Kirk

When Apple unveiled its preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion earlier this year, many people in the blogosphere concluded that Mac OS X was being "iOSified." In other words, features from iOS were being ported to OS X for use on the desktop, a continuation of the Back to the Mac campaign Apple first initiated with Mac OS X Lion. Some lamented that this has been a bad thing--as if features that work, in some cases, better on iOS than on the desktop, shouldn't be added to OS X, because the former is a mobile operating system, and the latter built for the desktop.

iOS and OS X have the same foundation, and there is no reason why efficient features of one shouldn't be added to the other. But Apple is, in my opinion, developing a much deeper and longer term strategy in iOSifying OS X.

[Ask the iTunes Guy is a regular column in which we answer your questions on everything iTunes related. If there's something you'd like to know, send an email to the iTunes Guy for consideration.]

There's a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: I named my iPod "Titanic" so when I sync it, iTunes tells me "The Titanic is syncing." While it actually says "Syncing 'Titanic'," this joke hints at the fact that syncing your library to an iOS device isn't always simple (even if it doesn't rise to the level of disastrous). In today's column, I look at some common questions about syncing all or part of an iTunes library to iOS devices.

Backgammon NJ. Source: iTunesBackgammon NJ. Source: iTunesBackgammon is a board game that is perfectly suited to iOS devices. The shape of the board fits the iPhone and iPad, and the gameplay-rolling dice and moving pieces-is greatly simplified when you tap to perform these tasks. Over the past few months, I've tried out a number of backgammon apps, and two stand out: Backgammon NJ (available for the iPad in a separate version called Backgammon NJ HD), and FaceMe Backgammon.

There are three things I looked for in a backgammon app, starting with an attractive interface. This isn't as common as you might think, as some backgammon offerings in the App Store have garish colors or horrid cartoonish boards and pieces. If you're better than a casual player, you'll want an app with strong artificial intelligence: If you can beat the app all the time, it's not much fun. And, if you like to play different people, you'll want multi-player options, preferably using iOS's built-in Game Center feature.

Two issues exposed financial data and Social Security numbers for 350,000 people, although it is thought the information has not been abused, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte said.

The university said in a statement earlier this week that it has fixed both problems, one of which lasted three months and the other more than a decade.

Megaupload filed a motion in federal court on Thursday asking to delay a civil suit filed against the file-sharing site while it prepares a defense for its criminal case.

Two companies, Microhits and Valcom, filed a civil suit against Megaupload on March 21, alleging the site induced and contributed to infringing copyright.

A security company specializing in the Domain Name System has released a Windows version of a tool that encrypts DNS requests, which could be spied on to reveal a user's browsing activity.

Last December OpenDNS released its tool, called DNSCrypt, for Apple's OS X operating system. The company has now released a technology preview of the same tool for Windows, wrote David Ulevitch, OpenDNS' founder and CEO.

Twitter is contesting a court order requiring it to turn over private data on a user charged with disorderly conduct during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York last year.

On Monday, the company filed a memorandum in New York's Criminal Court, asserting that users own their content and that it may be unconstitutional to request it without a warrant.

Many of the Twitter logins and passwords leaked on the web this week are either inaccurate or belong to accounts already suspended for spamming, the company said late Tuesday.

The logins and passwords were published Monday on Pastebin, a website intended for programmers to share code but favored by hackers to release stolen data. The data was published on five separate posts on Pastebin, comprising a total of 58,978 login and password combinations.

The Washington State Attorney General's office reached a settlement on Monday with an advertising company it alleged baited and spammed Facebook users with salacious content in order to direct them to unrelated advertising.

Adscend Media, an affiliate marketing company, and managers Jeremy Bash and Fehzan Ali agreed not to spam Facebook users and pay US$100,000 in court and attorney fees, according to the settlement.

A new wave of malware freezes a computer and demands payment to unlock it, this time falsely alleging victims have infringed copyright.

The campaign, spotted by Roman Hussy, who authors the abuse.ch blog, targets users in the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands.

Apple's latest update to OS X contains a dangerous programming error that reveals the passwords for material stored in the first version of FileVault, the company's encryption technology, a software consultant said.

David I. Emery wrote on Cryptome that a debugging switch inadvertently left on in the current release of Lion, version 10.7.3, records in clear text the password needed to open the folder encrypted by the older version of FileVault.

A new product from TrustSphere is tackling the problem of email incorrectly flagged as spam, an irritating and potentially costly error for businesses.

The product, called TrustVault, analyzes the communication between the sender and recipient of an email over a few weeks, looking at how many messages are sent, how often in a day and how quickly.