTunes to move it beyond being a predominantly download service for songs. The source asked not to be named.

“Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level,” said the person.

The iTunes store offers more than 11 million songs. Apple has sold billions of tracks through iTunes since its launch in 2003.

The Lala service allows users to stream from the Internet any tune in its catalog of more than 8 million songs once for free, and then sells unlimited streams for 10 cents per track and MP3 downloads starting at 79 cents.

Apple has agreed to alter its terms and conditions at the behest of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

The company has redrafted its Ts & Cs so that it now accepts liability for faulty or misdescribed goods sold from its website or the iTunes store.

The company has also agreed to make its terms consistent with the Distance Selling Regulations which, among other things, give consumers a seven-day “cooling-off” period in which to return any purchases for a full refund.

Apple must also ensure that its conditions are “drafted in plain or intelligible language” and that they “do not potentially allow changes to be made to products and prices after an agreement is made”.

After the ikee worm that displayed a picture of Rick Astley on jailbroken iPhones, the first malicious iPhone worm has now been discovered in the wild.

Internet provider XS4ALL in the Netherlands encountered several of such devices on the wireless networks of their customers and put out a warning. After obtaining a copy of the malware it was discovered that the jailbroken phones, which are exploited through openSSH with a default password, scan IP ranges of mobile internet providers for other vulnerable iPhones, phone home to a C&C botnet server, are able to update themselves with additional malware and have the ability to dump the SMS database as well.

Owners of a jailbroken iPhone with a default root password are advised to flash to the latest Apple firmware in order to ensure no malware is present.”

The new Verizon Droid, like many a high-profile smartphone just coming onto the market, has been hailed by some as a potential–you know what’s coming–iPhone killer.

But does Verizon Wireless want to deliver a knockout to the iPhone? There’s long been speculation that the carrier would sooner or later be offering the Apple smartphone, which since its launch has been solely in the hands of AT&T in the United States. (In some other countries, Apple has deals with multiple carriers.)

The latest posting to suggest an imminent rapprochement between Verizon and the iPhone comes from the AppleInsider blog, which on Friday said that it’s gotten wind of Apple having contracted to build a Verizon iPhone that would debut in the third quarter of 2010.

More broadly, according to AppleInsider, the new “hybrid iPhone” will work on both the GSM/UMTS and the CDMA systems, meaning that Apple will be able “to sell a single global handset to all carriers, and specifically to Verizon Wireless in the US.” In the U.S., carriers AT&T and T-Mobile are in the GSM/UMTS camp, while Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel are in the CDMA camp.