If you jailbreak your iPhone, the first thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO is change the default filesystem password.
When you jailbreak, the filesystem’s password is set to the common password “alpine.” As people usually don’t bother changing this password after performing a jailbreak, it’s really easy for hackers to get access to any jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch on a public network.
EDIT: Just confirmed with GeoHot and it seems that at least blackra1n doesn’t install SSH by default, therefore this should not be a problem if you used blackra1n to jailbreak, unless you installed the OpenSSH package from Cydia.
An Australian hacker called Ashley Towns demonstrated this by circulating the first known iPhone worm, known as Ikee, which replaces your lockscreen wallpaper with an image of Rick Astley. Luckily Town’s Rickrolling is benign. He wrote the worm to demonstrate how easy it is to break into jailbroken iPhones.
Changing the password is quick and easy — after the jump is a tutorial showing how to change the SSH password.
Note: There is no need to follow this guide if you haven’t jailbroken your iPhone/iPod Touch.
Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon. Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video you need as much storage space as you can afford. You need a badass computer with big fat hard drives that scream.
You think you might wanna Hot Rod your Mac Pro? This easy, step-by-step guide will show you how.
A couple of weeks back, I wrote Temporarily Get More iPhone Home Screens Via Cunning Bug Exploit, but had heard staying away from the iTunes Applications tab within my iPhone was probably a Very Good Idea. Reader Larry Pressnell noted that since the most recent iTunes update, his extra screens have been accessible in iTunes.
Since I needed to add some apps to my device, I decided to take the plunge earlier and, sure enough, my experience mirrored Larry’s: 11 home screens were shown, and extra ones were dimmed—see the grab above. Interestingly, items could be dragged from these ‘extra’ screens to the standard ones, with no problems, and a full sync didn’t find my extra pages vanishing into the ether. Whether this has anything to do with Voice Memos (the app used to get extra screens in the first place) being the last app on my final page, or the fact I’ve yet to update my iPhone OS to the latest point release, I’ve no idea.
Are you having fun with extra pages and managing to successfully rearrange your apps in iTunes? If so, let us know in the comments!
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released blackra1n RC3, which is an update to a 1-click jailbreak that adds activation options and an add-on blacksn0w, which unlocks latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS baseband version 05.11.07. To use blacksn0w, make sure you have this new baseband (check under Settings –> General –> About –> Modem Firmware) and if not, then update to a stock 3.1.2 firmware.
It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 3G. Besides the tool, there’s a blackra1n application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia and some other alternatives like RockYourPhone and the ’sn0w’ option to use blacksn0w unlock solution as well.
Please note that if you have an iPhone 2G, you can still jailbreak using blackra1n but blacksn0w will not unlock for you. You must use BootNeuter available in Cydia for that purpose. Also, if you purchased an iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch (any capacity) in October or later, there is a high probability that you have a new model. Blackra1n currently performs only a tethered jailbreak for these new devices, which means you need to use blackra1n every time you boot the device, otherwise all your jailbreak data gets wiped.
Our recent preview of Lightroom 3 – Beta has generated a lot of buzz about the future of digital processing. One of the questions that keeps coming up is: how do I migrate from Aperture to Lightroom?
Well, it’s not has hard as you think, as long as you’re willing to invest a bit of time up-front to do it right.
Follow us after the jump, and we’ll have you loving Lightroom in the amount of time it takes to get a pizza delivered.
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released the Mac version of blackra1n, his 1-click jailbreak solution. Just like the Windows version, it is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3G. Besides the tool, there’s a blackra1n application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia and some other alternatives like RockYourPhone and Icy.
Apple’s products are generally well built and very dependable. When things do go wrong, Apple normally backs its products with excellent technical support and warranty service. Normally, if your Mac or iPhone develops a problem, Apple’s return policies or warranty service will make it right.
In spite of Apple’s best efforts, some Apple products manifest chronic problems — they’re “lemons.” What follows is a guide, which details some of your options should you get stuck with a lemon.
With Apple’s recent ridiculous app store refusals, now is the perfect time to free your phone. Jailbreaking your device might seem too difficult to take on, but by following the steps below you can easily add a video camera to your 3G, or tether your Macbook to your 3GS. This How-To will guide you through jailbreaking your specific device using either Pwnage Tool or Redsn0w. Also included are simple instructions to unlock your device, letting you use it with different carriers.
