Slouching toward Cupertino. It's not every day the Second Coming gives you advance notice, but the resurrection of the Jesus Phone -- in 3G, for the first time ever! -- is now (unofficially) slated for June 9. Or so says gadget blog Gizmodo, quoting "someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch." Who could be Steve Job's personal masseuse's second cousin's mechanic, for all we know, or Citi analysts Richard Gardner and Yeechang Lee, who made the same prediction three weeks ago. Given that June 9 is also the date of Jobs' keynote to the Apple worldwide developers conference, the most eloquent response I can muster is "duh." Now if Jobs doesn't announce a 3G handset on that day, that will be big news. Memo to Apple fanboys: Please stop hyperventilating. It will all be over soon.
'Wow' now, brown cow. Meanwhile, I have the perfect trick to play on obnoxious fanboys who boast about their "hacked" iPhones (and don't give me that "who me?" look, you know who you are). VistaPerfection 2.0 lets you take a cracked iPhone and makes the interface look just like Windows Vista. You'll probably have to slip Ambien into their Krank2O, pry the phone from their soft clammy hands, and fiddle about with Secure Shell, but it will be worth it just to see their faces when they wake up. In other news: This item may be the only time in the history of Notes From the Field that the words "Vista" and "perfection" have appeared in the same sentence.
Small head Todd. So you've committed a heinous act and you desperately need a new identity so you can flee the country. (I know, happens to me at least once a month.) You could do worse than steal Todd Davis's Social Security Number. The CEO of Lifelock got famous for posting his SSN on his company's home page, and then infamous when a Texas drifter used Davis's identity to cash a $500 check. Now Lifelock is being sued by customers in three states, saying the company's ID Theft protection services don't work -- and they're using Davis's own experience as Exhibit A. Attorney David Paris claims he's found 20 instances where strangers have tried to use Davis' Social to obtain IDs. Davis says that's nuthin'. Thieves have nabbed his name 87 times, he says, but aside from the Texas drifter nobody's managed to get any money out of it. So the next time the Feds are pounding on your door, just open it and say "Hi, my name is Todd Davis, and my Social Security Number is 457-55-5462." If you're lucky you'll get to share a cell with all the other guys named Todd Davis.