Security researcher Aviv Raff says Google's new browser Chrome exposes users "malicious hacker attacks," because it allows users to launch executable files directly from the browser and without warning. Raff created a harmless demonstration to show how with successful bait, Google Chrome users could accidentally download and launch a Java archive file that goes on to execute without warning. Security experts call this trick "carpet-bombing." ZDNet's Ryan Narraine says the flaw exists because Google Chrome is actually built from the same software as Apple's Safari 3.1, which had the same vulnerability until Apple issued Safari version 3.1.2.

A group of Apple watchers have been compiling a spreadsheet listing product numbers of iPhones submitted by recent buyers. Presuming them to be sequential, they've come up with an estimate of at least 4,539,700 iPhone 3G handsets purchased. With 2.4 million suckers having shelled out as much as $599 for the firstgeneration model, and factories in China churning out over 800,000 units a week, his hot-tempered holiness Steve Jobs's prediction of 10 million units sold in 2008 could come true well before Thanksgiving. (Photo by George Panos) [Apple 2.0]

At a press conference scheduled for September 9, Apple will unveil "unspecified new products," reports Reuters. Thanks, Reuters guys — that really helps! The event's theme is "let's rock." In August, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose predicted Apple would announce a new iPod Nano, minor changes to its iPod Touch, price cuts to older iPod models and version 8.0 of iTunes — in other words, the same kind of update to its iPod product line Apple makes every fall. Our eternal gratitude, Captain Obvious!

"I’m starting at Newsweek tomorrow and Fake Steve was supposed to be part of my job. So we’re going to discuss whether to revive the blog." — Excerpt from an email message from semi-retired Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons to Mac Soda blogger mykbibby. Contrary to speculation by certain people we could name but won't, Lyons didn't kill the blog to curry favor with Apple for Newsweek. It was more personal.Dan saw His Steveness in person at Apple's developer conference in June and had a sincere personal crisis over Jobs's obvious illness. He felt wrong mocking a guy who might not be alive the next morning. Because in case you can't tell, Dan Lyons is one of Jobs's biggest fanboys. Huge. (In photo: Dan getting his own fanboy love at Macworld Expo 2008 from stock analyst Charlie Wolf.)

Infurious Comics created an iPhone app called Comic Reader, which does just what it sounds like it does, and featured a book called Murderdrome as the app's first title. Murderdrome is a story about a "game where the only way to score a goal," one character explains as he cuts into another's skull, "is with the severed head of an opposing player." Because Apple prohibits "any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content" in iPhone apps, Apple quickly booted Comic Reader and Murderdrome from its iTunes App Store.Naturally, this upset Murderdrome's creator Paul Jason Holden, who called — "infuriously," we suppose — for action on his blog: "PLEASE leave a comment. We’ll forward ALL of these to Apple, so that we can ensure that not only Murderdrome, but that ANY comic submitted to Apple doesn’t fall foul of the same censorship." (Do hyperviolent comic book authors also always go by three names?) By this morning, tech-news aggregator Techmeme was dutifully full of sympathetic retellings of Infurious's plight. Not here though. We'll only make the obvious point that we'd never heard of the Comic Reader app, Infurious Comics or its just-plain-gross comic Murderdrome until now. Publicity for being banned worked commercial wonders for even James Joyce's unreadable Ulysses, so we bet it helps Mr. Holden's gore-porn sales just plenty.

To hear iPhone-app developers tell it, VCs are circling and the end of days is nigh. Some developers can push out at an app in four months for less than $5,000, so why play with other people's money at all? "Fuck the VCs" says indie developer John Casasanta, of Tap Tap Tap. "What we’re about to experience in the iPhone world is going to be a bubble along the lines of the one in the late '90s/early 2000s." Echoing that is Mike Lee, cofounder of iPhone app development team Tapulous, who raised $1.8M in angel funding this summer. This week, Lee, one of Tapulous's nine employees, was told to exit his own company. Lee left a depressingly cocky send-off to his team in his wake. It's hardly the rallying cry to go it alone that he meant it to be.

