I’m relieved to see he called the cops and didn’t take chances like the guys that personally tracked down a swiped iPhone back in June. That was an amazing tale, though.

The weekend robbery happened in (the apparently appropriately named) Shadyside. North Versailles police have three suspects in custody, and recovered a pellet gun amongst various stolen items.

So for AU$119 a year, Apple’s MobileMe gets you Find My iPhone, email/calendar sync, photo gallery space, and iDisk online backup. But with so many free online services these days, it’s really only the tracking/remote wipe feature that interests me (even though you can switch it off if you get into phone itself). What about you? [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via Boy Genius Report]

Well, push describes a lot of things. Push is simply an action. Versus, say, pulling. Maybe that’s horribly abstract, so try this: If information shows up on your phone or neural implant or messaging program without you (or your wares) asking for it—that’s push. The info is pushed to you, versus you pulling it from the source. There are tons of ways push can be (and is) used.

Email’s a pretty good starting point for grasping the difference between push and the other stuff. You probably know good ol’ POP3—you log into your mail server and pull down new messages. Maybe it’s on a frequent schedule, so it feels automatic, even instant, but you’re still reaching out to the mail server every time to check and see if there’s new mail to download.

IMAP is a little fancier than POP, where all of your folders and email are the same on all of your computers, phones and other gadgets, and any change you make on one shows up on the other, since it’s all happening on a remote server somewhere. But with the standard setup, it’s still the same deal—your mail program has to log in, see what’s new, and pull it down. IMAP does have a pretty neat trick though, an optional feature called IMAP IDLE, that does push pretty well—it’s what the Palm Pre uses for Gmail, for instance. Essentially, with IMAP IDLE, the mail server can tell whatever mail app that you’ve got new messages waiting, without you (or your app) hammering the refresh button over and over. When the app knows there’s new messages, it connects and pulls them down, so it gives you just about the speed of push, without matching the precise mechanism.

While different systems do things differently (obvs), what true push services have in common is that they generally insert a middleman between you and the information source.

RIM’s setup for the BlackBerry is probably the most sophisticated. When your BlackBerry registers with the carrier (which has to support BlackBerry), the details are handed to RIM’s network operating centre, so the NOC knows where to send your mail. The NOC watches your mail server, keeps tabs on the phone’s location, and pushes email through to your phone whenever you get new stuff.

What makes it push is that your phone’s not actually polling a server for new messages to pull—it only receives them when they hit your inbox, and are then pushed to your phone by RIM’s servers. This means you save a lot of battery life that’d be wasted by making the phone constantly hit the servers for updates. The flipside is that when RIM’s servers blow up, you don’t get email, since it’s all routed through their system—hence the other panic that grips dudes in suits once every few months lately.

The other biggie is Microsoft, who has Direct Push, part of Exchange’s ActiveSync. It’s architected a little bit differently, so it doesn’t need the precise kind of data about where your phone is that RIM’s NOCs do: The phone or whatever you’ve got sends an HTTPS with a long lifespan to the Exchange server—if new mail arrives before it dies, the Exchange tells your device there’s new stuff, so it should start a sync. After it syncs, the device sends out another long HTTPS request, starting it all over again.

Apple’s weak-sauce substitute for multitasking works pretty similarly: The developer has something its wants to send an iPhone, when its application isn’t actually running, like an IM. It sends the notification to Apple’s push servers, which send the notification to the phone through a “persistent IP connection” the phone maintains with the servers. This connection, which is only maintained when push notifications are turned on, is needed to locate the phone, but still doesn’t draw as much power as constantly pinging the mail server.

Of course, those aren’t the only push systems around, and it’s only getting more and more important as stuff gets shifted to the cloud. We haven’t mentioned Android and Google Chrome, but both utilise push (or will) in different ways. Suffice it to say, Google Sync will soon be a major player in this game. But basically, all kinds of different data can be pushed—calendars, browser data, hell, even IM is a kind of push—and they all work more or less the same broad way.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about pushing, shoving and pancake massacres to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Developer Nat Friedman thought the same as you did (something along the lines of “f*cking stupid Apple morons”), and spent the weekend writing a script called playnice. The script will get the iPhone’s location information from MobileMe, then sends it to Google’s Latitude. Obviously, it only works if you are a MobileMe user, making it less useful for the rest of the mortals who are not willing to pay more dollars to Steve and his minions. [playnice via Nat Friendman]

With the iDisk app, you can view supported files like documents, PDFs, even stream music and movies (provided they’re in the right formats, natch) and remotely delete stuff from your iDisk. An annoying quirk, though, is that you have to dive into every folder individually to get it to refresh and show any new files. Document and PDF viewing work perfectly. With music and movies, the better the connection, the better the streaming experience, though don’t expect to stream your whole iTunes library over it—it’s a one song at a time kind of deal. And the movie file support is finicky, to say the least. But when it works, it’s pretty nice.

