George Hotz – well known to the iPhone scene as GeoHot – has put some efforts into analyzing the behaviour of the bootloader 5.8 that is running in many iPhone 3G’s. He found the signature checking of the bootloader is buggy. By exploiting this bug we are now able to up- and downgrade the bootloader. Sadly many of nowadays iPhone 3G’s contain bootloader 5.91. which added an RSA check that GeoHot could not circumvent yet. Read his whole article here.
By the way: this seems to be the same exploit the iPhone Dev Team used and released to be able to be used for manipulating (read our news here). Anyway GeoHot did standing work again. Kudos to you, dude.
Apple’s policy to upgrade devices once a year seems also to apply to the iPhone. A new iPhone – 3rd generation – is expected to be released at the end of june/beginning of july.
Rumors are circulating about the following features:
Developers who are already working with the latest beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 now report new drivers for WLAN chipsets allowing 802.11n connections to access points (according to MacRumors.com)
Also the camera could get an upgrade to 3.2megapixels as those CMOS image sensors have been ordered in large quantity (according to the asian Digitimes.com)
A video capture function seems to become integrated (according to EngadgetMobile.com)
A video editing function might become available (according to austrian Benm.at)
USB tethering might become available (also according to EngadgetMobile.com)
Will the 3rd gen iPhone be the same success story like the 1st and the 2nd generation? Let’s see.
We are very curious on the battle against the Palm Pre, that has been designed by the former Apple Manager and iPod architect Jon Rubinstein.
By the way: iPhoneBuzz.com has already released a comprehensive comparison between iPhone OS 3.0 beta and the Palm Pre. And StuffTV.com yet allows themselves to summarize the Linux based Palm Pre will be superiour to the iPhone. See here:
TheRegister.co.uk reports Quickoffice will be released within the next week on the iPhone’s AppStore. The Quickoffice suite will integrate Quickword and Quicksheet. It will allow
to create and view Microsoft Excel sheets on the iPhone (via Quicksheet, that is already available via AppStore)
to create and view Microsoft Word .doc (Office 97-2003) documents on the iPhone (via forthcoming Quickword)
to transfer files via WiFi
to access files on MobilMe’s iDisk
to email files
to view jpg, png, tiff, gif and svg pictures
to view (or play)
Office 97-2003 files (DOC, XLS, PPT)
Office 2007 files (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX)
Adobe PDF
Webpages (HTML, HTM, MHT)
Audio files (MP3)
The introduction price for Quickoffice will be about 20US$. By the way: Microsoft themselves seem to work on a native Microsoft Office version for the iPhone. But there are no further information available currently.
According to DetNews.com Microsoft plans to mimic the iPhone user experience on less costly Windows Mobile phones, said Andy Lees, chief of mobile-phone division at Microsoft. Especially the graphics acceleration makes the software design and thus the user experience more fluid and movie-like. Currently Microsoft is working with hardware manufacturers to make user experiences like the iPhone’s GUI available to the masses.
We’ve been informed that a jailbreak for iPhone OS 3 beta is on doubtful trade for about 10$ (and on doubtful websites full of ads). We strongly recommend
to wait with updating to 3.0 until the iPhone Dev Team has released a working solution, that also helps people maintaining the unlock possibility for the iPhone 3G (means to not update the baseband!) and
to not use jailbreaks for 3.0. As there are no technical information available, how it works and thus what might be screwed up by applying it.
Be patient.
Update April 2, 2009: Now the iPhone Dev Team also comments on those non Dev Team jailbreaks. Obviously some people use a self modified version of QuickPwn. The iPhone Dev Team will of course give no support to people using modified QuickPwn versions.The Dev Team explicitly warns from updating to a iPhone OS beta version floating on peer2peer networks and from applying non Dev Team jailbreaks to it.The problem is the iPhone OS 3.0 is beta and thus contains lots of bugs. That is why Apple releases these betas in such a short period.
iPhone 3G users will also lose the possibility to unlock, since baseband 02.30 cannot be unlocked at this moment. Yellowsn0w is compatible to baseband 02.28 only. Last but not least: all iPhone OS 3 betas will cease to work at a certain point of time.
The boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI based Intel Macs has been updated to version 0.13. rEFIt basically allows to explore the EFI environment and supports installation and booting of many operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It also supports booting from external drives.
The update 0.13 supports the newest Intel Macs (like Mac Pro). Also an auto detect feature has been added that should automatically support forthcoming Intel Macs. For installation at least Mac OS X in version 10.4 (Tiger) is required.
Amazon has opened their music download service for german customers. About 5 million MP3’s can be downloaded. Prices vary between 0.77€ and 0.99€. Complete albums start at 4.95€.
Amazon does not use DRM techniques. MP3’s are encoded at 256KBit/sec. By using the MP3 format these files can be played on virtually any digital portable music player.
Downloading requires Amazon’s MP3-Downloader. Amazon supports all major operating systems like Windows, MacOS X and Linux (Debian 4, Ubuntu 9, OpenSuSE 11, Fedora 9). The growing number of Linux users will most likely appreciate a way to legally buy and download music.
According to ArsTechnica.com Apple’s latest update of the iPhone SDK agreement contains terms that explicitly forbids developers to use the iPhone SDK to be used to create applications that require jailbreak.
We don’t expect that this will either stop people from developing apps for jailbroken iPhones, as we feel this is a problem Apple addresses in the wrong manner, nor do we think this will stop the hackers like the iPhone Dev Team to create jailbreaks. As long as certain applications (like browsers) are not allowed in the AppStore and as long as Apple denies access to the underlying BSD Unix, people will go on enabling these features on a different way.
The recent developments like the CydiaStore show that there is a market for Apps that run on jailbroken iPhones.
Since yesterday Apple seeds a beta build 10A314 of the forthcoming Snow Leopard. Developers report Apple recommends them to test 64-bit kernel extensions (Kexts) to speed up transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.
It does not seem that this build contains the rumored new User Interface (UI) called “marble” , that AppleInsider.com has reported a couple of days ago.
In german forums people are rumoring that the NDS Videoguard encryption for the german Pay-TV channel Premiere has been compromised. As this has not been confirmed we currently expect this to be a hoax like the Nagra3 hack that has been reported in august 2008.
For completeness we release a translation of the hacker’s statement (original in german to be found here on Gulli.com) of the allegedly hackers:
NDS hack eventually confirmed!
In the meantime the NDS hack has been confirmed by an admin and a smartcard distributor. They have been send pre-programmed white DPSCs (digital pirate smart cards).
At this moment the NDS hack has only been confirmed to be working for Premiere (german Pay TV station). The hack is based on the NDS temp crypthack from october 2008. This has been the starting point. In combination with the BlueCryptCam that also has a weakness in its NDS Videoguard implementation.
With a little modification it then became possible to access and dump the NDS card’s Eeprom and Rom areas. If this hack can also be applied to Sky Italia or Great Britain is currently unknown and will take some time.
Kudelski seems not to be involved in this hack although this is rumored.
There won’t be any emulators (emu). The “blue cards” containing an own operating system will be released and distributed within the next week . They will be programmable using a Phoenix, CAS3 or Infinity programmer.
More news to come…
Kind regards from the Ukraine
From a technical point of view this statement does not look serious. As the described approach is far to vague. The described NDS temp crypthack was an exploit during the transition phase from Nagra2 Aladin to Nagra3 or NDS Videoguard. Some satellite receivers got an unencrypted firmware update over the air that allowed to watch Premiere even without any smartcard (more information in german here on Dragon-Cam.org). As this was only possible during the transition phase, it is highly unlikely that this might be the basis for a successful compromise of NDS videoguard.
Moreover even if this card was real, we would not expect this card to see the light of day. There haven’t been many NDS hacks in the last years. Among other gentleman like business practices (read on TheRegister.co.uk, on Denver Business Journal and on Wired.com) NDS as a company of Rupert Murdoch’s imperium is rumored to have hired the best investigators to at least monitor hacking scene activities.
Update: March 30, 2009: reliable sources from the scene say this is a hoax. Further information are not available currently.
Update: March 31, 2009:We found a nice “Wired” Video. Tarnovski – one of the best known hackers on this planet – describes how to hack nowadays smart cards. It “only” takes some equipment and a “little” bit of experience ;-)
