Apple has been fined $1.2 million by Italy's Antitrust Authority for misleading consumers about their rights to product warranties, according to the . Italian law guarantees consumers a two-year warranty on all products they purchase, but Apple had only been offering its standard one year of support and was inducing customers to purchase AppleCare Protection Plans for longer-term coverage.

Italy's , enacted in 2005, considers sellers liable for defective products for two years after the time of sale. Apple's default warranty in Italy and elsewhere covers its products for only one year, and covers them for an extra two years when customers purchase an AppleCare Protection Plan.

Italian authorities have determined Apple violates the Consumer Code with its one-year warranty, resulting in a fine of €400,000 (US$522,860). Apple also must pay a €500,000 (US$653,575) fine for leading customers to believe they needed to purchase protection plans to extend their warranties beyond a year. (Apple did not respond to our requests for comment.)

Jailbreak hacker "chpwn" has that helps iPhone 4 users run Siri, Apple's mobile "personal assistant," on jailbroken devices. His new software, called Spire, claims to avoid copyright issues associated with earlier Siri hacks and improves privacy by allowing users to specify their own to handle communication between an iPhone 4 and Apple's servers. 

Apple still considers Siri a beta feature, so it's possible that Apple wanted to reduce the number of variables in testing the service by having it —i.e. the iPhone 4S. Despite this, iOS hackers were able to how Siri communicates with Apple's servers for the necessary speech-to-text conversion and get it running on an iPhone 4.

Earlier hacks involved possible copyright infringement by using unauthorized copies of the Siri software extracted from the iOS 5 firmware for the iPhone 4S. Spire copies these files directly from Apple's servers, supposedly skirting the copyright issue (though we're sure Apple's lawyers might have something to say about that). Other hacks also relied on a fixed proxy server to communicate with Apple's servers—a potential privacy hole—while Spire lets you configure your own. Siri still requires authentication keys that are on an iPhone 4S, however, so Spire still remains an incomplete solution to permanently running Siri on non-iPhone 4S hardware.

Has Apple acquired flash controller designer Anobit? What does Apple's legal win against HTC really mean? Does MCE's Blu-ray drive for the Mac measure up? How do you make sure your iMessages don't go to your stolen iPhone? Need to catch up on Apple news? We've got you covered:

: Apple has reportedly acquired flash storage controller designer Anobit for $500 million. The acquisition should help Apple make the most of flash-based storage in its mobile devices and provide it another edge over the competition.

: The International Trade Commission has issued its final ruling on the patent battle between HTC and Apple, and HTC is now facing an import ban starting in April of 2012.

When I first heard about podcasting, I didn't get it. Why would I want to download MP3 files of people talking? But then former Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the usefulness of podcasts when he at WWDC 2005, and I was sold. (Watch the video if you're unfamiliar with podcasting.) 

I now listen to podcasts when walking to and from work, cooking, doing the dishes, etc. This lets me keep up with developments in , , , and , not to mention entertainment with things like the stories from and relationship advice from . Podcasting combines two somewhat revolutionary elements: podcasts can be produced by anyone, and you can listen to them on the go without taking away time from other activities.

iTunes users outside of the US often get the short end of the stick when it comes to which media Apple makes available to them. This is usually due to licensing issues with the record labels or TV/movie studios. So when Apple rolls out some of its services internationally, users don't always know what to expect. In the case of iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud, however, Apple has decided to make things clear by that outlines exactly what can and cannot be accessed in each country.

As usual, US users of iTunes in the Cloud have access to everything—they can re-download their music, TV shows, music videos, apps, and books from the iTunes Store from any iOS device at any time. The UK, Canada, and Australia also get all the goods. A number of countries—mostly ones in Latin America and Europe, with a couple others sprinkled in—can re-download everything but TV shows, and most of the remaining countries only have access to apps and books. Apple's support doc also specifies each country that has iTunes Match available to them (in case users there weren't already aware).