"All Summer Long" is one catchy tune. Built on the groove of the late Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," spiced up with Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," the song nonetheless soars on Robert James Ritchie's down-homey delivery of one of the best ballads to hit the airwaves in years. I've heard it on Top 40, country and classic rock stations in the past week. Kid Rock's album, Rock 'n Roll Jesus, is now at #2 on Billboard's chart. All this without iTunes. Why on earth would record labels withhold an album from America's largest music retailer?There's no one big reason. This WSJ report lists several:

The Bloomberg financial newswire decided to update its 17-page Steve Jobs obituary today — and inadvertently published it in the process. Some investors were undoubtedly rattled to see, as our tipster did late this afternoon, the Apple CEO's obit cross the wire and then suddenly disappear. Jobs's battle with pancreatic cancer, and speculation over his health, jarred Wall Street earlier this year and continues to be the subject of speculation. The Times weighed in on the matter as recently as last month, when columnist Joe Nocera spoke with the secretive tech executive. But news organizations routinely prepare obituaries in advance, even for the healthy. And if Bloomberg readers had seen the internal story slug, "testjobs," their jitters might have abated. The obit, which we've obtained and reprinted after the jump, is a bit macabre to read but should not scare you out of your Apple shares. (UPDATE: Bloomberg has "retracted" its obituary, and the retraction is also after the jump.) More interesting are the accompanying notes for Bloomberg reporters!

The brouhaha over Google's once-legendary, now troubled free-meals perk has bubbled up more charges of wrongdoing in the search engine's kitchens. An anonymous poster has taken to Craigslist to air charges against Google's former global food manager, John Dickman. (The post refers to him as "Dick," but it's obviously Dickman being discussed.) The Craigslist poster claims Dickman, left, who is married to Lisa McEuen, right, an executive at the parent company of food-service operator Bon Appétit, with leaking inside information which helped Bon Appétit win a contract to run Google's in-house meal service.The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale. Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters. Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

A forum post on MacRumors explains how to end-run the password on a locked iPhone. It's so easy it hurts:

A Chinese worker at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China is "definitely not fired," a factory spokesperson told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao. The smiling young lady's photos were found on a newly unboxed iPhone by a British buyer who posted them to MacRumors.

The New York Times pored over the details of AT&T's new overseas data plans for the iPhone. Not only is it pricey, but absent-minded travelers (that's "I believe I'm slightly autistic" in the Valley, or in New York, "Anyone seen my Adderall?") will find themselves paying a lot more than they planned:

The iPhone 3G hasalready outsold the original iPhone. One reason for all the success? False advertising, says the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA has told Apple it can no longer air an ad claiming the iPhone accesses "all parts of the Internet," since the iPhone's Safari browser can't access Web sites that use Java or Flash. "Because the ad had not explained the limitations," reads the ruling, "viewers were likely to expect to be able to see all the content on a website normally accessible through a PC rather than just having the ability to reach the website." The naughty ad, below:

A gallery in Hamburg, Germany is set to display and sell framed prints of the red jewel artwork that once graced Armin Heinrich's do-nothing "I Am Rich" iPhone application, priced at €1,000. Sounds like a hoax, but then so did the original application. Apparently the port city is home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in Germany, and at least one of the people stupid enough to buy and download the application from iTunes was a Hamburger. [iPhone Savior]

