Apple Inc. co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, whose recovery from pancreatic cancer appeared less certain when he had to take medical leave in January, received a liver transplant two months ago but is recovering well, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The newspaper didn’t reveal a source for the report, which comes as Jobs, 54, is expected back in his day-to-day duties at the company shortly. CNBC said later that it had confirmed the Journal’s account, which said Jobs had the transplant performed in Tennessee.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told The Associated Press he had no comment. Dowling reiterated what has become Apple’s standard line about the CEO’s health, that “Steve continues to look forward to returning to Apple at the end of June and there is nothing further to say.”

The Journal reported that at least some Apple directors were aware of the surgery.

Apple Inc released 45 software patches on Wednesday to address rare security vulnerabilities in its popular iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices.

The company released them as part of its widely anticipated iPhone 3.0 operating system.

“This is a large cluster of patches for the iPhone,” said Dino Dai Zovi, a security expert who is writing a book on cracking the iPhone.

Apple has a stellar reputation when it comes to securing its devices. While it is unusual for the company to issue so many patches at once, analysts have yet to uncover any malicious software targeting the iPhone since Apple got into the mobile phone market two years ago.

Lots of big news from WWDC including updates to almost all of Apple’s laptops.

They added a 13-inch version to the MacBook Pro line, updated the MacBook Air, and added a few new ports to some of the machines including an SD slot and firewire 800 port. Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard.

The iPhone got quite a bit of love in 3.0, much of it just confirming older news. Cut, copy, and paste, shake to undo, developer APIs, Cocoa Touch support for text, landscape mode updates, spotlight, and MMS all made the bullet list. You will now also be able to rent and purchase movies directly from your iPhone. Other new features in 3.0 include the much debated tethering ability, allowing you to use your iPhone as a cellular modem (unfortunately there was no mention of AT&T actually supporting this feature, a wonder there wasn’t a riot), integrated TomTom GPS navigation, and game features galore.

New functionality also allows you to locate your iPhone via MobileMe, play a sound to help you locate it (regardless if it is set to silent), and even wipe your data remotely. The New iPhone hardware updates, “3GS”, adds a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, voice interfaces, twice the processing power, and hardware encryption. The 3GS comes in 16GB ($199) and 32GB ($299), pushing the 3G (which they are keeping on the market) to $99.

Palm Inc. said Thursday that its much-awaited new smart phone, the Pre, can connect to Apple’s iTunes software and download music and photos just as if it were an iPod or iPhone.

The feature might be unique for a device not made by Apple Inc., though third-party software is available that lets some digital music players masquerade as iPods in iTunes.

Palm Inc.’s new phone goes on sale June 6, with Sprint Nextel Corp. as the exclusive launch carrier. It will be $200 with a two-year contract and a rebate, competing with Apple’s iPhone in the market for high-end smart phones.

Apple is planning a major East Coast data center to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest as much as $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. The company is considering locations in North Carolina, where officials are rushing to pass enhanced tax breaks to woo Apple to their state rather than neighboring Virginia, which just passed its own incentives for data center projects.

The North Carolina House is expected to vote today on a package that would offer income tax breaks to companies that invest more than $1 billion over nine years in a rural area of the state and pay above-average salaries, according to local media.

The size of the project raises interesting questions about Apple’s ambitions for its online operations. The $1 billion price tag is nearly twice the $500 to $600 million that Microsoft and Google typically invest in the enormous data centers that power their cloud computing platforms.

Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that’s a privacy nightmare.

Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you’ve visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn’t know was kept about you.” Some of Safari’s bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.

Security researchers say that Mac OS X users are vulnerable to a critical, 6-month-old, remote vulnerability in Java, a component that is enabled by default in Web browsers on this platform.

Julien Tinnes notes that this vulnerability differs from typical Java security flaws in that it is ‘a pure Java vulnerability’ and doesn’t involve any native code. It affected not only Sun’s Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK, on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. ‘This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers,’ Julien wrote.

This bug was demonstrated during the Pwn2own security challenge this year at CanSecWest, but the details were not made public at that time. Tinnes recommends that Mac OS X users disable Java in their browsers until Apple releases a security update.

iPhone and iPod users may experience a “small and quick” shock via their earbuds due to a buildup of static electricity, Apple warned Monday.

People listening to one of the devices in extremely dry air are most at risk of receiving a static electricity shock through the ear buds, according to a warning posted on Apple’s Web site. The post likened the condition to the discharge that occurs when a person drags his or her feet across a carpet then gets a shock by touching a door knob.

However, Apple asserted that this condition did not necessarily indicate that Apple’s equipment was malfunctioning.

“This condition is not limited to Apple hardware and static can potentially build up on almost any hardware and could be discharged using any brand of earbuds,” Apple said.

Twitter! Whether you use it or not, or understand it or not, it’s the hottest thing in Silicon Valley right now. It’s brought up in every conversation. And no wonder - the service has exploded to somewhere north of 25 million users and has been growing by 40% a week since that Oprah appearance, says a source close to the company.

Google tried to buy it but was rebuffed by Twitter CEO Evan Williams, says a source with knowledge of the talks.

Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced via his Twitter account today, ‘Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content.

The objectionable content referenced is “The Downward Spiral.”‘ The initial NIN Access iPhone app garnered much fanfare (Wired article, Guardian article) and was approved by Apple. The update has been rejected due to an album reference. If Nine Inch Nails is having problems with censorship and approval what kind of problems are you having with the iPhone app approval process?

Apple Insider has unearthed proof that YouTube uploading will be built into the upcoming version of QuickTime that ships with OS X 10.6.

According to beta testers, several video-sharing options will be baked into the latest release of Apple’s QuickTime media playback and editing software, including the capability to directly upload to YouTube. With the new QuickTime, you will be able to convert and upload any supported video file type to the online video service and all you will need is to be a registered YouTube user. You also will be able to seamlessly upload supported video to the MobileMe Gallery.

Apple Inc. pulled a 99-cent iPhone game called “Baby Shaker” from its iTunes store Wednesday after its premise - quiet a crying baby with a vigorous shake - prompted outrage.

According to screen shots posted on several Web sites, “Baby Shaker” displayed black-and-white line drawings of a baby. The iTunes description included the line, “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” Once the iPhone owner finishes shaking the device, the on-screen baby is depicted with large red X’s over its eyes.

Public outcry ensued, with organizations including the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation condemning Apple for approving the game’s sale.

The application was designed by Sikalosoft, which also makes a 99-cent “Dice Mosaic” iPhone program that converts digital photos into black and white mosaics made from dice.