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Apple To Kill The Hackintosh Netbook Dream?

Cory Bohon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:01:05 -0600

According to developer rumblings, the Hackintosh netbook could be a thing of the past if Apple has anything to do with it.

The Hackintosh netbook has flourished as OS X users fill the netbook gap left by Apple. Sure, they might have violated the DMCA, and ended up with cramped keyboards, but they brought a dream to life.

According to OS X Daily, Apple could be killing support for the Intel Atom processor (the small processor that makes many netbooks tick) with the next Mac OS X 10.6 update (10.6.2).

If you have a Intel Atom Hackintosh netbook, we'd advise that you not update to the next iteration of Snow Leopard until this information can be verified. Or you could just wait until the Hackintosh community comes up with a new way to boot your netbook with Snow Leopard.

OS X Daily via Engadget

Change the Text Message Alert Sounds On Your Jailbroken iPhone

Roberto Baldwin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:13:22 -0500

Now that everyone you know has an iPhone, it's probably getting pretty annoying when, every time a text message arrives, all the people in your office reach for their iPhones.

Unless of course you're one of those folks that enjoys the Horn alert. No one is using that one. Well, except for clowns and 4-year-olds.

If you're brave enough to jailbreak your iPhone, then a new message alert is only a few steps away.

Difficulty Level: Medium

What You Need:

> Jailbroken iPhone
> GarageBand, Audacity or other audio-editing application
> iPhone Explorer

We apologize to everyone with a non-jailbroken iPhone. We've tried to find a way to make this work on those phones with no luck.

The Alert

Before you start poking around inside your iPhone, you'll need to figure out what you want your new message alert to be. We're going old school and using the Wild Eep from Apple's days of yore. It's the correct length and gives us some cool geek cred.

Your alert sound should be 1-4 seconds long and no longer. If your audio file is too long, use GarageBand or Audacity to trim the audio.

We'll use GarageBand '09

1. Open GarageBand and open the iPhone Ringtone area. Choose Example Ringtone.

2. Remove the audio already in the timeline and drop your audio into there.

3. Trim the audio to about one second and make sure the yellow loop indicator is also at one second and snapped to the same length of your audio file.

4. Navigate to the menubar Share > Export Song to Disk. Click Export when the dialog box appears asking to export to CD quality. DO NOT click Compress.

5. Name and save your new AIFF. We're going to name our file sms-received4.aif. You'll understand why when we get to alert sound switching time.

6. Navigate in the Finder to where you saved your file. Change the extension from .aif to .caf (Core Audio File). The iPhone needs this extension to recognize the sound. We'll explain in a little bit the significance of this file name.

Your ringtone is now ready for the iPhone. Let's get inside your iPhone. Now you could SSH to get into your jailbroken iPhone. And you could use QuickTime to edit your movies, but why make things more difficult than they need to be?

Instead of downloading apps on your iPhone and busting open the Terminal, lets go the easy GUI route with iPhone Explorer. If you're ever used an FTP client, you'll be at home with iPhone Explorer.

Getting it on your iPhone

If you can navigate a computer or FTP site, you can navigate through the iPhone.

1. Plug your iPhone in as you would normally. Launch iPhone Explorer. If the app puts you in a random folder just click on the Up Folder Level button until you reach /. Your window should look similar to the one above.

If the app doesn't want to behave via the Up Folder Level button, click the Change Root button.

You can also use this preference pane to set custom directory paths.

Choose the button with the picture of the jailbroken iPhone. That will take you to the top root level.

Backup your old system sounds with a new name, just in case.

2. Navigate to /system/Library/Audio/UISounds/. In this folder are all the fun alert sounds for your iPhone. You can change the Lock sound, the Photo Shutter sound. It's all here for your amusement. What we are interested in is the Text Message Alert sounds. Those audio files are named:

sms-receivedX.caf

The X represents a number between 1 and 6. We tried adding a 7, but the iPhone wouldn't recognize it. Instead, we replaced one of the audio files with our new one.

Adios, Honk

3. We choose file sms-received4.caf to replace because that's the irritating Horn alert we spoke of earlier.

Select a file and click Play. Boom, you're previewing.

You can preview the sounds from within iPhone Explorer in case you love the Horn alert and would like to choose another. We then changed the name of the Horn alert inside the iPhone to sms-received_4.caf. We added the underscore to the file so that it still resides on the iPhone as a backup and isn't replaced when we dropped our custom alert file into the iPhone. In case we sell our phone to a clown at some point.

The new and replaced file on your iPhone are highlighted here

4. Drag and drop the audio file you created earlier to iPhone Explorer.

The Horn, yeah it's really the Wild Epp.

5. Grab your iPhone and navigate to Settings > Sounds > New Text Message. Tap on the sound you replaced, and you should hear your new text alert sound.

