A senior chip design manager from PA Semi, Wei-han Lien, let a little light shine on Apple's plans for future generations of the iPhone and iPod by listing "Manage ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone" as his current gig on LinkedIn (Lien's profile has since been scrubbed from the site). CEO Steve Jobs had already let it be known that new Apple subsidiary would be working on chips for the popular mobile devices, and now we know that they will be basing designs on the same ARM architecture that Samsung licensed for the current batch, though with Apple's own proprietary improvements. PA Semi was known for crafting highly efficient, low-power chips. Other features, such as graphics and video processing and multi-touch controls, can also be embedded directly in CPU. Tighter integration with the surrounding electronics in the entire chipset can also be achieved with a custom design. As for PA Semi's role in supplying defense contractors with the company's famously efficient designs, not to worry — a contractor says he'll be able to provision chips popular in military applications for "four to five years."

"In 6 months, we’ve received over 2,700 plans. That’s about 20x what we received in a similar period last year. Out of that group, we’ve funded five companies." Honestly, I have no idea why Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy has decided to blog about the firm's iFund venture with Apple. KPCB is notorious for doing all its deals through insider connections, not by trolling for ideas on the Internet. (Apple board member Al Gore is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins, so it's not like the firm needs an in.) Murphy concludes, "Stay tuned for a future conversation on mobile monetization and navigating the tradeoffs of free versus paid applications." How about a conversation on navigating Apple's imperious rule of its App Store?

The irony in Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin's use of a private email account on Yahoo to keep backroom political dealings from becoming public is not that it's a page ripped from the Bush administration's electronic communications playbook. And it's not that Palin ran on an open-government, reformist platform in her gubernatorial campaign. It's that Democrat pundits will work themselves into a lather over a loophole San Francisco's own hunky God-mayor, Gavin Newsom, has himself exploited.Newsom, a Democratic gubernatorial wannabe, has claimed similar freedom from pesky accountability by using a private device to conduct public business. Shortly after an oil tanker leaked crude oil into San Francisco Bay, Newsom flew to Hawaii on vacation, assuring everyone he was in constant contact. However, he refused to reveal any messages regarding the spill that were sent to or from his iPhone. More damning for Palin is how hamhanded her efforts were: She actually claimed "executive privilege" on emails sent via her official account on which she included her civilian husband, Todd Palin, as a recipient. And free Yahoo webmail? Even the people who read blogs aloud to Republican presidential nominee John McCain know that can't possibly be particularly secure. (Photos by AP/Eric Risberg, Tony Avelar)

Before the first iPhone was released, Apple wanted Opera to build the browser for the iPhone, says a source. Negotiations dragged on for six months, the sticking point being exclusivity — Apple wanted it, but Opera was unwilling to commit, seeing a larger market for licensing its proprietary software to multiple handset manufacturers. Eventually, Apple walked away armed with ideas from the negotiations and built a version of its own Safari browser for the popular mobile device. Meanwhile, Opera ended up as the browser of choice for the blockbuster Nintendo Wii, and Opera Mini did much to saturate the mobile handset market. But is the iPhone claim simply a proud boast made by an indiscreet senior manager at a company party? Maybe.The real question is, why would Apple have approached Opera in the first place? Simple. It's not like the Cupertino company has thousands of employees to throw at a browser project — with only a few thousand in corporate and the rest in retail, Apple is actually happy to outsource engineering whenever possible. Especially when the company can ensure an exclusivity deal and enforce some creative control over the interface. But that demand of exclusivity led Opera to bow out, which forced Apple to end up developing its own mobile browser after all. If the source's assertion is true, passing on Apple could prove a miscalculation on Opera's part. Apple is said to have offered it a large piece of then-theoretical iPhone sales. Opera chose a smaller piece of a larger pie in licensing its Opera Mini to multiple carriers and manufacturers, and so far, it's done fine with that strategy. But even with the bugs and lawsuits, the iPhone is set to beat Steve Jobs's public estimates that Apple would sell 10 million units this year. Meanwhile, mobile search partner Google is intent on porting the company's new Chrome browser to the Android mobile software platform and both Mozilla and Microsoft recently upgraded their competing Firefox and Explorer browsers. Four years in, and Opera has big money to blow on a bar tab at the Supper Club in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. That will buy a lot of champagne and at least a temporary warp in Apple's reality distortion field. But enough to make up for the iPhone money Opera passed up? That remains to be seen.

