The Telegraph reports that Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs was close to being knighted for his services to technology by the Queen of the United Kingdom in 2009. Unfortunately or fortunately for Jobs, his nomination was blocked by Gordon Brown, who served as Prime Minister at the time, because the Apple co-founder apparently turned down an invitation to speak at a Labour Party conference. Apple was aware of the proposal that till that moment reached the final stage of approval.

"The former MP was told by Downing Street that the decision was related to a failed attempt to attract Mr. Jobs to Labour's annual conference," the report said. "Given his status as a superstar of business and technology, such an appearance would have been viewed as a coup for Mr. Brown."

It seams that malicious hacker put their hands on Mac computers. Security researchers report that hackers have a way to remotely send commands to your Mac OS X computer. “Blackhole” RAT, or Remote Access Trojan, allows hackers to control your Mac. SophosLabs analyzed the sample it received and determined that it is a variant of a well-known Remote Access Trojan (RAT) for Windows known as darkComet. The Blackhole RAT is available for download from the net, but there are no any reports from customers being hit by it.

The Trojan's basic functionality includes:

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There are lots of rumors about forthcoming second-gen iPad hardware. The iPad 2 is expected to be slimmer and lighter, with a larger speaker and an improved display designed to deliver a better experience in bright sunlight.  It will likely run on a 1.2GHz, dual-core, ARM Cortex-A9 chip and Imagination’s SGX543 GPU architecture. The new iPad probably will support both GSM and CDMA thank to the Qualcomm chip. It will have double the RAM–512MB, same as the iPhone 4, as well as front camera for FaceTime and Photo Booth and back-facing one for POV FaceTime and shooting photos and video.

Alongside the new iPad Apple may also announce iOS 5 preview at the event. iOS 5 is expected to have new voice navigation, maps application and certainly Cloud/MobileMe/iWork/iLife integration, and updated notifications.

Despite the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on a health-related leave from the company now, Italian Apple site SetteB claims that he is definitely considering to appear at today’s big media event.

"If he did appear, sources said Jobs would at least make a brief appearance onstage, along with other top company execs in showing off Apple's latest version of its hugely popular tablet".

Apple is expected to introduce the second-generation iPad at an event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, today. The media event is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.

One Wall Street analyst said that Apple’s iPad 2 reportedly may be affected by production difficulties due to some problems with the new ultra-thin glass screen that could result in a limited supply at launch. Although, Apple is not expected to experience delays in launching the iPad 2.

"It appears that Apple is once again pushing the technology envelope by making the device far thinner than the original iPad, and the iPad 2's ultra-thin glass screen is generating yield issues," the analyst wrote. "This appears to be more of a process problem as opposed to a technology problem, and we wouldn't be surprised to see volumes ramp fairly quickly as the process improves."

The new iPad is expected to have a forward-facing camera for FaceTime video chat, faster processor and more RAM, support for both GSM and CDMA wireless technology.

Recently Apple posted on its website a new job listing that confirms rumors about Apple’s plans to open new Apple Store in southern Italy, most specifically in Sicily. The company focused its attention on opening Stores in near-Rome regions, so there are not so many Apple’s shops in southern Italy. The new store is to open by the end of summer 2011, according to the local press. The exact location of Store is still unknown. But there are some rumors claiming that the store will be open in the city of Catania. Apple plans to open other store in Bologna that confirms by another job listing.

There were nice rumors showing future iPhone 5 bazel. The photo claimed new iPhone 5 display will be larger and the edge of the bazel will be thinner. Unfortunately this photo was fake.

Nowhereelse.fr has done some analysis on the image finding replication of artifacts and incorrect lines of perspective:

iPhone hacker MuscluNerd tweeted some recent news regarding iPhone iOS 4.2.1 unlock.

Current i4 unlock goal includes til 04.10.01 (4.3b3). Very weird situation...vuln cmds are there, trying to invoke them!

ironically, the i4 unlock search has yielded 05.14 & 05.15 unlock 3G/3GS vectors... but i4 is 1st priority

Not much, but we see that the work is in progress. They have found necessary vulnerabilities and their target is even higher - iOS 4.3 (baseband 04.10.01). As a background effect they also might be able to unlock 05.14 and 05.15 basebands, so there might be a reason right now not to update baseband to version 06.15.

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Jonathan Ive, designer of many Apple’s iconic products, is said to want to spend more time in England. Ive reportedly has proposed to commute from Somerset, but Apple's board seems unwilling.

A friend of the family told The Sunday Times: 'Unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.'

Ive joined Apple in 1992 and has been responsible for the design of the unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone and iPad and rose to become the company's senior vice president of product design.

Photos of what appears to be a white bezel for the future iPad 2 have been leaked online by 9to5Mac and iFixYouri. Sounds like iPad 2 will be available in white. Current iPad case is made of aluminum, but the front color is black (display and bezel).

The piece that we have (from Shenzhen City), thanks to the folks at the iFixYouri iPhone repair shop, is the "digitizer" sometimes known as the the thick bezel.

Apple is holding a special event on March 2nd at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 10:00am local time where they will likely reveal the new iPad 2. The iPad 2 is expected to be thinner, faster, have a camera or even two, work on both GSM and CDMA networks.

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In the forthcoming Mac OS X Lion Apple will use WebKit2 in Safari web-browser. Apple’s WebKit engine was announced in April 2010. The new WebKit2 offers both speed and security improvements:

WebKit2 is a new API layer for WebKit designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI. This model is very similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients of WebKit to use it.

That means that Safari will be faster and more stable and if a webpage crashes or hangs, only that single tab will be affected instead the whole browser.

If you're thinking to switch from your Windows PC to Mac after all this buzz around new Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple prepared a great solution for you in a new version of Migration Assistant.

Basically Migration Assistant was created to help Mac users in migrating from their old machine to a new one. They just needed to convert their old Mac via FireWire Target Disk Mode into a hard drive and then import data, settings and files on the new machine via Migration Assistant.

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According to blogger iMarck90, Mac OS X Lion's iChat app supports Yahoo Messenger and can transfer text, voice and video chat over Yahoo's IM protocol.

When iChat was introduced by Apple, it was an instant messenger client for proprietary chat protocol of AOL. Later it got a Jabber/XMPP support.

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Along with new architectural features new version of Mac OS X also sports new look for the iCal, Mail and Finder, and some other applications look slightly different due to adoption of design elements implemented in the iPad. AppleInsider received the screenshots of new Lion's interface, and we're posting them below.

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As you may know, this Thursday Apple has released a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion and recently we took a sneak peek at its new features. However, the new version of iOS also includes some architectural changes, and we'll talk about it in this post.

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