Apple’s first computer, the Apple-1, will be for sale at Christie’s Auction House this month, and the bidding is expected to skyrocket to upwards of $200,000.

Forgot about the new MacBook Air, how about Apple-1? The original personal computer is being auctioned by Christie’s beginning November 23 and is expected to net somewhere between $161,000 and $242,000.

The computer was created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 in Jobs’ parents’ basement, while the two were in high school.

If you’re truly interested, here are the ancient computer’s specs: 8 KB of RAM, cassette board connector, 6502 microprocessor, and firmware in PROMS. No monitor or keyboard, for anyone hoping to eke out even some minimal use. Let’s be clear: this is a collector’s item only, and as The New York Times points out, this model “could barely power a game of Pong.”

It’s the historical worth of the machine that will lure in buyers. It’s estimated that there are a mere 50 surviving models of the 200 originally produced, as they were (appropriately) swiftly replaced by the Apple-2.

In addition to this harrowing hardware, the winner will also become the proud owner of some Mac memorabilia. Its original box, manual, an invoice, and a letter to the first owner from Jobs himself are included – typed on lined notebook paper.

Everyone stateside interested in bidding is in luck – Christie’s will be holding an online auction simultaneously. So skip Black Friday (for the next several years) and maybe you can afford to make the Apple aficionado on your Christmas list very happy.

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PayPal rushed a fix out today for its iPhone app after learning that it contained a flaw that could be used by attackers to trick PayPal users into divulging their account information.

The authentication vulnerability in PayPal’s iPhone app could have allowed someone to conduct what is called a “man-in-the-middle” attack, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar told CNET. In such an attack, people who happen to be accessing their PayPal accounts over an unsecured Wi-Fi network could be tricked into thinking they are on the legitimate PayPal site when they aren’t.

Only PayPal’s iPhone app, which has been downloaded more than 4 million times, is affected; the Android app nor the company’s Web site are affected, Nayar said. iPhone users will have to download the update from the iPhone app store to secure their phones.

“We don’t believe any customers have been affected at all, and if there were any affected they would be 100 percent covered by PayPal,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the matter today after being contacted by viaForensics, the mobile security firm that discovered the problem.

PayPal learned of the problem yesterday from the newspaper, according to Nayar. “As soon as we found out, we moved to push a fix to address this vulnerability,” he said.

Nayar complained that viaForensics put users at risk by publicizing the information before giving PayPal a chance to fix it. “We work closely with the security community and…we ask them to report to us before going public,” he said.

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For iPad owners envious of the iPhone’s multitasking abilities, you won’t have to covet any longer.

iOS 4.2–software that will update, improve, and repair a variety of features and bugs for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad–could be available by Friday. Steve Jobs said last month that it would arrive sometime in November, and this week the rumormongers are pointing to the end of the week for the day it will drop. The near final version of the software was released to developers last week, and Apple has already started accepting iOS 4.2-compatible apps.

Now, this isn’t just another incremental update. iOS 4.2 is, at least from a development standpoint, an evolutionary step for the iOS platform, as it finally brings the iPhone and iPad in step with one another. Previously their OS releases were slightly out of sync, due to the iPhone software and hardware upgrades coming in summer and the iPad hardware and software getting introduced in April this year. With this upgrade the two will share the same software.

There are some significant updates iPad and iPhone users are each waiting for in this release, along with the expected minor improvements.

Here’s a handy summary of what’s expected in iOS 4.2:

AirPlay
This is a more polished version of AirTunes. With AirPlay, as Jobs described at a September press conference, you can stream audio, video, and photos over Wi-Fi to other devices on your network. That includes your iPhone, iPod, and iPad, but also Apple TV. The way Jobs described it, you could be watching a movie on your iPad, hit pause, turn on AirPlay, and pick up the movie right where it left off on your Apple TV.

Netflix, which makes iPhone and iPad apps, and is available on Apple TV, already does this even without AirPlay. But will AirPlay functionality work with other non-iTunes content? Either with music-streaming services like Pandora or Hulu Plus? We don’t know if app makers will need to individually support AirPlay in their apps, or if it’s included by default.

And where do apps fits in? Apple TV does not have App Store access–yet anyway–so being able to play games or open apps on a large screen TV via AirPlay would certainly increase the appeal of Apple TV in its current incarnation.

AirPrint
iOS 4.2 also brings the ability to print to any networked printer from an iOS device. AirPrint works over Wi-Fi, will automatically sniff out a printer on your network, and doesn’t require any added drivers.

