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iPhone Troubleshooting: How to Restart, quit frozen apps and Reset iPhone
I'm starting to think there is some sort of bad luck attached to my iTunes Store account, as tonight I experienced the third iTunes Store song that completely locked up an iPod - only this time it was my iPhone. While listening to 'Again with the Subtleties' from the Yppah album You Are Beautiful At All Times (US iTunes link) in my iPhone's iPod app, the phone completely locked up at the end of the track with an almost-faded out display. What was worse, the iPhone became completely unresponsive - the display wouldn't accept any of my taps, and even the external buttons were ignored. Momentarily wishing I could simply yank the battery to cut the power and reset the phone, I realized Apple must have some sort of a contingency in place for lock-ups like these.Fortunately, I was right: The iPhone troubleshooting section of Apple's main iPhone support site contains a walkthrough for situations like this, complete with instructions on how to restart the phone, force quit a frozen app or reset the phone in cases like mine where it has completely locked up. Here are these steps in a nutshell: Restart your iPhone: Most people probably already know how to do this, but just in case, you can simply hold the sleep/wake button on the top for a few seconds to bring up a red slider at the top of the display which allows you to power off the phone. Quit a frozen iPhone app: I know it's a crazy thought, but it is entirely possible that Apple's wondrous iPhone apps can lock up from time to time. In this case, simply hold the Home button when in the app for about 6 seconds to kill the app. You should be able to jump back into the app without restarting the phone itself. Reset your iPhone: Note that this is not Restoring your iPhone; that's the button in iTunes that wipes the iPhone and all your information on it. Resetting an iPhone is nothing more than a hard reset or a forced reboot - you're simply cutting the power and making it reboot. To do this, hold the sleep/wake button and Home buttons simultaneously for a few seconds; the display will quickly wipe itself and you should see the black background and white Apple logo, signifying a reset well done. Fortunately, that reset fixed my problem and I'm jamming again with my iPhone as I write this. Still, you can be sure that I'll ping iTunes support to find out what's going on with these files, as this is the third one I've downloaded from the iTS that's caused an iPod to stop dead in its tracks. Anyone else experience something like this? You know where to sound off.
Tabloid journalist jailed for intercepting royal voicemails
Any Brits reading this will probably already be aware of the occasionally questionable exploits of the "red top" tabloids, but for those that prefer not to take their tea with crumpets, the news that Clive Goodman, a journalist for the UK Sunday tabloid the News of the World, was found guilty and sentenced to four months jail time for intercepting over 600 phone messages left for three senior officials in the royal household will probably come as a mild shock. To British readers, the fact that a tabloid hack was willing to go to such lengths in order to provide such thrilling exclusives as the "news" that Prince William casually asked an ITV reporter to borrow a video editing suite won't be a surprise at all. Perhaps the most depressing fact in this case is the complete incompetence of the assailants: Mr. Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire -- the freelance investigator who was sentenced to six months prison time for his role in this plot, and for independently tapping several other notable figure's phones -- illegally and recklessly accessed voicemails before the rightful owners had retrieved them. If there's any good to come out of this case, it'll be a tightening of the security at the network operators that provided the royal official's mobile phones: apparently Mulcaire somehow managed to obtain the passwords "issued by the mobile phone companies to their own security staff. This allowed him, having obtained the mobile phone numbers of his targets, to call customer services and to obtain the voicemail retrieval numbers." We don't know whether to be flattered by the fact that royal staff slum it with the rest of us by using the same mobile phone networks that us "commoners" do, or to freak out at the lax security exercise by the unnamed network operators.[Via Boing Boing]
