The “Apple vs. Psystar” lawsuit seems to become very interesting. Psystar now hired attorneys at Carr & Farrell. Carr & Farrell were Burst.com’s attorneys and won the 2006 case “Burst.com vs. Apple“. Let’s see how they perform here.
MobileMe is this month’ Apple’s never ending story of issues. At first it was only minor problem: customers from Germany and France could not cancel their plans. But then too many eMails got lost and Apple needed about 10 days to fix this issue. Then silently the highly advertised Push-Feature got deactivated (see our report here). In contrast to Apple’s high quality when it comes to usability and features, MobileMe began to leave an impression like a not well tested software in beta stadium.
In the end Apple did the right thing and apologized by offering one month free of charge. All customers thought all of MobileMe’s issues are solved. But sadly they were wrong.
Now MobileMe got again issues. This time syncing of addresses and appointments with mobile devices did not and in some cases still does not work properly. But as Apple said, this problem is also solved now. In certain cases data may not be synced back to the mobile devices. In those cases customers need to activate syncing manually. Read here how to do it. Take a deep breath and be patient, re-syncing may take up to 15 minutes.
As of yesterday Makayama released a Voice Dial Application for the iPhone. That means we finally can dial numbers without looking at the screen. Driving in your car and making phone calls is much safer now.
Voice Dial does not depend on a dictionary or vocabulary. Instead you can record voice samples for any contact in the addressbook. It therefore works with all languages.
There are two versions of Voice Dial:
The introduction offer until August: is $ 24.95 (EUR 17.95) ex. tax
Voice Dial is definitly the missing application for the iPhone. Find the manual here or watch the video:
absatz
You don’t trust DRM protections? You read that Microsoft and Yahoo switched off their DRM servers thus disallowing the continuous use of legally bought Music?
Then this might be the news for you. Sources that wish to stay anonymous confirmed and explained that removing of AppStore’s DRM of your legally bought applications is fairly simple for people who know what a command line is.
The technique only requires a jailbroken iPhone that got SSH installed. Once you legally bought the application you can run it on your iPhone / iPod Touch. Then you log in via SSH, determine the process ID and dump a part of the memory. Since the application needs to be decrypted in order to run on your iPhone it will be decrypted before it’s going to be executed. So in memory you have the decoded binary and you only need to dump in to a file. Using the GNU debugger here makes your life easy. After that you only need to replace the part of the encrypted binary with the memory dump and set a flag to not encrypted. People who know what ProcDump in the early Windows days did: this is exactly the same technique without the automatization.
Anyway we’re not sure if more concrete information may violate Germany’s weird intellectual property rights, we can’t go into further details here. We recommend to do a Google search. You will most likely find one or two tutorials that go in to detail step by step. Applying that technique will allow you to save your very bought apps. We don’t condone misuse or piracy.
As we’ve reported earlier this month, german T-Mobile sues german Sigpate. T-Mobile argued Sipgate encourages T-Mobile iPhone customers to break contracts when jailbreaking their iPhones in order to install Sipgate’s VoIP client.
Now Sipgate struck back. Sipgate argued, T-Mobile in Germany advertises unlimited use of Internet, but in reality limits the use to a certain amount of MBytes and certain applications only. T-Mobile for example explicitly permits use of VoIP clients, Instant Messenger apps and VPN clients (although being pre-installed) on their iPhones. In contrast to their advertisements T-Mobile in fact does not offer unlimited Internet access.
The Hamburg District Court (AZ 315 O 360/08) now ruled in favour of Sipgate. T-Mobile is disallowed to use the term unlimited internet access in their advertisements any more. In case of violation of this court’s rule T-Mobile will need to pay 250,000€ fine.
Update July 27th, 2008: In their testing program Juma found issues with some european carriers using 3G technique. In contrast to other SIM proxy manufacturers, Juma does not want to sell solutions that don’t work 100% on either GSM or 3G/UMTS networks. Customers who had already ordered got full refund on saturday and sunday. Anyway: we heard Juma is researching these issues to come up with a solution as soon as possible
It finally seems to be true. We already reported that unlock specialists from Brazil and from Vietnam independently from each other announced they can unlock the new 3G iPhones using a proxy SIM solution. But nobody (at least in Europe) got such proxy SIM into their hands.
Anyway here seems to come the real deal: a working proxy solution hit the streets of germany as of today. It is called iPhonix and is manufactured by Juma FZE – a trading company located in Dubai. As initial offer iPhonix will cost 50€ (about 80US$), instead of 59€. Sadly the product page seems to be available in german only by the moment. We already ordered a product sample, but as we don’t have it yet: we can’t confirm, but the german Magazine MacBug does (see german article here). Update: This currently does not work with any german carrier!
On the following video you can see a white iPhone 3G running with german interface. The iPhone 3G is obviously carrier locked (most likely to the german T-Mobile D1 net). After inserting the iPhonix proxy it connects to the carrier of Dubai (Etisalat) – obviously roaming. Anyway this is not the best video to convince german customers. We’d better seen checking out a T-Mobile SIM and putting in an O2 or Vodafone card that does not work and then after using the proxy… You know what I mean… And where is the making calls… Anyway see their promotion video here:
Apple has just released the new firmware 2.1 beta to developers. Firmware 2.1 brings a better GPS integration for 3G devices to allow using it as a real navigation receiver. The GPS feature “Core Location” can now also detect the speed and the direction of your moves. For 2G and 3G users there will be an update included for better integration of push notifications.
Along with this beta Apple shipped the new SDK. But currently this new SDK cannot be used to provide Apps to the AppStore.
We are not aware yet, if this update solves the slowing-down issues of Apps (we reported here).
It seems Apple wants to make the iPhone more secure. Currently they are searching for a security expert to validate the security architecture for the iPhone.
Find detailed information about this job opportunity here. Excerpts:
(..)
Responsibilities
Review and provide feedback on security mechanisms implemented in OS X
* Provide risk analysis of potential security threats to our embedded products
* Develop “proof of concept” attacks on the current security mechanisms
* Come up with new and innovative ways of increasing security while preserving ease-of-use and increasing the quality of the end-user experience.
(..)Required Experience:
* A genuine passion for analyzing security technologies and developing “proof of concept” attacks
* Demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities and troubleshooting skills
* Industry exposure to and knowledge of OS security and UNIX internals
(..)
Reading this, we think it might not be too easy to find a probable employee whoes curriculum vitae is not in violation of the DMCA. Since this really sounds like a nice job offer only to guys formerly known as hackers…
The Microsoft Windows division of users can be glad again. WinPwn 2.0 has just been released by its creator and maintainer CMW. It features activating, jailbreaking and unlocking iPhone 2G and activating and jailbreaking of iPhone 3G.
Because of the overwhelming demand for a Windows version of Pwnage, the website http://www.winpwn.com is currently not easily available. Anyway you can try to download WinPwn 2 here.
Kudos fly out to CMW, standing work :-)
Vodafone yesterday announced to offer a data-plan for customers who actually bought an unlocked iPhone in a foreign country. The data-plan requires a normal fon-plan by vodafone, means: the iPhone plan is an upgrade. The interesting point is the price.
This flatrate costs 9,95€/month surcharge to a current fon-plan. It gets slowed down from HDSPA to EDGE/GPRS speeds after having transmitted 500MBytes.
In contrast to original T-Mobile Germany iPhone plans Vodafone does not permit using Voice-Over-IP (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM) or VPN – means they tolerate that you even jailbreak your iPhone in order to install third party apps, that are not provided through the official Apple AppStore.
The struggle for the cheapest iPhone plan has begun.