All Articles Tagged hack

We haven’t covered the latest in the hacking front here at Phone different for a few reasons:

1. Dieter was busy this week
2. Rene dare not fiddle with his unlocked iPhone let it get bricked and he not be able to use it up there in Canadaland
3. Chad, Brian, and Casey are not madmen, they like their iPhones just they way they are, thank you very much.

Anyhow, here’s the deal. If you’re on a Mac, you can now go download the iPhone Pwnage Tool¹. What does it do? Well, it’s a full-on way to load any firmware (i.e. version of the iPhone OS) you want, including versions not even made by Apple (should some such version arise). Supposedly this will be remarkably difficult for Apple to lock down in the future. Naturally, the firmware we all are interested in is the current Beta of the 2.0 firmware. I’ll be making this my weekend project, so stay tuned to see if I have a new 2.0 Hands-On or a new Paperweight Hands-On.

Engadget brings us this video (embedded below) of the action as well:

¹ That’s pronounced “Ownage,” if you’re wondering, as in “Hey n00b, I’m totally like, gonna like, pwn joo n00b.”

Two fun little hacks for your iPhone this morning. The first comes from Nate True (aka iPhone genius), it’s a neat little way to get speed dial icons on your Home Screen. The trick? 1.1.3 allows you to add web shortcuts to the home screen and Safari allows web pages to initiate calls (with your permisison). Two great tastes that taste great together. True tells you how:

So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but I know many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen.

I’ve put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There’s no jailbreaking required for this one – it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation. –

The next dialing hack is for those of you with jailbroken iPhones. This is actually one of the better apps I’ve seen for this gray market – real Voice Dialing on your iPhone. It’s done up by Makayama and it’s $27.95. You’ll need to add them as a source yourself:

To get a free tryout, start Installer on your iPhone, press Sources, then Edit, then Add. Next, type http://tinyurl.com/2t8cax

…It might seem a little crazy to be paying for an iPhone app when the SDK is just around the corner, though. Nate True himself makes it clear that 1.1.3 takes more steps toward safely-installed apps by reducing the number of programs that run as “root.” But if you’re jonesing for voice dial and have money to burn, you have that option now.

Voodoo doll courtesy ^Vanessa^

One of the biggest gripes about the iPhone is that its speaker isn’t nearly loud enough for many people. This problem was exacerbated early on because the iPhone’s alerts were originally too quiet to begin with. Apple themselves have fixed this problem by allowing you to change, say, the SMS alert volume. There’s also rumblings that Apple has quietly introduced louder speaker on iPhones manufactured more recently.

But if you’re one of those crazy early adopters, not only are you stuck with less money in your pocket (because of that unprecedented price drop), you’re also stuck with a quiet iPhone in your pocket as well. What to do? well, according to skorpiond at modmyifone,

I grabbed a needle and sticked it into every single tiny hold on the bottom left corner of the iPhone. I think it was dirty in there or something because now this *** is EXACTLY how I wanted it since day one… LOUD!!! I really hope I didn’t mess up the speaker though.*

…So basically you engage in some warranty-voiding dangerfun with your iPhone — presumably popping the protective cover over the speaker. Anybody brave enough to try this? We at Phone different already absolutely destroyed our first iPhone in the Video takeapart, so we’re a little gunshy about voiding more warranties.

via engadget mobile

Well, in iTunes 7.5, free ringtones are back. It turns out that you can do the old trick of renaming an AAC music file to turn it into a ringtone. To get it to work, take any 30 second m4a file in finder, rename the extension to be m4r, and drag it in to iTunes. Voila!

For the iPhone, folks figured out how to downgrade the iPhone firmware to the older 1.1.1 firmware to get all the fun goodies if you decide that 1.1.2 isn’t all that great, or you miss the ease of the jailbreakme.com installer.

It seems that the iPhone modem firmware has been unlocked as well, meaning that they’ve figured out how to unlock 1.1.2 iPhones once the jailbreak is easy enough. A simpler GUI app will probably show up in the next few days.

Hackers have figured out how to re-flash the radio in 1.1.2 so it is now safe to unlock the iPhone, as you can “revirginize” the iPhone after unlocking it to avoid any bricking with the next update.

The 1.1.2 iPhone software has already been jailbroken. The software isn’t quite out of beta yet, it works only with Intel machines, and you’ll have to read a readme.txt file to figure it out, but it’s available for download if you need it. If you want to jailbreak 1.1.2, you’ll have to do most of the work from 1.1.1, so keep that downgrade link handy.

And for the last little tidbits, if you have an iPhone with 1.1.2 firmware connected to iTunes 7.5, it gives you the battery status in a little icon next to the eject button in iTunes. And, if you put your computer with iTunes 7.5 to sleep, it will still charge the iPhone. Oh, and you can sync entire events from iPhoto ‘07 to the iPhone instead of just photo albums.