We do know that Apple has struck an agreement with Hewlett-Packard, which will enable all its newest printers to work with AirPrint.

This is a pretty big deal for iPad users. Apple has sold it as a productivity device, and pushed productivity apps, but provided no easy way to print directly from it. Of course the advent of AirPlay simultaneously cuts out several app developers who created apps to enable printing from the iPad.

Multitasking and more for iPad
iOS 4.2 brings the stuff that came to the iPhone in iOS 4 to the iPad. Yes, that means multitasking (the ability to run multiple apps simultaneously), folders for organizing apps, and Game Center access.

Apple has also added a way to adjust the brightness from within an app as part of the multitasking bar. Previously users would have had to leave whatever app they had open and dig through the device’s settings menu.

There’s also an update for 3G iPads: with 4.2 they will have the same higher signal bars at the lower end of the wireless spectrum released following Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna press event.

The Great iPad Lock Switch Controversy
It sounds innocent enough, that iOS 4.2 will turn the slider on the top right corner of the iPad from a screen orientation lock to a mute button. But it’s riled up some hardcore iPad users. They’re not happy that what was once a simple flick of a button to keep the screen locked in landscape or portrait mode now requires pulling up the new multitasking bar, swiping to the left, and selecting the screen orientation lock.

The change adds more steps, but what it really does is make life easier for Apple since the switch’s function will be consistent across the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch models now.

Speed boost for iPhone 3G
Scores of iPhone 3G owners were none too pleased with the iOS 4 update on their older model phones. Complaints poured in that their phones were freezing up when typing or scrolling, and the battery life plummeted. One iPhone owner has even sued Apple over the update’s effect on her phone. But developers who’ve had access to the beta version of 4.2 say that it will return those affected 3G models to the speed they used to operate at before the 4.0 update.

Minor housekeeping for iPhone 4
As with any update, there are a bunch of small improvements planned, including options for new text alert sounds, new wallpaper for iPhone 4s, and added settings for Game Center.

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High satisfaction rates among iPad owners is leading to more interest in the device, which continues to eat away at demand for Netbooks, according to a new survey from ChangeWave Research.

The survey, which included the views of 3,108 consumers contacted in October about buying plans for PCs, Netbooks, and tablets, showed that 26 percent of consumers would purchase a tablet in the next 90 days.

Of those tablet buyers, 80 percent said they would purchase an iPad. RIM’s PlayBook, which is Apple’s nearest competitor, came in at 8 percent. The Samsung Galaxy Tab (3 percent), HP Slate (2 percent), Archos tablet (1 percent), Dell Streak (1 percent), and Sony Dash (1 percent) rounded out the list.

Noting Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, Paul Carton, vice president of research at ChangeWave, said that “with the iPad having already set the bar so very high in terms of customer expectations, these new Tablets all have their work cut out for them in order to succeed in the race to gain new market share.”

ChangeWave’s survey asked current iPad owners about their satisfaction with the device. The numbers showed 72 percent of owners were “very satisfied” (the highest rating), while 23 percent reported being “somewhat satisfied.”

Those who reported being “somewhat unsatisfied” (1 percent), “very unsatisfied” (0 percent), and “don’t know” (3 percent), accounted for 4 percent of respondents.

The percentage of consumers planning to purchase desktop computers (6 percent) in the next 90 days was up 1 point since the last survey in August, and those planning to buy a notebook remained at 8 percent, according to ChangeWave.

The big loser Netbooks, which saw a loss in consumer interest. According to ChangeWave, 14 percent of consumers planning to purchase a laptop said it would be a Netbook, down 10 points from June 2009 when interest for the device peaked.

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The end of Lime Wire as it has existed for years appears to be at hand.

U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction today against the company that operates the long popular file-sharing software LimeWire and orders managers there to disable “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading…and/or all functionality” of the LimeWire software, Lime Wire announced.

In May, Wood, who serves the Southern District of New York, granted summary judgment in favor of the music industry’s claims that Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.

LimeWire, the software, was released 10 years ago and quickly emerged as one of the favorite ways to pass pirated music across the Web. Gorton and his company have acknowledged making millions from offering the software.

While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward,” a Lime Wire spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.”

Lime Wire continues to exist but no longer operates as a file-sharing service, the spokesperson said. Exactly what the New York-based company will do in the future is unclear. At this point, the company’s chances of licensing music for Spoon appear to be small and its predicted doom.

