In an effort to boost sales in the UK, Apple has extended its Black Friday offer outside of the US, promising to slash prices on a selection of its products.

Black Friday has been a retail tradition in the US for some time now - referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving when stores online and off cut prices to kickstart the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

Apple customers will have already received an email promoting the one-off sale tomorrow. "You'll find lots of great iPod, iPhone and Mac gift ideas - all with free shipping," the message reads.

Any more details have been pretty unforthcoming, however, which is not really surprising given the usual secrecy an intrigue surrounding any Apple announcements.

Not to be outdone, however, Microsoft has announced it is partnering with eBay to make it easier for IE8 users to find "products at deep discounts" in the run up to Christmas.

Daily deals to be found on the popular online auction site will be displayed for users via the Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice - functionality in the new version of the browser which previews users' favourite sites.

Happy shopping.

Not long after the first proof of concept for iPhone malware surfaced, a piece of genuine malware for the iPhone has been spotted in the wild.

For the overwhelming majority of iPhone users, this really isn't much of a problem. Phones which have been activated and updated through iTunes are in no way vulnerable to either attack. Only phones which have been jailbroken and equipped with SSH are subject to the attack, which can be thwarted by changing the SSH password from the default.

But how do you change the SSH password? And what is the SSH default password anyway? If you have to ask yourself these questions, you may want to give some serious thought to restoring your jailbroken iPhone to its original settings. Running a jailbroken iPhone might not be for you.

In the early days, jailbreaking was performed by users who wanted to run third party apps on their iPhones. It was really the only way to get software installed and running until the App Store opened up. As jailbreaking became more popular, the process was streamlined and made much, much easier to do, This, however, glossed over the fact that you were performing a fairly serious modifaction on your phone, one which released Apple's own security protections. If you aren't very aware of what this means and how you can deal with it, then jailbreaking your iPhone probably isn't be best idea.

That's not to say that I think jailbreaking your iPhone is wrong or dangerous on its own, if you know what you're doing. Many of those who do run jailbroken phones are well aware of the danger of leaving a default password in place, and most of those users have long since closed up such a hole. Others, however, have jailbroken their handsets without really understanding what they were getting into, and perhaps this should serve as a wakeup call for those users to either read up on managing a jailbroken iPhone, or get back behind Apple's walled garden.

We are just over a week away from 'Black Friday' in the US.

Despite the ominous title, it's actually not a bad thing at all. The Black Friday term refers to the day after the Thanksgiving holiday which officially marks the beginning of the holiday season. For many retailers, the day is the first in a stretch in which businesses begin to show profits and for the first time enter the black on the year. To mark the occasion, retailers often throw huge sales promotions and offer great deals.

This year, rumor has it that Apple is among those planning a huge sale. Prices are said to be set to drop as low as 30 per cent.

That companies would look to offer big sales is no surprise. The recession is ongoing and retailers have plenty of merchandise to move still. Interesting in this case, however, is that Apple is getting so aggressive with their price cuts. The company is supposedly defying the recession and posting its best numbers ever. Perhaps things aren't as rosy as we have been lead to believe?

No, this is not a repeat from Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Microsoft once again finds itself having to stave of claims that it blatantly ripped off Apple's MacOS with the latest version of Windows. This time, the company had to issue a blog posting after an executive suggested that Microsoft used OS X as the standard for designing Windows 7.

I guess if you have been in a coma for the last 25 years, this is big news. It's no secret that Microsoft and Apple tend to have OS features that look a lot alike. The legal part of the issue was settled long ago, as was the point that Apple got much of its GUI ideas from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Aside from that, one can argue that it's a good thing when vendors take cues from one another. While Mac fans will contend that Apple has very little to gain from copying MS, they have followed Redmond's lead on things such as the right click and the adoption of x86 chips.

Besides, in the end this is a good thing. The day that OS X is not good enough to inspire Microsoft is the day that the Macintosh is in serious trouble.

The Beatles are set to finally release their entire catalogue in digital format. What's more, all of those songs will be on an Apple.

Unfortunately for iTunes fans, that Apple will be from Apple Corps, not Apple Inc. The band's record label has finally settled its various legal wranglings and gotten around to putting the Beatles' complete catalogue in a single digital offering.

Instead of offering the albums for download, however, the label has instead opted to package every remastered album together with movies, photos and artwork into a single 16GB USB drive. The drive will be offered in the shape of an apple and will be limited to a run of 30,000 and will cost £200.00.

Okay, so it's a bit disappointing that the songs won't be available through iTunes or another music retail service, but at the same time that apple-shaped USB drive and the bundled video and artwork is pretty cool. While normally I'd laugh off the idea of selling music on a thumb drive as an idea best left in 2001, I wouldn't mind getting this Beatles collection come Christmas time.