Best time to trade in your iPhone is ... now

Rumors are rampant that Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) will announce the iPhone 5 on September 12, with a release date soon after that. But if you want to offset the cost of your new phone by scoring the highest value possible for your old one, trade-in experts say you'll need to lock in your trade now -- before everyone else gets the same idea.

"We always get a rush of people who wait to get a quote until they have the new [iPhone] in their hands," said Jeff Trachsel, the chief marketing officer for trade-in serviceNextWorth. "But as the volume increases, the value of your phone declines."

Trading in now will help you avoid that rush and score more cash. Most trade-in services simply ask for you details about your device, like its storage size and condition, and offer up a price that's guaranteed for 3 weeks to a month. In turn, the companies typically refurbish and resell the devices.

Smart traders play arbitrage: Lock in a price now, then wait until you have the new phone in hand to actually send in your old model.

Old iPhones hold their value remarkably well. At NextWorth, a 16 GB iPhone 4S in good condition currently fetches $274. Rival site Gazelle is offering $277 for an AT&T phone or $260 for a Verizon or Sprint device.

Go one model older, to the iPhone 4, and you can fetch $175 at NextWorth for an AT&T phone or $162 for a Verizon phone. Gazelle will pay $160 to $165.

Click here to continue reading: http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/20/technology/iphone-trade/index.html?iid=HP_LN&hpt=te_t1

Apple account hack raises concern about cloud storage

On Friday night, Wired technology journalist Mat Honan was brutally hacked. In a chain of events that Honan would unravel in the following days, hackers took advantage of security holes at Amazon and Apple to gain access to his iCloud account. They then took over his Gmail account, remotely wiped all data from his MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad, and took over his Twitter account as well as the Twitter account of his former employer, Gizmodo.

The incident might seem small on its surface -- just one person's information, not a huge data breach of credit card numbers. But this one very public incident, thoroughly documented by Honan in a Wired article, could be a wake-up call to many who store their information with cloud-based services, including Amazon, Apple and Google.

"My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures," said Honan. "Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing."

The hackers used fairly basic techniques to accomplish the hack. They found Honan's home address and e-mail address online, and after some back and forth with Amazon tech support, used it to get the last four digits of Honan's credit card number. They called Apple customer support pretending to be Honan and used those four numbers along with same billing address to verify his identity, gaining access to Honan's iCloud account and the associated .Me account. The .Me account was Honan's backup e-mail for his Gmail account. Once they were in his Gmail, the hackers could reset passwords for all the key accounts that used Gmail, including Twitter accounts.

Click here to continue reading: http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/tech/mobile/icloud-security-hack/index.html