Legacy software
Obviously, there is little that the court can do about software that is already released. But in her order, Wood tried to close the door on any further releases, upgrades, advertising of the software, or the creation of any comparable software in the future. She also wants Lime Wire to do its best to discourage the use of the LimeWire software already in the wild, what she called “legacy software.”

“Using its best efforts,” Wood wrote, “Lime Wire shall use all reasonable technological means to immediately cease and desist the current infringement of the Copyrighted Works by Legacy users through the LimeWire System and Software and to prevent and inhibit future infringement of copyright works.”

She ordered Gorton and employees to establish “default settings in the legacy software that block the sharing of unauthorized media files” and offer users tools to remove the software from their hard drives. Wood ordered Lime Wire to create a copyright filter that would work on legacy software. In addition, Wood required Gorton and crew to first get the permission of the music labels before building any new, legal version of LimeWire.

However Lime Wire disables their client, there are plenty of alternative file-sharing software and networks available. Indeed, BitTorrent has emerged over the last few years as a much more popular way to share files.

Spoon
But for Gorton, the injunction is not the end of his or his company’s troubles. The Recording Industry Association of America, which filed the copyright complaint against Gorton and Lime Wire in 2007, will now seek damages that could easily top $1 billion. That phase of the trial is scheduled to begin in January. A group of music publishers has also filed a copyright complaint against Lime Wire.

According to music industry sources, Gorton and the RIAA were in settlement negotiations for a long time as the judge deliberated over whether to impose the injunction.

Gorton offered to license music from the top four record companies for Spoon, Lime Wire’s little-known legal music service. The deal fell through after Gorton’s lawyers insisted that the music labels allow LimeWire to continue to operate for a year so users could be moved over to Spoon.

The labels totally rejected the idea. RIAA lawyers have told the judge that LimeWire costs the record labels about $500 million every month in lost revenue. They wouldn’t wait a year. They wouldn’t wait a month. They assert they have taken a beating from Lime Wire for too long.

“For the better part of the last decade, Limewire and Gorton have violated the law,” the RIAA said in a statement. “The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that Lime Wire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely.”

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Chances are you don’t leave your front door unlocked. And you shouldn’t leave your Wi-Fi network unsecured either.

Why? With a $50 wireless antenna and the right software a criminal hacker located outside your building as far as a mile away can capture passwords, e-mail messages, and any other data being transmitted over your network, and even decrypt data that is supposedly protected.

Someone could also join the network and launch attacks on your computer and any other devices using the network at that time. If file sharing has been left on or the personal firewall is misconfigured it’s relatively easy to access the computer via an open Wi-Fi network. Someone could upload an executable program to a file on your hard drive that steals data or just leaves a back door for future access. And if you are using the network to connect to a corporate network through a VPN (virtual private network) an attacker can get into the corporate system too.

“The most dangerous thing is a direct attack,” Don Bailey, a security consultant at iSec Partners who is also an expert on telecommunications snooping, told CNET. “The threat is not only that your traffic can be sniffed, but that an attacker can get access to all your data and connections on your computer, even those supposedly secured by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption.”

Unsecured Wi-Fi networks can be attractive for scammers to launch spam and virus attacks because the attack would be tracked back to the Wi-Fi network but not to the computer of the criminal who exploited the open network.

“Someone could be using your wireless network, whether it’s a neighbor or a customer, and you are taking on the liability of that person’s action,” Bailey said. “If they do something illegal, like break into computers, those actions are going to come back to your hot spot and the federal authorities are going to hassle you.”

Even though many Wi-Fi routers come with WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) enabled by default, a lot of people don’t want to be bothered with setting up a password, despite the fact that you don’t have to type it in every time you log on. The Wigle.net (Wireless Geographic Logging Engine) site shows that of 26.8 million Wi-Fi networks logged by volunteers who were “war driving”–driving around in cars and using laptops or PDAs to find wireless networks–49 percent were listed as secured with encryption and nearly 28 percent were shown to be not using encryption. (On the remaining 23 percent the security level was unknown.)

There is also an interactive map on Wigle.net where you can zoom in to see individual Wi-Fi networks and even the SSID (Service Set Identifier) numbers associated with individual wireless local area networks.

Not only should you not host an unsecured wireless network, but you should definitely be extra careful when using other people’s open networks.

There is no good way to tell whether a hot spot is legitimate, like a Starbucks Wi-Fi network, or if it was set up by someone for malicious purposes. Even if you are on what appears to be a Starbucks network, there could be someone on the network who is spying on other users.