Enjoy being unique again.

Props to Project Amplify for their original how-to.

Check out the video below of the process.

iPhone 3GS Still Jailbreakable?

Cory Bohon — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:41:03 -0500

Earlier this week reports came out about Apple updating the bootrom in the newly shipping iPhone 3GSes, but as it turns out, this device will not stop jailbreaking.

Wired interviewed Eric McDonald, a member of the iPhone Dev Team who said, "It’s not going to be impossible to jailbreak even if the exploit we used is gone."

McDonland goes on to say that you can still jailbreak the currently shipping iPhone 3GSes, and that the 24kpwn exploit only made it easier to boot the hacked device. Since the new bootrom interferes with the 24kpwn exploit, you'll need to plug in your device to your computer to start it up after a shutdown.

Of course, this inconvenience will not stop the hacking-faithful, nor will it stop the iPhone Dev Team. You can read the full interview on Wired.

iPhone Update 3.0.1 Does Not Disable Tether Hack

Roberto Baldwin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:01:21 -0500

We just tested Bluetooth tethering on our 3.0.1 updated iPhone and were still able to surf the Internet with no problem.

Now we're safe from MMS attacks and AT&T's inability to deliver features.

Tether hack.

iPhone 3.0.1 is Ready to Rock - Fixes SMS Flaw

Roberto Baldwin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:10:02 -0500

We're downloading now.

The 297.9MB update fixes the SMS vulnerability demoed yesterday at the Black Hat Conference. Turns out we won't have to wait until Saturday as reported by the BBC.

Plug your iPhone into iTunes and get ready for some sweet, sweet security updating.

Yippee!

Security Alert: iPhone SMS Hijack Being Demoed Today

Roberto Baldwin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:01:43 -0500

According to security researchers, if you receive a single square character via SMS starting today. Turn off your iPhone ASAP.

Cybersecurity researchers Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller plans to demo the security flaw in the iPhone at today's Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. The flaw in the way the iPhone handles SMS allows a devious hacker the ability to send a quick SMS burst and remotely control your iPhone.

While being on the lookout for a square character is helpful, Miller contends that an attacker could adjust the SMS burst to contain a different image, or no image at all.

Once in control of your device a hacker, or jerk, could make phone calls, visit Web sites, use the camera and microphone, and actually send another SMS burst making your iPhone into a mobile zombie.

Miller told Forbes, "This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone... Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."

The dynamic duo told Forbes that they informed Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago with no response.

UPDATE: Before you start shutting off your iPhone and hiding under the blankets, remember that someone still needs your phone number in order to launch this attack. Hopefully we can test this out today to see the real vulnerability of your precious iPhone.

Source: Forbes

OMG iPhone Grande!

Arvind Srinivasan — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:12:51 -0500

Your days of waiting for an Apple tablet are over. Sort of.

A bunch of enterprising developers (hackers) have found a way to get the iPhone OS on a different, bigger, better device. They have posted a video that shows the OS running on a touchscreen monitor that has an accelerometer. Essentially, they loaded the OS on a Mac Pro, and then booted into it.

Apparently they were able to harness most of the features via the screen. Of course, they have not posted a guide to recreate the hack so you can try it yourself, and time will tell whether this is real or just a really, really, good video editing job, but that said, we would totally buy one.

What do you think? Is it real? Drop your opinion in the comments.

Jobs' Amazon Account Allegedly Hacked

Florence Ion — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:04:42 -0500

A hacker contacted Leander Kahney of Wired's Cult of Mac with claims that he broke into Steve Job’s private Amazon.com account and then attempted to sell details of Jobs’ purchasing history of the past several years and his credit card number to the site.

According to the hacker, who identifies himself as “orin0co”, Jobs is a frequent online shopper and has purchased 20,000 items from the popular online shopping site in the last decade.

The hacker claims he sent Jobs an official-looking email that tricked him into entering his Amazon password and username. If this is true, that means Jobs would be the latest victim of a phishing scam.

Ryan Olson, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense, said it was possible that Jobs had fallen victim to a targeted attack. “Yeah, I think it’s plausible,” he said. “It would not be hard to get a lot of his information because he’s a celebrity.”

The hacker claimed that neither Jobs nor Amazon were aware of the break in because he went undetected, though he sent a screen shot of what appears to be Jobs’ account at Amazon.com and shows three purchases: A Blu-Ray DVD, a HBO miniseries on DVD, and a copy of The Nuclear Express, a history of the nuclear bomb. Boom!

However, orin0co’s story is a bit fishy, considering there is no proof and Apple isn’t talking. Additionally, screenshots are easily faked and it doesn’t seem likely that if Jobs is such an out-of-control online shopper that his last purchase would be in October 2008.

Check out Leander's email coorespondence with the "hacker."