figure 1: the “Grand Theft Auto” font is a nice, subtle touch
There’s a story floating around about the iPhone being added to metasploit, which is a system used for making shellcode. Shellcode is code that takes advantage of bugs to run otherwise unauthorized code. Incidentally, the more stories I read about it, the more they all seem strangely familiar.
So what is the eventual impact? Well, it means that the iPhone is going to get hacked, likely by some of the best. If there are crippling bugs in the iPhone (and there are always crippling bugs), expect hackers to find them eventually. It could also lead to better unlocks (the official unlock, even), more secure software, and security software suites (unofficial, of course) for the iPhone. Granted, the other edge of the sword brings identity theft and spying, but like Nietzsche said, you can’t have good without bad. If you think Nietzsche was godless swine, pretend the quote comes from The Facts of Life’s opening song instead.
figure 1: ‘Something went wrong !’ and ‘EVERYTHING OK !’ are both indicators of success.
A UK voice-over-IP company by the name of Truphone has figured out how to use the iPhone’s own software to make VOIP calls. The entire thing was witnessed by Oliver Starr:
Currently requires the use of terminal on the iPhone to tell the iPhone to use its on-board SIP stack to place the call over WiFi instead of via the SIM card. To use the terminal application, in turn requires that you first Jailbreak the phone using an application like iBrickr or iFuntastic. This is not an application for the inexperienced or the faint of heart.Instantitating the SIP Stack for TruPhone.
In other words, it’s not ready to use yet. Though I can think of a worse fate for usability than dialing calls through the command line, I won’t. There’s no need for it anyway, as they reportedly have a GUI application in the works. They’ll be beta-testing their software in perhaps a month.
The iPhone Dev Team, the same folks that have set the stage for 3rd party applications and more recently, the free iPhone unlock methods, released a statement via Erica Sadun of TUAW about Apple’s positioning on the iPhone unlock and the possible bricking of iPhones. Their statement is to wait to install the patch if you’ve unlocked your iPhone; if you really need the update, they have a tool in the works that will restore your iPhone to its factory condition. The ‘restore-to-factory-condition’ tool would be useful for anyone that wanted to sell their iPhone and be assured that there’s no personal information on the iPhone. The text of their statement is reproduced below:
9/25 Statement from the iPhone unlockers
Based on download numbers, the iPhone Dev Team believes that, worldwide, several hundred thousand people have unlocked their iPhones. That number continues growing every day. The removal of the lock, a bug, was a major step forward in the iPhone development. It made the iPhone free and useful to anyone, not only to those in certain countries.
Apple now announces that the next firmware update, expected later this week, will possibly break the handset of all of us free users in the World. It speaks of “damage” done to the firmware and “unauthorized access” to our own property, The removal of those firmware problems, which were built in in favor for AT&T, does not cause “damage” as they want to make us believe.
We will provide you with a tool in the next week which will be able to recover your nck counter and seczones and even enables you to restore your phone to a Factory-like state.
In the meantime we advise you not to update your free iPhone with the upcoming firmware. Wait for the next version to be fixed to work properly with your carrier and not break your phone.
figure 1: dirty hippie 3rd-party-developing AppTapp Installer.app-installing AnySIM-unlockers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Though Jobs’ Apple Support crew would void your warranty for installing them, Steve went as far to say that some of the 3rd party apps were being looked at very closely by Apple:
“Meanwhile, Jobs acknowledged that third-party developers have started to produce several intriguing, yet unofficial iPhone applications. He said Apple is looking at some of them closely, especially those that don’t require a connection to the Internet. It’s likely that those applications would be the first of any to receive an official endorsement from Apple, according to Jobs’ comments, as those that require Internet access could threaten the ‘high standard’ of experience customers have come to expect with the iPhone.”
If you hate the Marker Felt font in the iPhone and are willing to go the extra mile to remove it, then John Gruber is your man. Just so we’re clear, this does void your warranty. But it goes without saying that if you really hate marker felt, you won’t care.
A bit of friendly advice — if you’ve unlocked your iPhone, you should be careful with the next firmware update — don’t apply it immediately. Check with news sites and forums to see if the update works fine with unlocks first. Apple released a press release that noted that the current methods of unlock can cause “irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software.” And as such, they’re going to void the warranty of anyone that unlocks their phone, and they’ll mark your phone as ineligible for warranty service. There are some reports of people that have been “blacklisted.” There’s a full rundown of this story after the cut.
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Here is our guide for using AppTapp Installer.app. Yesterday, we covered how to install it (Mac / Windows); today, we’ll cover how to use it.
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figure 1: for Windows PCs
Ever since the iPhone was announced, people have been clamoring to write native applications for it. Sadly, Apple has not yet released the tools necessary to develop those apps. However, if you’ve been following the iPhone news you realize that the iPhone has been “hacked.” What does this mean to you, the nonhacker? Well it means that thanks to the mighty efforts of many dedicated people, you can install applications directly onto your iPhone. The best part, it’s easy. Read on for our full How-To on how to hack your iPhone so you can install applications.
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figure 1: for Macs
Ever since the iPhone was announced, people have been clamoring to write native applications for it. Sadly, Apple has not yet released the tools necessary to develop those apps. However, if you’ve been following the iPhone news you realize that the iPhone has been “hacked.” What does this mean to you, the nonhacker? Well it means that thanks to the mighty efforts of many dedicated people, you can install applications directly onto your iPhone. The best part, it’s easy. Read on for our full How To on how to hack your iPhone so you can install applications.
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figure 1: this is the soldering you’d need to do
The full ten steps to unlocking an iPhone have been posted at iPhoneJTAG by George Hotz, aka Geohot. It’s a ten step process, beginning with step 1. It’s not as difficult a process as I expected it to be, except the precise scratching and soldering process. You have to scratch away at one of those tiny wires on the iPhone, and solder other wires to it directly. I imagine that the folks at the iPhone dev wiki will still be hard at work on unlocking the iPhone via a software method; not everyone has got a steady soldering hand.
