The United States Department of Defense has approved the “security technical implementation guide” for mobile devices running iOS 6, including the iPhone and iPad, meaning that Apple’s handhelds can now be used on DOD networks. Also approved are BlackBerry smartphones and devices from Samsung running its Android-based Knox operating system. The DOD currently has around 600,000 commercial mobile devices in use, including 470,000 BlackBerrys, 41,000 unspecified Apple devices, and 8,700 Android devices. Most of these are part of a pilot program by the Defense Information Systems Agency to make use of the latest in technology. Unlike most enterprises, BYOD, or “bring your own device,” isn’t allowed, at least when it comes to connecting to DOD networks.

Keeping up with Apple is hard enough, but when Google announces a boatload of products, updates, and services during a 3-hour keynote at the Google I/O developer conference, we’re happy to let others — The Next Web in this case — compile the list. Many of these announcements are relevant only to developers, but updates to Google Maps, the Google Play Music All Access streaming music service, new Google+ features, and a unified messaging service called Hangouts may be of interest to anyone using Google services.

Beleaguered smartphone maker BlackBerry has announced that its Messenger service will come to iOS and Android this summer. The chat service, one of BlackBerry’s most loved features, is still used by 60 million people a month, generating 10 billion messages per day (that’s five times as many iMessages were sent per day as of January 2013). But with BlackBerry’s woes of the past few years, the release still feels like a rearguard action.

In a discussion of where Apple needs to take iOS 7, WWDC, and the App Store, TidBITS Contributing Editor and iOS programming book author Matt Neuburg contributed his exhausting mix of detailed analysis and irrepressible ranting to Chuck Joiner’s MacVoices podcast, along with John Brayton of Golden Hill Software.

If you want to stay heart healthy, you should exercise, eat right, not smoke, and… stay away from iPads? As Bloomberg reports, 14-year-old Gianna Chien has discovered that the 30 magnets in the iPad 2, which are used to hold the Smart Cover in place, could accidentally disable a pacemaker if the user falls asleep with the iPad on his or her chest. Apple warns of this danger on page 126 of the iPad User Guide, but how many of you read that far? Chien made the discovery while working on a science fair project, which sadly didn’t win first place. (We hope the media coverage of her project helps makes up for that!)

Despite recent complaints about iOS security, it’s effective against at least one group: law enforcement. According to Declan McCullagh at CNET, police departments around the country are sufficiently stymied by iOS device encryption that they’re turning to Apple for help. They’ve flooded Apple with so many requests for assistance decrypting confiscated iPhones that Apple is putting them on a waiting list of up to 4 months. Of course, the flip side of this story is the suggestion that Apple has a backdoor method of cracking iPhone encryption.

Developer and entrepreneur Peter Nixey has posted an open letter to Apple emoting about problems with and proposing solutions to managing photos on Apple devices. Nixey’s main complaints revolve around the lack of useful iOS tools for photo management, duplicates and confusion in Photo Stream, Photo Stream’s inability to sync videos, and devices with too little storage. He suggests a new paid Apple service that would store the canonical version of a user’s entire photo and video collection in iCloud, allowing access from any of that user’s devices. Fingers crossed that Apple realizes just how broken the current system is and addresses these and other complaints!

Apple’s tumultuous stock price has pushed it into and out of the top spot among U.S. companies by market capitalization, but that doesn’t help with the Fortune 500 list, which ranks companies by gross revenue. Not that Apple’s doing badly there either — in the 2013 Fortune 500, Apple jumps from 17th place all the way to 6th, cracking the top 10 for the first time and giving a more accurate picture of how Apple compares with other corporate giants.

Writer, counselor, and longtime TidBITS reader Gary Bloom has tapped out an elaborate comparison of writing apps for iOS, in which he cleverly compares each one to a house. He even kindly mentions our review of Nebulous Notes; though it’s not our “favorite” writing app, per se, we just liked it enough to give it a review! If you write on your iPad, this article is a must read — his favorite app may surprise you.