The document should help clear up some confusion as to why users in certain countries can't re-download certain types of media.

iPhone users whose devices have been stolen may soon get a little help from Apple when it comes to the problem of iMessages going to the pilfered phone. Ars has heard that Apple may be planning changes to the way iMessages are handled that will make it simpler for users to lock out unauthorized devices, though it's unclear when that might happen. In the meantime, some users are finding that there are some temporary "fixes" to the problem of iMessages going to stolen phones.

last week when Ars reader David Hovis contacted us to tell us his wife's tale of woe. To recap: Mrs. Hovis' iPhone 4S was stolen, so she remotely wiped the device and then asked her carrier to deactivate the SIM. She then purchased a new iPhone and activated it with her old number—theoretically erasing all traces of her information from the original stolen phone. But when Hovis began sending iMessages to his wife, both she and the new owner of the stolen phone received them—Hovis and the new owner had a somewhat lengthy dialogue back and forth about the issue in order to confirm, and the new owner (who had allegedly purchased the stolen device from someone for $500) seemed just as perplexed as Hovis.

Samsung's modified Galaxy Tab for the German market—the 10.1N—seems to be sufficiently different than the iPad in design and likely won't face an injunction, a judge said on Thursday. Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann made the statement during a hearing in Germany over the modified device, implying that the Dusseldorf court may rule in Samsung's favor when the decision deadline rolls around on February 9.

After in Germany earlier this year, Samsung redesigned the tablet slightly in order to inch itself away from the iPad's design. The Galaxy Tab 10.1N was designed only for the German market—the most prominent change being the metal frame around the edge of the device that now wraps around the front instead of laying flat—but Apple still raised complaints, filing for an injunction against the 10.1N in November.

Despite Apple's complaint, however, Judge Brueckner-Hoffman disagreed. "According to the court's assessment, the defendant has moved away sufficiently from the legally protected design," she said at the hearing, according to . She added that the court doesn't believe anyone is buying a Samsung tablet when they think they are getting an iPad, according to . "[C]onsumers are well aware that there is an original and that competitors try to use similar designs, so buyers are vigilant when looking at products."

Those who use Amazon's Kindle app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch can now finally access newspaper and magazine subscriptions that were previously only available to hardware Kindle users. The company announced the new Kindle for iOS feature, along with a handful of others, on Wednesday morning. Amazon claims that users now have access to more than 400 publications that can be delivered straight to their devices.

In addition to the ability to read your magazine and newspaper subscriptions through Amazon, Kindle for iOS users can now also access documents that they send to their private "send-to-kindle" e-mail address through the app. Amazon also says it has added a PDF reader that will open PDFs from within Mail or Safari on the device, or PDFs transferred via iTunes. "The PDF reader is enhanced with support for PDF table of contents and thumbnail navigation for quickly jumping through the document," the company said via e-mail.

The new features are available today via an app update through Apple's App Store, but when I tested it on my iPad to see if I could access a New York Times subscription on my account, the app claimed there were no subscriptions to be had. Amazon did not respond to our request for clarification on this point by publication time, so it's unclear as to why this is happening.

Have any of you been able to access your periodical subscriptions through the iOS app yet, or are you running into the same problem?

(Update: Some are telling me that NYTimes restricts its subscriptions to hardware Kindles, and that's the reason why the subscription isn't showing up.)

The International Trade Commission handed down a ruling on Monday saying that several of HTC's smartphones and would be subject to an import ban beginning in April 2012. The case is important for Apple, as it is the first substantive ruling that Android devices definitively infringe on an Apple patent. Despite this, however, the end result of this particular ruling may have little material effect on HTC, Google, or other handset makers—HTC says it plans to remove the offending feature, and there's plenty of time to do so before the ban kicks in.

The ITC ruling goes back to Apple's first legal attacks against HTC in March 2010. In addition to filing a , Apple also filed a with the ITC. While the ITC takes its own sweet time to render a final ruling—in this case, nearly two years—the Commission still generally wraps up its cases faster than typical federal circuit court dockets.

If you buy TV shows from iTunes, you know the scene well: you've bought one or two episodes of a new show just to test it out, only to find that you love it and want to buy the rest of the season. But instead of making it easy, iTunes doesn't let you hit a button to download the rest of the season—once you've bought a couple episodes, you have to either buy the whole season at once (including those one or two episodes again), or download each remaining episode independently.

Why Apple would overlook something so simple remains a mystery, but the company rectified the situation this week by adding a "Complete My Season Pass" feature to the iTunes Store (hat tip to ). Just like the "Complete My Album" feature on the music side of iTunes, Complete My Season Pass will reduce the price of the full season pass by the amount that you've already paid for individual episodes, allowing you to round out the season without buying doubles. It's such a minor change, but so necessary for maintaining TV show purchasing sanity.