"Pretty much everything you have done on your iPhone has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover," reports Wired blogger Brian X. Chen. The basics, from Wired's longer story:

70-year old San Diegan William Gillis has added "civil conspiracy" to the list of allegations in a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T. More 3G devices on a local network means less data bandwidth and possibly disconnections, both problems which have plagued the latest version of the iPhone since launch. The conspiracy charge is on top of false advertising allegations he already filed — the conspiracy being that Apple and AT&T knew that the advertised performance would suffer if sales estimates for the devices were actually met or exceeded, hence the two companies oversold the device. [Wired]

Thought there would never be an iPhone app that allows you to produce variations in a screeching tone by waving your phone around like a schizophrenic conducting an imaginary, grating symphony? Wrong you are. Technology! [BoingBoing]

Something we bet Steve Jobs won't be discussing on stage at this morning's iPod event: The third-party developers who create apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch say Apple takes a week or more to approve updates — even bug fixes. Apple also doesn't communicate with the developers to tell them why or how long their updates will be delayed. Fraser Speiers, who developed the Exposure Flickr application for the iPhone, told Macworld:

PALO ALTO — Thursday night in a Crowne Plaza hotel, with an Elks Club banquet roaring next door, Netscape cofounder, Ning king, and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen sat down with Portfolio writer Kevin Maney for a Churchill Club interview. This wasn't exactly what Andreessen had planned. Back in May, he wrote on his blog that he planned to stop speaking in public: "Used to be, if you wanted to get a message out into the market, you would give a talk at a conference, a reporter would write down some of what you said and mangle the rest, and you'd call it a day.... Mid-year resolution #1: No more public speaking. Mid-year resolution #2: More blogging." Two weeks later, he stopped blogging. Here follows a thoroughly mangled version of his comments. Marc, you have no one to blame but yourself.On Microsoft:

Have an iPhone? Obsessed with checking the oft-misleading results of state-by-state polls constantly from now until November? You're insufferable! Which means, of course, that there is an iPhone application just for you. [Gizmodo]

Victor Wang — huh-huh — from Apple emailed the author of the Pull My Finger app, shown above, to explain that the interactive fart-noise program was deemed "of limited utility to the broad user community." I wonder what would happen if they applied a "utility" standard to the music videos sold through the same store? Wang's full email:

Internet video darling Veronica Belmont's

Users at DSLreports.com are sharing stories of lost AT&T EDGE connectivity in the New York metropolitan area this morning. Non-3G iPhones and Nokias are affected, too, so it's not an iPhone-specific problem.

A group of Apple watchers have been compiling a spreadsheet listing product numbers of iPhones submitted by recent buyers. Presuming them to be sequential, they've come up with an estimate of at least 4,539,700 iPhone 3G handsets purchased. With 2.4 million suckers having shelled out as much as $599 for the firstgeneration model, and factories in China churning out over 800,000 units a week, his hot-tempered holiness Steve Jobs's prediction of 10 million units sold in 2008 could come true well before Thanksgiving. (Photo by George Panos) [Apple 2.0]

Don't call it an app store — it's an open content distribution system. Android Market will be Google's version of the iPhone App Store. A PR-speak description of the site emphasizes that posting apps for sale will be a lot like uploading videos to YouTube. But with iPhone app developers already posing as punk-rock heroes, how much more developer-friendly does Google really need to be?A screenshot from the not-yet-launched store seems designed to appeal to wonky coders, not the mass market of non-technical buyers Google will need to attract. My guess: Google will fall all over themselves insisting it's all about developers and Freedom, until the store is ready for launch. Then they'll shove ZeDev Tools and Murderdrome aside for Bingo and FlipBook. At least with a YouTube-like rating system, there's a chance of surprise hits that aren't chosen by app store curators with a canned idea of what a smartphone is for.

To hear iPhone-app developers tell it, VCs are circling and the end of days is nigh. Some developers can push out at an app in four months for less than $5,000, so why play with other people's money at all? "Fuck the VCs" says indie developer John Casasanta, of Tap Tap Tap. "What we’re about to experience in the iPhone world is going to be a bubble along the lines of the one in the late '90s/early 2000s." Echoing that is Mike Lee, cofounder of iPhone app development team Tapulous, who raised $1.8M in angel funding this summer. This week, Lee, one of Tapulous's nine employees, was told to exit his own company. Lee left a depressingly cocky send-off to his team in his wake. It's hardly the rallying cry to go it alone that he meant it to be.

• Michael Kors' Gossip Girl appearance? He'll be in the front row of Eleanor Waldorf's (in real life designer Abigail Lorick's) runway show along with Tinsley Mortimer. [NYO]

A forum post on MacRumors explains how to end-run the password on a locked iPhone. It's so easy it hurts:

A Chinese worker at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China is "definitely not fired," a factory spokesperson told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao. The smiling young lady's photos were found on a newly unboxed iPhone by a British buyer who posted them to MacRumors.

The New York Times pored over the details of AT&T's new overseas data plans for the iPhone. Not only is it pricey, but absent-minded travelers (that's "I believe I'm slightly autistic" in the Valley, or in New York, "Anyone seen my Adderall?") will find themselves paying a lot more than they planned: