Laser iPhones shrink your brains

But overpriced booze doesn't - honest

Comments It's been a fairly average week, with the normal crop of lasers, abnormal cranial conditions and massively overpriced drinks. We'll start with an iPhone article. Don't worry, it's the only one. A vulnerability has been discovered in the iPhone, and an exploit devised. There's been less of a row than usual, but it's still there:

And where have all of these exploits come from? All the attention that Apple has been hyping for it's new phone. Can you hear all the security pros and novices out there, Steve Jobs? The reason Windows gets so much flak is because of the so many people trying to break it. And the reason so many people are trying to break it is because it's the most widely used operating system. Since the iPhone is so pushed and hyped, everyone's (term used figuratively) going to have one. And that's going to mean a lot of targets, especially if it can be used in a manner to record things!

David Eddleman

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Apple are probably happy as pigs in muck to have any kind of article written about the iPodophone. Choosing the web browser as the software platform for the device was a bad decision both from performance and securtiy perspectives. If apps all run at a privileged level then that is plain stupid.

They have the mach kernel, an extremely good API with Openstep and with Objective C a highy productive language for developers so they could make the thing secure, fast and open for developers, although they might have as much fun integrating a real time signalling environment with the toys as everyone else has had. But I suspect they just want to shift as many of the things as possible and they're probably enough fanatical customers out there who will just upgrade to the next one which will be "even cooler".

Charlie Clark

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What the article doesnt tell you is just some of the security measures introduced by jobs and co. Theres no 3G on the iPhone. The GPRS is so slow and the wifi so buggy that hackers are bound to just get bored and go play with something else. I mean if they want your bank details it's gonna take them about half an hour to get the phone to dial up!

Nice move Mr Jobs, now I see your thinking in releasing a phone with last generation networking.

Chris Morrison

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We're getting all hot and bothered over this??

Christ.....how many security flaws do they find in Windows each month, and we're getting our knickers in a twist over a single one in the iPhone. Has our sense of perspective gone on holiday? It's a computer. It's gonna have security flaws.

Electro Boy

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A French civil servant was discovered to have only a thin sheet of brain tissue lining his skull - the rest of the space occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. Jokes about the intelligence of Frenchmen and bureaucrats aside, several of you wrote of prior examples of this sort of thing:

A woman in the UK was reported years ago as The woman with no brain. Years later when MRI resolution improved they discovered she too had a thin layer of brain on the inside of her scull. Like the guy in this report she had had a shunt installed when she was young.

She too was married with children and ran the household accounts as her husband wasn't too good with computers.

John Warlow

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Once upon a time, some french chap went to the Gendarmerie, since he needed to change his start train station, to go to military conscription (was mandatory at that time). The train ticket being paid by the public authority, it was based on home location, and the chap wanted to departure from his studying location. And the only military authority was Gendarmerie.

After explaining the problem, the gendarme went on to type on a very old Tryumph typing machine, the new departure place of the said chap, onto the train ticket. That was some 25 letters + signature.

No kidding, it took him 4 attempts to slide the sheet of paper in the typing machine, before having it correct:

- 1st attempt: typed in the name of the chap. Was baffled the machine typed on the verso of the inserted sheet

- 2nd attempt: same thing (yeah, it got inserted the same way ;-)

- 3rd attempt: the guy got creative, here, reversed the sheet sense, but same side, not good either

- 4th attempt: after what all witnesses thought would blow his brain up, he managed (took 30 s. of INTENSE thoughts) to insert the sheet the right way, and had the enthusiast look of someone that just discovered the secret of turning lead into gold, on his face.

The chap went outside, happy he finally did it.

regadpellagru

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Surely the first recorded example of Homer Simpson Syndrome?

Robert Grant

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Oh great, now the PC brigade will be telling us we can't say "no brainer" anymore, in case we hurt the guy's feelings...

Colin Sharples

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There was a bloke in New York who died at 35, worked for the local council and in the autopsy found the skull cavity completely full of spinal fluid, he also had a thin membrain of brain tissue on the top of the the base bone where the head joins to the neck.

He also had an IQ of 75 and was described as slightly slow but easy to get along with.

John Kirkham