They’re out! No, they’re back! A few days after pulling all of its products out of the EPEAT program for environmental stewardship, Apple returns to the group’s list with a note from outgoing hardware chief Bob Mansfield. An explanation of the departure and return were not included.

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that it will be changing gears with regard to the open-source Thunderbird email client, providing security updates and maintaining mechanisms for the Thunderbird community to continue development, but not pushing Thunderbird forward internally. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, was candid about how Mozilla has tried and failed for years to innovate with Thunderbird and to engage an active contributor base. Some will no doubt claim that this move portends the death of email; we would suggest it merely indicates that email is a mature and highly entrenched technology that does what most people want.

Ars Technica summarize a problem with an App Store server that generated faulty DRM code for several days, causing downloaded Mac and iOS apps to crash on launch and users to hit developers with angry 1-star reviews. Apple has fixed the problem, which affected at least 120 apps and tens of thousands of users who downloaded updates or new apps during the time the problem occurred. Apple also reset the version numbers of affected apps to conceal (but not remove) the angry 1-star reviews. If you downloaded any apps around 5 July 2012, it’s worth checking for updates again.

Security firm Kaspersky is reporting that a Trojan horse application called “Find and Call” somehow made it past Apple’s App Store approval process and was downloaded by a number of users before Apple woke up and pulled it. A similar piece of malware was also posted to — and pulled from — Google Play’s Android marketplace. Needless to say, if you downloaded this app but haven’t tried it yet, delete it immediately, before it can steal your contacts and spam them with SMS text messages. Clearly, Apple’s approval team blew it here, but at least they were able to pull the app fairly quickly. Whether the company will go further in removing the app from devices remains to be seen.

Apple has announced that the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will take place from 11 June 2012 to 15 June 2012 in San Francisco. Tickets cost $1,599 and sold out within the first two hours (much to the consternation of West Coast developers who woke up to discover they couldn’t attend).

In a blog post, Kevin Systrom, CEO of the photo sharing service Instagram, announced that his eight-person company will be acquired by Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chimed in on his own timeline, adding, “For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.” Facebook says the transaction will be valued at $1 billion. We hope the owners of Instagram will share some of the windfall with their tiny, but effective, staff.

Judging from most press reports over the last couple of months, you’d think Apple has done a horrible job of protecting the safety of the Chinese workers who manufacture most of its devices. Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest manufacturers, is actually a behemoth that builds cell phones, computers, tablets, and other technology for most of the big companies around the world. Nick Bilton of the New York Times started asking these other firms — including Dell, HP, Samsung, and Microsoft — about how they’re responding to working conditions. The answers? Silence, pat press releases, and very little actual information.