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.
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
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.
More than the default number of home screens, via a bug exploit.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I want a way to view all my iPhone apps on my iPhone, not just through iTunes. I review lots of iPhone apps and am a keen iPhone gamer. When apps vanish into the void, I forget they’re there (and so Spotlight isn’t much use), and it’s absurd that I can only delete apps in the void when using iTunes. I should be able to do this with just the device.
On Twitter earlier today, I said “iPhone now has 14 pages of apps (via cunning bug exploitation); time to do a major ‘review and delete’ session,” and people have asked me how I did this. Hat tippage must go to British games journo Stuart Campbell and web dev Dayanah, who independently discovered the exploit I now use, although the process of how to take advantage of it appears variable. In my case, it’s roughly as follows:
Ensure the device’s home screens are all totally full, and that Voice Memos is the last app on the final one.
Drag an app from one screen to the next, thereby ‘bumping’ Voice Memos into the void.
Download an app to fill the space left from app-dragging in step 2.
Voice Memos, irked at being bumped, should now make its way back to your first home screen, and you should have a brand-new second page. If you’re lucky, the new page will also include apps previously in the void. If not, reboot and these things will happen. Rinse and repeat the process to get more pages.
One warning: this is only a temporary solution. Open your device in iTunes and select then the Applications tab and your extra pages will probably vanish. In my experience, the same happens during a sync. However, as a means of accessing ‘hidden’ apps between syncs, it’s better than nothing, until Apple gets its finger out of its butt and finally provides a means of viewing more than an arbitrary number of apps on its mobile devices.
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.
Ken’s trick depends on a little bit of Applescript to make it work. But not everyone knows Applescript, which is where another app called Hazel comes in handy.
Social browser Flock might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it comes with some social web smarts built-in, and some of these can be put to use in cool ways.
iTunes 9 has neat little new feature: it will automatically import any music or videos you throw into a specific folder.
That folder is called “Automatically Add to iTunes”, and after installing iTunes 9 you’ll find it tucked away inside your “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/” folder.
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.
Here’s a quick follow-up to my last Camino screencast. In this short video, I’ll show you how to get a little more control over your windows and tabs while using Camino.
More screencasts are forthcoming. Got a topic you’d like to see covered? If I know something about them, I’ll be happy to explore your suggested topics. Give me a shout in the comments.
