Check out [support.apple.com] where it says "Note: Every time you make an in app purchase, you will be asked to confirm your purchase by tapping Buy. If it has been less than 15 minutes since your last iTunes Store purchase or sign-in, you will not be required to type in your account password again."

That's correct, it's not sufficient as it stands. If it were, we would not be having this (pleasant) conversation, and that would be a shame :-)

The point is that many, and perhaps most, parents are not *aware* that they're giving access to their credit card in this way. So from their perspective, they're not giving access to their credit card. And if anything's "moronic" it's that Apple has not (yet) provided a good solution to an obvious problem. Also,…

Every single iPod touch that I've seen in the hands of young children to date has got in-app purchases enabled, because it's the default and parents were not even aware of the concept of "in-app purchases". None of those parents is stupid. Apple changed the environment big-time with this concept and is only now…

Plus the default for that "disable in-app purchases" is off. And most parents are clueless to its function, or even to its whereabouts in the iPhone menus. Until they get a big bill, or they read that WP article.

And yet people are up in arms, so the evidence clearly suggests that the existing "disallow all in-app purchases" is not sufficient. For one thing, even if you disable in-app purchases, that 15-minute window allows your child to download and install other apps, including paid apps, without having to supply…

Note to Gawker: the new web-site design is becoming a massive time-waster — it's actually worse now for me than it was on day 2. Pages don't appear correctly (I'm constantly get the spinning icon with the content grayed out in the background, hitting F5 fixes this immediately). Responses to me appear on my…

This is not meant as a flame, but I'm guessing that you're not actually a parent. Apple should immediately implement a change that allows the parent who has just installed a game for their 4-year old to explicitly invalidate the cached AppStore credentials so that there is *no* chance of an accidental $99- purchase…

Have I used a Mac? Of course, I have one right here. My comment was specifically about clicking the Apple icon to initiate a shutdown/restart (which is analogous to, but less obvious than, using the Windows Start button to do the same). My comment was not about how one generally uses the Mac for other tasks. …

Now this is the kind of auto journalism that I actually want to read and is precisely why I subscribe to the UK's excellent Evo and Car magazines. Good to expose the beast that is Ferrari every now & then. Brave stuff.

Rhubarb, no they won't. That's like me saying "my bank account will have millions of dollars in it". Or Donald Trump saying, well, anything at all. Wanting it to be that way won't make it so.

Who would ever have paid $99- for this? Also, WOT gives the chrometa site a bad rating.

Yes, the article mentions "Sony is only entitled to isolate … the information on the computer that relates to the hacking".

They're not concerned about copies/backups being available; I think they want to see what's on the drive.

The PS3 hack probably won't land him in jail, but wiping his drive in response to the legal directive would. Judges and prosecutors love this kind of 'proxy' crime — they'll convict you massively for destroying evidence or perjury, and may not even bother to pursue the original offense. So, don't wipe the drive kid.

Why is cut not available? Because someone at Apple has decided that you cannot be trusted to use such a feature. You must instead drag and drop the file; that is the ergonomically correct and most humanistic way to move a file. Except in some circumstances, when drag and drop will instead copy the file. But you…

Right on. No-one who has used both VNC and RDP over broadband would *ever* choose to use VNC. VNC's useful, no doubt, but not for serious work on a remote Windows server.

No, it's not remotely like a storage unit. No-one's storing goods here for their own sake, they're trading them. It's more like operating a store where you rent space to people (let's call them 'thieves') who then trade their stolen goods. And you know about it, and you knowingly profit from it.

So I'm guessing that you live on your own island where you make all the laws. Or perhaps you sail the high seas, never leaving international waters.