On 30 April 1993, the organization behind the creation of the Web, CERN, officially put the World Wide Web project software — line-mode client, basic server, and common code library — into the public domain. And history was thus written by Tim Berners-Lee, with significant help by Robert Cailliau. You can now read more of that history, and see both the first Web site and the original legal documents, at the site that CERN has put up to celebrate this momentous anniversary. (Adam here. Little did I know, when I met Cailliau at the Hypertext ’93 conference in Seattle, exactly with whom I was having lunch and helping with directions to where he could shop for his teenage daughter. I was somewhat embarrassed, since I hadn’t said complimentary things about his MacWWW browser in my “Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh” book, given that the software was primitive and very buggy, but he was nonetheless very kind.)

About a year ago, Tor Books, the highly regarded publisher of science fiction and fantasy, announced that they were dropping digital-rights-management protection on all of their ebooks. Now, Julie Crisp of Tor UK has revealed what that decision has meant in terms of ebook piracy: “As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.” (This, of course, is no surprise to us: we have been publishing our Take Control ebook DRM-free for nearly ten years, with exactly the same results.) Equally heartening to Tor is how much support their authors have for the DRM-free policy.

When we think of old communications technology, many of us picture 10Base-2 coax connectors or maybe 2400 baud modems. But what about wax-covered cardboard discs? The Smithsonian discovered and digitized such a disc containing the voice of Alexander Graham Bell saying, "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." Now you can hear what the inventor of the telephone sounded like on 15 April 1885.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com reports that LivingSocial, a daily deals site owned in part by Amazon, has suffered a massive data breach involving the names, email addresses, birth dates, and encrypted passwords of 50 million customers. No credit card or financial information was lost, luckily, but this is just another example of why it’s essential to create a different strong password for every Web site and Internet service. Read Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Your Passwords” for a complete password strategy.

The most reliable Windows laptop is… the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro running Boot Camp, according to a report by PC management firm Soluto. Over the course of a three-month study, the MacBook Pro bested models from Acer, Dell, and others thanks to its superior construction and lack of the commonly preinstalled Windows “crapware” (to quote the report). It is the second most expensive machine in the top 10, cheaper only than the 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display that ranked 6th in reliability.

David Kravets writes at Wired that Apple is agreeing to pay $53 million to settle a class-action suit that accused the company of failing to honor warranties on faulty units of the iPhone and iPod touch if the liquid contact indicator tape embedded inside the headphone or charging port had turned pink or red. The maker of the tape, 3M, said that humidity could have caused the color change.

Nearly two years ago, a company called Lodsys made news by suing a number of iOS developers, claiming their use of in-app purchasing infringed a Lodsys-owned patent. Apple intervened, saying that its patent license with Lodsys covers iOS developers. Despite that, Eric Slivka at MacRumors reports that Lodsys has filed ten more lawsuits against iOS developers, ranging from the large (Disney) to the small (TLA Systems, makers of PCalc). Apple has yet to respond to these new suits.

Flashback was one of the most significant pieces of malware to affect Mac OS X, morphing quickly and infecting more than 650,000 Macs. Security writer Brian Krebs has now identified a 30-year-old Russian man as being responsible for Flashback. It seems unlikely this outing will make any significant difference in the guy’s behavior, but it’s interesting to have the human element brought into malware coverage.

Jason Snell likes to read comics on his iPad and has the credit card bill to prove it! His piece in Macworld is an outstanding survey of the digital comic landscape, describing how traditional print comics correspond to digital offerings, comparing several methods for acquiring comics, and discussing which mobile devices work best for comics.

Should security practices be kept secret? The Verge’s Tim Carmody suggests that Apple’s legendary secretiveness could result in worse security than if the company were more transparent about how it protects customer data. He closes with, “All the evidence suggests that much like Apple Maps or MobileMe, iCloud simply isn’t at the level of polish and performance we’ve come to expect from Apple. Security is just a symptom.”

Developer frustrations with iCloud Core Data syncing have been much in the news of late, but for those who are wondering — at a technical level — what the fuss is all about, Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software lays out what is involved with iCloud data syncing, and where developers are experiencing problems.