We doubt Apple will sign this guy up for an endorsement deal, but Mullah Zaif, a former Taliban official, raved about his iPhone to Al Jazeera correspondent Hamish McDonald during a visit in Kabul.

While Steve Jobs' famed "reality distortion field" transformed, despite all odds, computers, music, movies and cell phones, it is his own body which has proven resistant to his formidable power to reshape the world.

Remember how Oprah once threatened to ruin the life of novelist Jonathan Franzen by selecting his book for her club and thereby making him lots and lots of money? Walmart might do the same to Apple's iPhone!

When we overdose on celebrities and overindulge in gadgets, where's the vomitorium to hurl it up? Why, it's eBay, on whose shores the flotsam of every shipwrecked trend lands. Here's what was formerly hot in 2008:

I'm skeptical, but Boy Genius Report has what's supposed to be an internal document from Walmart. It details the launch timeline to begin selling iPhones at Walmart on December 28. Here's what nags at me: Why not start the day after Thanksgiving, instead of three days after Christmas? It's not because unprepared staff and long lines would be a problem. Please explain to me how this is all part of His Steveness's master plan.

Gene Wood, an operations manager at Ask.com, the Barry Diller-owned search engine beloved by Midwestern moms, wrestled a mugger to the ground rather than lose his iPhone, for which he paid $499. While riding on a subway train in San Francisco and watching a movie, Wood felt a hand reach behind him and snatch the phone. Wood, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 240 pounds, jumped from his seat and pursued the thief. Here's his harrowing account of how he got his iPhone back through hand-to-hand combat — and got away with just one small, if nasty, head wound:

You can buy an iPhone at Best Buy, but more likely you won't buy anything at all this Xmas. The company's revised forecast predicts revenue between now and February may drop by 15 percent. CEO Brad Anderson's official statement is blunt: "Since mid-September, rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we've ever seen ... Best Buy simply can't adjust fast enough to maintain our earnings momentum for this year." Cool, but seismic changes? Brad, come on out from Minnesota and we'll demo a real earthquake for you. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Another one bites the dust. This time, instead of banning a new app, Apple has denied a music streaming app called CastCatcher from releasing an update, due to "unreasonable volume of traffic." As with the past bans, the developers come out as the folk heroes, but an evil corporate overlord would have helped CastCatcher a lot. Here's how:iPhone music apps comes in a variety of flavors, from licensed tracks streaming apps — such as Pandora — to radio streaming apps — such as AOL Radio — to computer music streaming — such as Simply Media. But they are all mostly corporate owned. AOL Radio is powered by CBS, Last.fm is owned by CBS. ClearChannel Communications, the radio monopoly has its own iPhone app. CastCatcher's main feature was the ability to stream things called shoutcasts, a media streaming format developed by Winamp creator Justin Frankel during his anti-corporate punk days at Nullsoft. Some radio stations have used shoutcast software to bridge their transmission online, but most shoutcast sites are operated by hobbyists — ham-radio operators, amateur DJs, sports coverage, or talk shows. That means no revenue to share with Apple. And that means Apple has no room for them to hog AT&T's bandwidth. Why don't you kids go make a podcast instead?(Photo by otakuchick)

We knew there would be last-minute dirty tricks in this campaign — but who knew they would include attempting to turn the powerful Apple fanboy vote? iPhone Savior has revealed, with suspicious timing, that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama uses a desperately uncool Motorola Razr, not the iPhone spotted in his hands back in May. Then again, maybe Obama's trying to appeal to America's industrial heartland; Motorola is based in the suburbs of Chicago, where Obama has his campaign headquarters. Or, possibly, he just wants to make phone calls.

Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Craig Berger claims his industry contacts know that Apple's Q4 iPhone production will be more than 40 percent lower than Q3. So, even though poor people are the iPhone's largest growth market, overall sales are expected to be off because rich people stop buying gadgets when the Nasdaq drops. I'm getting tired of this global-downturn talk. Where's my reality distortion field? (Photo by otakuchick)

The Jesusphone is no longer just for privileged white folks. "The strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income, particularly since the launch of the iPhone 3G." So says a report from ComScore, which concludes that "lower-income mobile subscribers are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to access the Internet, email and their music collections." Awesome. Now I can buy an iPhone 3G without feeling I'm being extravagant. But I can't shake the feeling this study was secretly paid for by RIM. (Photo by r.f.m II)

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles today, Rick Rashid, the head of Microsoft Research, reminded the audience that he helped write the Mach kernel 25 years ago. That piece of code is now at the core of Apple's OS X, the operating system which runs both the Mac and the IPhone. What he should be asking: Why didn't his employer think of that? (Photo by Ina Fried/CNET News)

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives. Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones. Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry. This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.) There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

Why is Adobe dropping licensing restrictions and fees for its Flash video player? To prod Steve Jobs into adding Flash to the iPhone. Maybe Adobe should just keep resubmitting that iPhone Flash player application to the iTunes Store. [Wired]

Google's Android phone has something in common with Apple's iPhone: Both gadgets have a "kill switch" to uninstall unwanted applications. Buried in Google's Android legalese is a clause that says Google might "discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion." The outrage would be pretty bad if anyone actually had a Googlephone. [CNET]

Hottrix, a software developer, is suing Coors for copying its $3 iBeer application. The novelty iPhone app shows a glass of beer that disappears as you tilt the iPhone sideways. Cute and harmless. Unless of course you're a major corporation that made a similar application, creatively called iPint, and gave it away for free as a marketing promotion. iPint consistently showed up in Apple's top 10 free applications list.Hottrix is alleging that they tried to reach an agreement with Coors but failed. After complaining to Apple, Coors' iPint was removed from the App Store in the U.S. — though it's still available in other countries. Hottrix still wants $12.5 million for damages for the alleged copying of its "wholly original ... and copyrightable subject matter." Copyrightable, not copyrighted? That may prove tricky to argue. Another case study on how not to cash out with an iPhone app.

The founders of Tap Tap Tap, a developer of iPhone applications, have parted ways, and are putting their most successful app, Where To, up for sale. John Casasanta says he and Sophia Teuschler delayed the announcement for weeks because they had difficulty coming to terms for the split. Commentards are already lauding the pair's transparency, but the move doesn't speak well for their business sense. If you were selling a home, would you tell people at an open house that the sellers were divorcing? Just what a buyer wants: a negotiation with two parties who can't agree on anything themselves.

Shares of Research In Motion have declined from $148 to $60 in four months, falling along with most tech stocks. The difference between RIM and, say, Yahoo? Microsoft still wants to buy RIM, say some analysts cited by Reuters. Forget Google's still-not-on-the-market Android phones; RIM's BlackBerry is the only real competition for Apple's iPhone.Like Apple, RIM offers not just the hardware but the software and services that run on top of it; RIM does Apple one better by also selling back-end servers that companies install to manage their workers' email. Microsoft is in that same business, but it's not as good as tying everything together as RIM is. The speculation is that RIM shares would have to drop to $40 or so, at which point Microsoft might bid $50 a share, or $28 billion for the company. This much is not speculation: RIM would be a better buy than Yahoo.

"My twelve year old son brought to my attention a security bug he discovered on his iPhone," blogs programmer Karl Kraft. "He has an even more paranoid security mind than I do, because he primarily uses his iPhone to send and receive sweet nothings between himself and his girlfriend, and he is certain that his mother and I are desperate to intercept these messages." The poor kid doesn't realize his parents would be perfectly happy with an XML summary of the content. They could set alerts on it: WARNING sexual subtext identified. Steve Jobs has four kids, so don't tell me this isn't in the works.

Nearly one in four high school students surveyed by Piper Jaffray "plan on buying an iPhone in the next six months." It's not clear if the 22% who want one include the 8% who already have one, or if the survey was conducted before their once-splurgy parents began raving about The Worst Financial Crisis Ever — why, six months from now there'll be nothing left to sync with! Me, I took a hint from the kids: My shiny new Blackberry Curve 8330 will be a valuable job-hunting tool after Denton fires us all.