Apple's Japanese unit has promised to improve website warnings over its first-generation iPod Nano music player after incidents of it overheating and catching fire, a government statement said.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a weekend press release that Apple Japan had submitted a report about measures it has taken against the incidents -- such as giving warnings or recalling the products.

The report was filed in response to an order issued a week ago by the ministry after recharging problems caused 27 overheating incidents, including six fires, which left four people with minor burns.

"The ministry is in the process of closely examining the report and making additional inquiries to the company," the statement said.

Apple has sold about 1.8 million units of the 2005 iPoD Nano model in Japan since September 2005.

The Japanese unit has put information on its website about the problems, including recommending battery replacements. However, the lack of prominence given to the warnings has provoked criticism.

The ministry statement said that Apple Japan has vowed to "improve the homepage in a way to make it easy for users to understand with regard to warnings and measures to prevent recurrences of incidents."

It also noted that the company had newly notified the ministry of 34 other "non-serious" overheating accidents. The ministry called the delay "truly regrettable."

The latest setback for Apple follows the launch of its iPhone 4, which has been dogged by reception problems linked to its new design and manufacturing issues that have led to the delay of the white version.

After trying dozens of programs to backup and transfer my ipod touch music,apps and photos to my computer i had almost given up finding the right software and to tell the truth i've been getting pretty tired of downloading and deleting software after finding out it only did part of what i wanted it to do or to find out that i can only transfer something like 100 songs then i have to upgrade and buy the full version to be able to transfer the rest, i can finally say to you that you can now throw away all those applications you've downloaded.

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SharePod is easy to use and works! Heres some of the main features:

• Add & remove music and videos from your iPod
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Download   Screenshots

A couple of weeks ago, the first iPhone worm appeared, spreading on jailbroken devices with the SSH application installed (vulnerability being the fact that many users haven’t changed the default root password). As far as worms go, this one was quite benign, merely “rickrolling” users; i.e., changing the background image on the device to an image of Rick Astley.

Now, according to early reports of strange activity by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, and later confirmed by Sophos, there’s a new worm in the wild, and this one is far more malicious.

The new worm is called “Duh” or “Ikee.B”, and it uses the exact same vulnerability as the first one. The fix is thus identical – change the root password in the SSH application to something other than the default, which is “alpine”.

Failing to do so might result in very serious consequences. According to Sophos, Ikee.B is “designed to connect to a server in Lithuania and to follow orders from remote hackers.” It can find vulnerable iPhones on a wide range of IP addresses, including IPs in several different countries, for example the Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Austria, and Hungary. Furthermore, it changes the root password on the iPhone to “ohshit” (as discovered by Paul Ducklin, head of technology in Sophos Asia Pacific.)

Users who haven’t jailbroken their iPhone or haven’t installed the SSH application are not affected by this vulnerability.