This guy Core of wickedpsyched.net coded a version of AFP, the Apple Filesharing Protocol, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This means that you could enable filesharing on your iPhone and copy some files over directly from your desktop over wi-fi. If you ask me, this is better than disk mode, where you can plug in your iPhone and it shows up as a removable disk. It apparently doesn’t show up in Installer.app yet, but give it a few days and I’m sure it will be there.

There’s also great news if you’re more of a windows person. Say you just prefer the Samba/SMB/Windows Filesharing so you can share with windows and mac, well he’s got you covered there too.

Someone has snapped a picture of the iPhone with the 3rd party application installer.app icon at an Apple store. It’s kinda funny, it really hits home that jailbreaking right now and installing 3rd party apps is as simple as pointing an iPhone at jailbreakme.com.

There’s now an instant method to get third party apps on your iPhone (firmware 1.1.1 only). The same methond works on iPod Touch. I have to say, this is by far the easiest method of hacking the iPhone that I’ve ever seen. This method, which relies on the iPhone TIFF vulnerability, is also incredibly simple to use; much more so than the previous AppTapp installer method for iPhone 1.0. Since it relies on a buffer overflow, I expect this method to stop working as soon as Firmware 1.1.2 is released, which could be any day now.

All you have to do is point your iPhone browser at jailbreakme.com, confirm the wish to jailbreak, read some stuff, scroll down, select ‘Install AppSnapp’, wait for Safari to quit, and wait. Your iPhone or iPod Touch should restart automatically, and when it’s all done, you’ll have Installer.app ready and willing for you to install 3rd party apps!

This method of installing 3rd party apps doesn’t require any computer software, you just have to go to the website on your iPhone browser and follow the instructions. Again, the site makes efficacious use of the TIFF exploit that’s been talked about before, so if using a security vulnerability to install software freaks you out, don’t go to the site I’ve posted after the cut.

Conversely, f you think that using a buffer overflow to install software is awesome, 31337, or k-rad, there’s a link for you and your iPhone after the break.

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If you’ve been hacking your iPhone to get 3rd party apps with firmware 1.1.1, there’s now a big reward. Installer.app has been updated, and some long-needed changes have been made. First, instead of browsing the entire collection in one huge list, you now select a category, and then browse a smaller list. Under the previous system, as the list of 3rd party apps got longer and longer, the interface for finding and installing a program became more cumbersome. With the new system, the category splitting should make finding and installing apps a lot simpler to use. Also, it should do a great job of hiding dictionaries, theme packs, etc. into their own subcategories. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, this should appear as an update.

If you haven’t hacked your 1.1.1 iPhone, there’s still no easy way to do it on a mac. There are, however, rumors of an AppTapp-type installer to make everything nice and simple coming very shortly. If you’re using windows, there’s a program called iDemocracy that promises to make everything fairly simple.

Erica Sadun, iPhone hacker extraordinaire and writer at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, has documented the entire set of Cocoa function calls required to program for the iPhone. These header files are used for programmers to properly create user interfaces, network code, and, well, pretty much everything. And the documentation effort is a massive job, usually not something to be done by just one person. I know that this site can get kind of wonky here and there, so I’ll do my best to explain why this is important, but for everybody.

All of the applications available from Installer.app have been written without any formal set of documentation. So, there may be some bugs, since there’s no single place to go for programming information. Usually, Apple would provide the documentation for programming on the iPhone. But, as they’ve recently announced, they’re not going to be doing that until February. So, now anyone that is planning or writing a native Cocoa app for the iPhone or iPod touch now has the means to research how to do it.

That includes both the folks that are hacking iPhones to install and write 3rd party apps, and any larger software companies that want to get a leg up on their software development. With this set of header files, it should be perfectly possible for any large development group to prototype their program well in advance of the official Apple release.

Of course, these header files may yet change. There’s no guarantee that Apple’s set of documentation will stay the same; Apple will definitely be adding to this, and they may not allow some of the function calls documented by Sadun to be accessible for other programmers. No one can tell. But, it’s a huge step for programming native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch

There’s an easy new program you can use to jailbreak the iPod Touch, called iJailBreak. You can download the installer (which now includes both PowerPC and Intel mac support) at code.google.com. Sorry, no Windows love yet. iJailbreak makes “heavy use” of the iPod Touch / iPhone TIFF vulnerability, and its use requires that you only restart your iPod Touch. Simple enough, right? Way simpler than this, anyway. iJailbreak is programmed by a 13-year-old, and judging from the broken tabs at the top right of their website, they have an unbricker application planned.