This weeks iPhone news doesn’t compliment Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as much as previously… for starters, the (supposedly official) announcement of Orange distributing Apple’s handset in France has been stalled over revenue sharing disputes. That, at least, is today’s report, which comes from French weekly Challenges. The article notes, without citing sources, that the mobile operator is unhappy with Apple’s demands for at least a third of service revenues from iPhone subscriptions. Apparently the issue lies in how phones and service contracts are sold under French law—they cannot be sold together—and that Apple realized it might not make much margin out of the phones alone. The article also says that if an agreement is not reached by the middle of next week, Orange will miss its window to prepare for the Christmas mobile boom.

In the U.S., Apple’s ambivalence about whether it would actively fight the hacking of the iPhone seems to have ended, with the iPhone 1.1.1 update disabling the ability to use the handset on other networks, as well as the “jailbreak” hack which let people install unsupported software. It goes a bit further than that, with one user saying that “after the 1.1.1 patch was installed, it wiped out all of the third-party applications he had installed on a second iPhone” according to InfoWorld, so it’s not just preventing the hack from working but actively trying to undo what the hack allowed. The unlocking crowd are right in there to fix the problem, or break Apple’s fix depending on your point of view. Engadget notes that iPhoneSIMfree users will need the original AT&T (NYSE: T) SIM card to reactivate it after the update, although some other unlocking solutions can’t be reactivated at all. The updates seems to fix some minor flaws, and a critical one. Gizmodo has more details.

• Apple Says Its iPhone Firmware Update Could Break Hacked Phones
• Apples And Oranges: Alleged Dispute Over Revenue Split Stalls Launch