The strong point of the iPhone app as a manager is that it makes it incredibly easy to share files—go to the file you want to share, click the little wireless icon, and you can email a link to it with an expiration date you set. It also has a bookmark list of your friends’ public folders, you can quickly get back to them.

Bottom line, Air Sharing has nothing to worry about. Besides requiring a MobileMe account, you can’t upload files to your iDisk from the iPhone, or store any of them locally, which is what really gimps the app. I’d hope that Apple would expand its capabilities, but my suspicion is that they don’t actually want you to store files on your iPhone or browse through them like you would on a regular computer—it’s a conceptual line they don’t want to cross, so we’ve got a viewer with great interface here, nothing more.

So, if you wanna steal your friend’s iPhone and not have them know where you absconded to, all you have to do is go into Settings, then hit Mail, Contact, Calendars and click on the MobileMe account. Turn off Find My iPhone and all your friend will get is a little yellow warning symbol when they try to track it if the phone’s been previously located (see above).

Even if they’re not smart enough to dig into the MobileMe account setting, all you have to do is turn off Location Services under General settings—that also cripples Find My iPhone long enough to get it back home to wipe it out completely so it’s untraceable.

You can still send nastygrams to the iPhone via the service as long as the phone is still online, so presumably Remote Wipe still works as well, though neither of those will actually help find your iPhone.

Luckily, it seems like even with this massive vulnerability in the tracking feature—you know, the one the service is named after—it should still be more than enough to catch most iPhone thieves.

Documents you have backed up on MobileMe, like PDFs, Word files, or whatever else, can now be streamed to your iPhone and viewed, as well as sent—instead of sending a hefty email attachment, iDisk will send an email with a link so the recipient can download directly from MobileMe. It’s free, and will launch alongside iPhone 3.0. [Apple]

It allows you to send a beeping noise to your phone even if its in silent mode as well as a message telling whoever finds it to call you. If you fear its in the hands of a bad person who wants to use your info for blackmailish purposes, you can erase it remotely.

One of the irritating mosquito-like posters over at 4chan hacked into everyone’s favourite boob-related-adjective Salma Hayek’s MobileMe account and found it laughably easy despite MobileMe’s “security” questions.

Maybe using the name of her biggest film’s title and role to date (”Frida”) as the answer to her security question wasn’t the smartest choice, but luckily nothing the least bit incriminating has been found so far. And as much fun as it was to scour the internet for the chestiest pic of Salma we could find, we still don’t approve of this kind of underhanded hackery.

Since this kind of hacking is so common, we suggest using a total non sequitur as an answer for the custom security question. For example, did you know that my favourite ice cream flavour is Brian Lam? [ElectronicPulp via Technologizer]

This is an email they’re sending out to MobileMe members:

Dear MobileMe member:

On July 7, 2009, the .Mac HomePage web application will be discontinued. As of this date, you will no longer be able to create new pages or edit existing pages using HomePage. Any pages you’ve already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like. If you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7.

Instead of HomePage, we recommend the other sharing features of your MobileMe membership. With MobileMe Gallery, you can share photos online directly from iPhoto or the web application atwww.me.com. And using iWeb on your Mac, you can create custom websites and blogs and publish them to MobileMe.

We apologise for any inconvenience this change may cause. For more information, please read this FAQ. And thank you for being a MobileMe member.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

Apple’s offering a $US30 discount to MobileMe users on both OS X Leopard and Time Capsule. This makes us think that a 2TB Time Capsule is coming soon. Here’s why.

• Snow Leopard is due out soon, so Apple needs to clear out Leopard inventory via a $US30 discount
• 2TB hard drives just hit the market relatively recently, so NASes and other storage devices using 2TB are the next logical step
• ClubMac and MacMall both showed rendered box shots of a 2TB Time Capsule drive

So with the above points, it seems likely to conclude that Apple’s either phasing out the 500GB Time Capsule units in order to make room for the 2TB ones, or just want to reward the people who have been MobileMe customers for a while.