Note: 3GS, 2nd gen and 3rd-gen iPod Touch owners who have recently updated to firmware 3.1 cannot jailbreak their phones unless they revert back to 3.0.1.
Google has added push Gmail to the iPhone/iPod Touch via its Google Sync service.
“Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone,” says the Google Mobile Blog, which announced the change. “Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”
Google Sync also syncs contacts and calendars, or any combination of contacts, calendars and Gmail.
Push Gmail works in the iPhone’s/iPod’s native Mail app, but you have to set up your Gmail account as an exchange account. Full instructions after the jump.
Steve Jobs made a welcome return to the public eye last week at a special music event to introduce Apple’s 2009 holiday iPods.
“The September music event was classic Apple. It marked the return of the world’s greatest corporate storyteller,” says communications coach, Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.
Gallo’s book will be published later this month by McGraw-Hill and can be pre-ordered now from Amazon. Gallo’s written some insightful analyses of Steve’s presentations in the past, so we asked him to take a look at last week’s event. After the jump, Gallo breaks down his top ten presentation tips from Jobs’ latest speech.
Make free calls on your iPhone with Fring and Google Voice. CC-licensed pic by damienvanachter on Flickr.
If you have a Google Voice account, you can make free VoIP calls on your iPhone. You’ll need to sign up for an account at Gizmo.com and download the free Fring app for your iPhone, but after that you’re done. You can make free outgoing calls to (up to three minutes) and receive unlimited incoming calls through Google Voice.
OK, this one’s a bit niche, but some of you might find it useful. For the benefit who’d rather read than watch a video, here’s an explanation.
Many of you will already be familiar with OS X’s built-in zoom feature (which you can reach via the Mouse or Trackpad prefs in Snow Leopard). Hold down Control (by default; you can change it to Option or Command if you wish), then two-finger scroll up or down on your trackpad, or use a mouse wheel if you have one. Your display will zoom smoothly in and out.
And many of you will also have heard about the new QuickTime screencast recording feature in Snow Leopard, which offers does a fine job but lacks the bells and whistles found in full-scale screencasting apps like ScreenFlow.
Combine the two, and you have a neat way of calling out or highlighting details while using QuickTime to record a screencast.
Displaying an impressive level of tech savvy, Ice-T took a claw hammer to an old PowerBook he’s getting rid of.
In this 4-minute video, you can watch Ice-T smash his old PowerBook to bits. At first, it seems the former rapper is getting revenge on a glitchy machine.
“This Mac gave me a lot of hell,” he says. “It’s kinda like payback.”
But as the video goes on, it’s clear Ice-T is trying to remove and destroy the hard drive, which he’s afraid might fall into the wrong hands.
“I’m gonna get this hard drive out of here, make sure none of my secrets are in here, if somebody should find this computer,” he says.
In the comments, Ice-T takes a lot of flak for destroying the machine (and a bunch of racist garbage). The geniuses on YouTube rip him for not taking the machine to an eWaste facility and releasing toxins into the environment.
While the toxins criticism might be on target, Ice-T was right to destroy the hard drive first. Data is incredibly easy to pull off old hard drives, whether the drive has been erased or not, even in multiple passes. There are plenty of cases of identity theft from old machines. And just weeks ago, journalism students were able to buy a drive full of government secrets from a dump in Ghana.
As the actor knows, the one sure-fire way to destroy all data on a hard drive is to destroy the hard drive. “There’s probably a better way to do it, but i just said, ‘fuck it,’” the Law & Order actor says.
In fact, if recycling an old laptop, it’s a good idea to drill several holes into the case and right through the hard drive before taking it to an eWaste facility (Only if the drive can’t be easily removed obviously, which is the case with many older PowerBooks and iBooks).
With Apple’s recent ridiculous app store refusals, now is the perfect time to free your phone. Jailbreaking your device might seem too difficult to take on, but by following the steps below you can easily add a video camera to your 3G, or tether your Macbook to your 3GS. This How-To will guide you through jailbreaking your specific device using either Pwnage Tool or Redsn0w. Also included are simple instructions to unlock your device, letting you use it with different carriers.