Live by the fork, die by the fork. Now that Google is cutting back on its free food, where will its flacks woo journalists? Morale in Google's kitchens is rock-bottom, as leaderless workers try to keep understaffed cafes running, even as Google management insists they open new eateries. The last place Google's PR staff should want to entertain a reporter is in their cafes. The tragedy of it all: As we learn more about how the Googleplex's food operations fell apart, it sounds like Google executives' ego got in the way of thinking about the needs of employees — or the workers who keep them fed.The trouble started when Google hired John Dickman as its director of food operations. Dickman is married to Lisa McEuen, an executive at Bon Appétit. At the time, Bon Appétit and Google were two of the largest buyers of organic and sustainable food in the region; by picking up Google as a client, Bon Appétit gained considerable purchasing power. A source in Google's kitchens says that Dickman was "the reason Bon Appétit got the Google contract." But in exchange, Bon Appétit, a division of Compass Group, got a very testy client. A former Google chef who had his own ideas about how to run the cafes profitably said he tried to get founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt interested, but they didn't listen "because I didn't have a Stanford degree." Google's ethics cops have never looked askance at, say, Schmidt hiring his girlfriend for a high-profile PR gig, or Brin getting Google to invest in his wife's startup. But Dickman's marriage to a Bon Appétit executive raised eyebrows, and he left the company in January. Two top chefs followed him out the door. Josef Desimone went to Facebook, in March. Dickman himself went to Apple, and Nate Keller, a protégé of Google's first chef, Charlie Ayers, followed him there. Both Desimone and Keller took several members of the kitchen staff with them. "All management staff has quit within the last three months," says a source at Google. That may be an exaggeration, but if so, not by much. One issue that's been underplayed: The behavior of rank-and-file Googlers. "Pride is all cooks and dishwashers have," says a former Google chef. But Googlers, whose sense of self-aggrandized entitlement is already legendary in the Valley, have been taking out their frustrations on the people who dish out their food. Kitchen staffers are "invisible" to them, says a Google food worker — except when they somehow displease Googlers who expect free meals and servile deference, too. Google's cafes have always been at the heart of its PR strategy, helping to portray the company as generous to employees, dedicated to doing things differently, and caring about Mother Earth. Google PR director David Krane took on the replacement of original chef Charlie Ayers as the task he worked on in the 20-percent time Google gives employees to work on side projects. I can't remember the number of times Krane cajoled me to enjoy a free meal, courtesy of Google. He wouldn't want me there now. A Bon Appétit executive said in May that the company was planning to drop Google as a client. Arrogant, tightfisted, and argumentative, the Googlers were more trouble than the food-service contract was worth. Even so, Bon Appétit has been scrambling to patch things up. "The two founders of Bon Appétit come on site at least once a week," says a Googler. "Other representatives from Bon Appétit headquarters are on site every day — as visitors. It's a very sticky situation. The kitchen staff isn't being told anything. When dinner is cut how many jobs will be cut, too? The thing that really gets me is that the Googlers have no clue and will be asking us questions when dinner and other programs stop. They won't know the truth either." The company seems uninterested in letting Googlers know the truth. It's telling that Google PR won't go on the record to deny the cuts, though they're happy to persuade reporters on background that the cuts are limited. A spokeswoman, conveniently unnamed, told CNBC's Jim Goldman that the company had no idea where the rumor came from. Here's an idea for Google PR: Go down to a kitchen, and talk to the people who actually make the food you love to eat while chatting up reporters. They seem to be better informed than you are. (Photo by Jeromy Henry/Fortune)

Apple's iPhone has some 2,000 apps available for download. Of those, 65 have some arguable business application, Ben Worthen notes in a Wall Street Journal blog. Only 3 out of the top 100 most downloaded applications are business-related. The most plausible interpretation of those numbers: iPhone buyers and developers are, 97 times out of 100, uninterested in apps for doing business.But because Worthen writes about "business technology," he looks at the numbers and concludes that "the growth is impressive" — because a month ago, there were zero iPhone business apps. A month ago, there were zero frivolous iPhone apps, too, and they've outgrown business apps 30 to 1. Why not just admit the obvious? People mostly buy iPhones because they're fun. And they install apps for the same reason.

Last week, iPhone developers pounced on a workaround for the Apple gadget's inability to let users cut and paste text between applications. Never mind. Apple's latest firmware update plugs the loophole. Back to writing down phone numbers on paper.

A tipster sent our gadget sister site, Gizmodo, a copy of Verizon's talking points for its employees to use against iPhone mania. Like last year's leaked "iWhatever" email from COO Jack Plating, it comes across mostly as validation that there's no phone like the iPhone in buyers' eyes.But I disagree with my esteemed colleague Kit Eaton at Gizmodo on one thing: AT&T's network is indeed the iPhone's weak spot. At least 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area not served by AT&T 3G. Even David Pogue's iPhone musical called out AT&T service quality as a minus. Verizon's EVDO network — which reaches 80 percent of Americans, per the cheat sheet — would be a much better match. Someday.

Valleywag spies were busy last weekend. "I was at a party in Palo Alto on Saturday night two doors down from Steve Jobs's house, and in the morning i was coming out with my bike and walked right in front of him on the sidewalk," writes one. How'd he look? "Pretty thin. I thought his face looked healthy, but he was very thin." If Jobs's parking habits are any indication, though, perhaps the Apple CEO is ailing after all. Another tipster eyed the Jobsmobile and took the picture above. Her caption: "Mercedes? Check. No license plate? Check. Handicap spot? Yep, this is Steve Jobs's car!!!" (Photo by Rana Sobhany)

Mac Guy Justin Long took a moment out of his undoubtedly busy schedule to chat up with a couple of Mac fanatics over the weekend. The friendly females gushed over Long's performance in Waiting before launching in a diatribe against the iPhone 3G and all of its problems. Long told the ladies that he had no control over that and admitted that he was having problems as well. Looking to change the topic, Long ran his fingers through his hair, which accidentally created a trigger effect with his female fans. Thinking he may have stumbled onto a Pied Pieper like ability, Long then ran his fingers through his mane one more time to see if the women would once again follow suit. He was crushed to learn that it was a one-time only occurence.