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The holidays are now upon us and after today's turkey is digested, it will be time to strap on your most comfortable shoes and prepare for an early day of marathon shopping. "Black Friday," the unofficial retail holiday that lands the day after Thanksgiving, kicks off the season with deals and doorbusters...not to mention crowds and chaos.

However, those of you with an Apple iPhone can get a leg up on the other shoppers who have to fumble through old-fashioned newspaper printouts that list each store's bargains. You can have all the deals at your fingertips, thanks to new iPhone applications that list everything on sale. And that's not all, either. Read on for our guide to preparing your iPhone for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season beyond.

Earlier this week, the news of the first iPhone worm made its way around the net. Since the worm only targeted jailbroken devices and then only those which had the SSH program installed, there wasn't a need for concern on the part of most iPhone users. However, a second hacker tool which uses the same security hole as the so-called iKee worm has reared its head and this one is far more dangerous. According to security firm Intego, the new hacker tool goes after personal data stored on the device including email, contacts, SMS messages, calendars, photos, music files, videos and any other data recorded by any iPhone app.

In other words, if you're the owner of a jailbroken phone, you should now be concerned.

This article has been updated. A more current list of tools can be found here: "30+ Tools for Building Mobile Apps." Please visit that page instead!

These days, everyone wants to build their own iPhone applications, but not everyone knows how write the code necessary in order to create them. Fortunately, there are now a number of tools that allow non-developers the ability to create their own iPhone apps without knowing programming or scripting. Some are general-purpose app builders designed for small businesses while other target specific needs, like apps for musicians or for eBook authors. Still others let developers familiar with simpler programming languages like HTML write apps using the code they know and then will transform that code into an iPhone application which can be submitted to the iTunes Store.

Below we've listed 13 different tools that let you create your own iPhone applications, none of which require knowledge of Objective C, the programming language used to build apps for the iPhone OS .

Firefox users can now add and customize keyboard navigation to Facebook with just a few clicks using a new plug-in added to Userscripts.org this afternoon. Want the ability to jump to your friends' photos, your groups, or any other page on Facebook with a single keystroke? This simple script is really handy and is already helping me access parts of Facebook that have always been a few too many mouse-clicks away for them to show up regularly in my visits to the site.

Called simply Facebook Keyboard Navigation, the tool requires the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey - a powerful browser customization tool you can learn to make even more advanced use of in 5 minutes.

The iPhone hacker George Hotz, (aka geohot on Twitter) has done it again. Earlier this year, he made a name for himself in the hacking community as being the first to provide a usable iPhone 3GS jailbreak, which he then followed up by releasing a "better" unlock tool for the same device. Now he's again beaten the iPhone Dev Team to the punch with his release of blackra1n, a jailbreak tool for the Apple's latest iPhone firmware, 3.1.2.

Last week we took a poll asking for your favorite 'light' blogging service. These are blogging services that make it very easy for you to share content and media. While old-school blogging service Blogger.com got the most votes in our poll, newer slicker services such as Tumblr, Soup.io and the recently trendy Posterous are popular with early adopters.

Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.

I may be a scruffy, untrained blogger but I can still appreciate the work of traditional professional technology analysts. SageCircle is an analyst analyst firm, they track the analyst industry. Their emails and podcasts are an inspiration - dense with information and loads of fun. (If you like that kind of thing.)

SageCircle has been maintaining a list of tech analysts with Twitter accounts and the list is now up to 724 active users. It's a cool list and I thought it would be a good thing to put into TweepML, a wonderful Twitter group-creation service we reviewed earlier this month. The link for following all the analysts is below.

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one limited to the U.S.'s borders, either. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation. (Keep that in mind when tagging your friends' photos, too, won't you?)

But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

Amid the hubbub over new iPods and iTunes' LPs announced at last week's annual Apple event, one feature that was a little under-hyped was the new "anti-phishing" protection built into the iPhone's Safari web browser. The added feature, available via an iPhone software update, warns users when visiting fraudulent websites using Safari. This sort of technology is already commonplace on the web, but is rarely seen on the mobile platform.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem with the new security feature: it wasn't working...or at least, so it seemed. As it turns out, the problem was that users weren't informed as to how to properly activate the anti-phishing protection, an issue that points to a poor implementation of what could and should have been a major breakthrough in mobile computing technology.

Tweets on Twitter, you can favorite them - but do people take the time to? It turns out they do and someone's probably been favoriting Tweets from you, too. Favstar is a new service that tracks the most favorited tweets tweeted and finds some pretty funny stuff that way. The service will also tell you who's been favoriting your tweets though - and tonight it added RSS notification to its features.

That means you can now subscribe to an RSS feed showing you who likes your Tweets, even if they didn't reply, retweet or respond otherwise. That's interesting information to know.