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The iPhone Serial Port Hack
An anonymous reader writes "The iPhone's little known secret, a hidden serial port, is revealed. 'The real benefit in all of this is that there are so many console packages for iPhone in Cydia now that you can have a fully functional computer, as useful as a Linux box, but without carrying around a laptop.'"
Get a Nokia N900 or Android.
And yet, you are posting on Slashdot.
Or, I dunno, a small netbook and a USB-to-serial cable. They're hardly massive.
It's not like you don't know in advance when you're going to need a terminal. If you can remember to bring that massive dongle thing along you can remember a netbook.
No sig today...
Please don't use the hardware you purchased and is now yours for non-Apple authorized activities.
How soon until you're just licensing that iPhone?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
<sobbing level="softly">I don't want to go back to carrying gender changes, null modems, 9/15 pin changers as well as worrrying about DCE/DTE and handshaking ..... </sobbing>
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Never. There's no need. You can own the hardware. You just can't use any of the software included until you agree to the license, and thereby agree to Apple's restrictions on how you use the hardware.
That's the cleverness, really. They don't control your ownership of the hardware. So to a naive observer, you're completely in charge. But the moment you actually try to use any functionality embodied in the included software (i.e., anything capability beside "crappy doorstop" and "blender fodder"), Apple owns you. As long as your path coincides with Apple's decisions, you're golden. But try to do anything they don't want you to do... "You get nothing! you lose! Good day, Sir!"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I really, really hate these Zen/internet/GNU Koans from the hackers dictionary.. They all sound like they were written by Renaissance Faire types and don't really impart anything to me except the mindset of people who thought Unix workstations were AWESOME and then proceeded to infight with 114 mutually different flavors of unix.