Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Finally Unlock iPhone 3G
nandemoari quotes a story at Infopackets:
"2009 has gotten off to a great start for a team of iPhone enthusiasts with little regard for Apple's licensing requirements. They've finally figured out a way to get the phone to work with any cell phone carrier (and not just AT&T). The iPhone Dev Team is best known for their work on 'jailbreaking;' the technique of altering an iPhone so that you can run any applications on it, not just those approved by Apple. Given the company's questionable vetting policy for entry to the official App store, it's not surprising many users approve of jailbreaking."
I can use Opera Mini on my iPhone.
I've been thinking about one, but:
a)How do you get around activation at purchase time?
b)Does Apple break this later on, especially when I need it?
I could buy a legally unlocked iPhone from Hong Kong, but it costs $700+. In the unlocked countries, Apple prices it through the roof, I suppose. Although there has been talk about a prepaid version here for some time...
Because the iPhone happens to be an alternative to the iPhone alternatives.
Except it's still not the smart phone of choice for business users, due to its poor ability to type out messages. Apple needs to learn from two LG smart phones, the Voyager with its flip-open keyboard or the Incite with its haptic-response touchscreen; a third-generation iPhone with a haptic-response touchscreen (including the ability to type out messages when displaying in landscape mode) would make the iPhone a VERY serious competitor against the Blackberry or Palm Treo series of smart phones.
Trusted Computing used to be treated as one of the most evil things here on Slashdot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgFbqSYdNK4
The appstore (where Steve decides what is trustworthy and what is not, to quote the video) sold the "I am rich"-app for cryin' out loud. Among a bunch of other crap. Other apps that are very useful are not given a chance and won't run.
Those are good reasons, but the most important reason I think is that the user interface just works so damn well. It does for me... I am no Apple fanboy (the only other Apple device I own is an iPod, the rest is all Windows stuff), but I bought one, despite
- no out-of-the-box todo lists
- no notepad that is actually useful (and syncs)
- no cut & paste (a major omission), and poor (if any) communication between apps
- crippled Bluetooth (only works with headsets, can't use it to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard or other peripherals).
- locked down OS (can't replace the standard keyboard with a custom one, for instance).
- rumours of poor battery life and poor reception (I haven't noticed any of these. Tip to increase battery life: turn off location services; the GPS chip is power hungry... like it is on any other cell phone).
So why are people buying despite all this? I don't think having a built-in iPod and some amusing apps make up for this. The following, however, does:
- Form factor. It's small. And I thank Apple for not putting a damn physical keybord inside, which would make it considerably bulkier.
- Ease of use. The UI is simple and responsive certainly compared to WME.
- The multi-touch screen: brilliant not because of the cute "pinch" zoom gesture, but because I can operate it with my fat fingers. Whereas my other smart phones required me to use a fingernail or the stylus, I can operate the iPhone 1-handed using my thumb.
Typing messages is actually pretty good on the iPhone. As you'd expect, typing speed is somewhere between the on-screen keyboard & stylus of WME phones, and phones with a physical keyboard. But that's not what Apple needs to work on to capture the business market. Apple needs to address security by offering a mandatory PIN login that cannot be disabled by the user, and a remote wipe function. Without those two, you can forget about corporations allowing these things to VPN in and access the Exchange server.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Luckily there are apps for a jailbroken iphone that build on the functions of the default apps. iRealSMS is a brilliant messaging app for the iphone, of course it will never be avaliable on the appstore as it competes with their rubbish sms app. Its got real inboxes outboxes and sent messages templates drafts landscape typing.
This is why un-jailbroken iphones arent as good. If an apple official app sucks, well thats just too bad.
To be fair, at least for the iPhone itself, the DRM wasn't very good. Apple used the same S5L processor and encryption key set on both the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G. With the iPhone 2G at launch, everything ran as root and a trivial Safari exploit could be used to remote execute code as root - being able to run that code allowed key retrieval. Since Apple did fix the root security issues with iPhone OS 1.1.3 and later with all applications now running as the very limited user Mobile, but since they did not change the keys for the 3G it was not very hard (in the scale of breaking DRM at least) to crack open the firmware of the iPhone 3G and jailbreak that too. The iPhone's primary hardware should not be considered a strong DRM platform because Apple did not properly implement it before it was broken for good.
This of course does not apply to the S-Gold radio; that was completely changed between the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G, and the Dev Team beating that is indeed an amazing hack. Never the less, it took them 5-6 months to break it, which is actually rather remarkable. This was another case where Apple learned its lesson, as the 2G's radio was not properly secured, either.
Futhermore, if you want to look at an iPhone device properly secured, look at the iPod Touch 2G. Apple did change the keys that time, and so far it has not been possible to break it for 4 months. At a bare minimum, a remote code execution exploit and a local privilege execution exploit must be found in the Touch in order to have a chance at capturing its keys, and that's just to decrypt the firmware. We have no idea what other surprises are on the Touch since no one has made it that far yet.
I'm not entirely convinced that it's impossible to build an unbreakable device. DRM has been getting better over the years, the Xbox 360 still doesn't have a way to execute unsigned code (without hardware modification), for example.
Good post, but it is impossible to build an unbreakable device simply by definition. If code runs on it, it's breakable, even if it means a brute force code signing "attack". It might take 10,000 years to get the correct key to use in signing, but it's possible. What impresses me is how quickly these guys find a way in. I've done some playing around cracking hardware, for educational purposes of course, and it's nowhere near as easy as they make it seem.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I read the Dev Team blog entry about this and didn't see any mention about which carrier was supported. I assumed it would only work on other carriers which used SIMs (ie T-Mobile). If it will work with non-SIM based carriers this needs to be clarified.
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I've been there and done that to no avail:
1. Jailbreaking causes applications on my iPhone to randomly stop working. Once one goes south, eventually all the applications on the phone do -- one at a time. The only option is to continuously reinstall the applications that stopped working -- except when it gets to something like your contacts or phone. Then you're more or less fucked. Removing the jailbreak stopped this.
2. I tried the backgrounder and while you had no noticeable impact, I surely did. Not only in battery life but in processor life. Applications that were backgrounded were grinding the phone to an absolute halt and we're only talking about stuff like Pandora and AIM. I was spending more time killing the backgrounded applications or restarting the phone entirely than I was using it. Not such a great solution.