There are also instances of inadvertent fake hot spots. Some older Windows machines running XP create ad hoc networks called “Free Public WiFi,” which do not connect you to the Internet but to the computer broadcasting that service. The hole that enables this has been patched, but affected computers that haven’t had an operating system update are still vulnerable.

Whether you choose to trust hot spots, configure your device–laptop and smartphone–to connect to open Wi-Fi networks only with your approval and not automatically. Wi-Fi-enabled devices may automatically open themselves to sharing and connecting with other devices, so be sure to turn file sharing off when using Wi-Fi.

“The best thing to do is to stay off hot spots all together,” Bailey said. “If you are going to use them, make sure you have a firewall and VPN technology.”

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NEW YORK–Lime Wire installed a secret upgrade to its software beginning last summer that would enable the company to shut down the peer-to-peer network whenever it wanted, music industry sources have confirmed.

The revelation was first reported Tuesday by PC Mag. According to the Web tech publication, reporters there were tipped off by a source who said the company had installed an upgrade that allowed Lime Wire to turn the network off.

“LimeWire added the ability to send out messages to clients updating them with the location of their local peers via start-up scripts,” PC Mag wrote, citing the anonymous source. “It will be these start-up scripts that will be disabled…largely isolating individual users.”

And Lime Wire didn’t give users much choice about whether to accept the upgrade, according to PC Mag. The company “added automatic updates, with a key stipulation; if an update is available and the user chooses to ignore it, the LimeWire client cannot be opened,” the magazine reported.

Tiffany Guarnaccia, a Lime Wire spokeswoman said that story in PC Mag was “mostly accurate.”

Lime Wire is the maker of LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer software, accused of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed in 2007 by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the four largest record companies. On Tuesday, a federal court judge here hit Lime Wire with a permanent injunction that required the company to shut down its file-sharing network. While Lime Wire is out of the file-sharing business, Guarnaccia said the company continues to operate and is considering its options.

Asked about a rumor that the company had begun to layoff employees, Guarnaccia said “layoffs – they are a hard decision to make. We’re evaluating all possibilities.”

Issuing the auto-updates that secretly undermined the abilities of the LimeWire software, appears to have been done to improve Lime Wire’s negotiating position with the music labels.

After U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood granted summary judgment for the record industry, Lime Wire and the labels began settlement talks, say multiple music industry sources. Lime Wire proposed to create a new legal music service called Spoon and told label execs that the secret software updates would give them enough control to ensure they could push users to the legal service.

The sources said that talks broke down when Lime Wire insisted that they be allowed to keep LimeWire software operational for a year while they moved people over to the legal offering. The labels balked and Wood granted an injunction against Lime Wire.

Whether LimeWire is shut down or not, Gorton will likely walk away with millions. Records show that in 2006, the P2P service generated $20 million in revenue.

Gorton also said during a deposition for the RIAA’s case that that he transferred 87.1 percent of Lime Group’s ownership interest to his family trust, and that the primary reason he did that was to “protect the assets in the event of a legal judgment against me personally.”

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Google won’t face any fines from U.S. regulators over its accidental Street View Wi-Fi data collection.

The Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to the search company today, saying that because Google has made improvements to its internal privacy practices, including a formal review process, it would not pursue the matter further.

“Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time,” wrote David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In May, Google said that because of a programming error, its Street View cars had intercepted fragments of data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks for periods of 200 milliseconds at a time. An investigation by the Canadian government showed that the about 12 Blu-ray discs’ worth of Wi-Fi transmissions worldwide were collected after an unnamed Google engineer failed to follow company procedures–by not sending design specifications for Street View code to the company’s legal department for review.

Google acknowledged last week that, in some cases, it collected e-mail messages and passwords. There is no evidence the data was ever misused. The company has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the locations of Wi-Fi networks.

Vladeck’s letter said that Google “should develop and implement reasonable procedures” to “identify risks to consumer privacy.”

In a blog post on October 22, Google outlined the steps it was taking to improve its privacy practices, including appointing computer scientist Alma Whitten as a director of privacy, and better training and legal compliance.

Some other privacy commissioners continue to investigate Street View.

Update 10:15 a.m. PT: Google just sent over this statement: “We welcome the news that the FTC has closed its inquiry and recognized the steps we have taken to improve our internal controls. As we’ve said before and as we’ve assured the FTC, we did not want and have never used the payload data in any of our products or services.” And while I’m at it, in case there’s any confusion, the investigations aren’t targeting Street-View-the-mapping-product. Instead, the agencies have been looking into how Google’s cars that did the mapping separately collected fragments of unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions.

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