The release of the 3G unlock software (currently going under the name yellosn0w) is due to december 31., 2008. The unlock will currently only available for baseband version 2.11.07 or lower.
Between Chrismas and new year’s eve members of the team (planetbeing, MuscleNerd and pytey) will be giving a lecture about the security systems in both the iPhone 2G and 3G on the Chaos Computer Conference 2008.
Welcome to Berlin, guys. Enjoy the most interesting and inconsistent town in Europe, today :-)
As of January 1st, 2009 Slysoft will change update conditions for their products. Lifelong free updates will cease to be offered in favor of an annual subscription. Licenses that have been bought before 2009 are not affected and will still containt the free lifelong update feature.
Until december 31st, 2008 (wednesday) Slysoft offers a special chrismas discount (20% off). As Slysoft ‘s products “AnyDVD” and “AnyDVD HD” in Germany are considered not legal we cannot directly link their site.
Mac OS has the wonderful feature that it’s got a BSD compatible Unix enviroment called Darwin as the basis. You can get to it by simply starting the terminal. Once getting used to it you even install Cygwin to your Microsoft Windows installation because it simply is a powerful way of controlling your computer.
Anyway typos and forgotten parameters is pita once you entered some longer commands. Going back to the beginning of the line is real pain, using the right/left cursor arrows takes forever. But there are workarounds…
The following list shows some of the most common commands that help to use the terminal more effectively – derived from the old unix days btw.
| Key |
Function |
| Ctrl-A | jump to beginning of the line |
| Ctrl-E | jump to end of the line |
| Esc-F | jump forward word by word (requires to hit Esc every time again!) |
| Esc-B | jump backword word by word (requires to hit Esc every time again!) |
| Tab | completes the names of folders and files |
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The “UCSB International Capture The Flag” is a distributed, wide-area security exercise. It aims at testing the security skills of the participants.
This time the organizing team around Prof. Giovanni Vigna prepped a small network, that could be accessed only via remote. The goal was first to gain access to the network and then to disarm a connected bomb. Additionally the participants had to solve 13 coding riddles (like determining the output of a program that is only available in a small parts and not as a whole).
The Berlin Team ENOFLAG was the team to solve 12 of the 13 questions and to disarm the bomb. Congratulations guys, standing work!!!
The PC version of the long awaited game Grand Theft Auto IV has yesterday been released to the european markets. First tests show the game is as outstanding as its console versions, released earlier this year. Anyway forums are full of bug reports by people using ATI based graphic cards. The game crashs even before it gets started. NVidia users also report issues, but at least it starts after some starting attempts.
The german Gamestar.de is currently doing a poll. This poll (with currently n=4787) shows that about 75% of the users experiencing heavy issues like permanent crashes. Only 5% say GTA runs seamless without issues.
You may rethink your Chrismas wishlist at this time. What about a Playstation 3? Besides the fact that the game plays wonderful on that device, it’s also got a Bluray/DVD/mp3/Xvid/DivX player included ;-)
What might sound like a conspiracy book by John Grisham is reality. Apple obviously believes that another company or even companies are secretly backing up Psystar. Groklaw.net explains that this might be an explanation why a major law firm took this case. Apple’s lawyers wrote:
(..) Apple will seek leave to amend this complaint to show the unknown John Doe Defendants’ true names and capacities when they are ascertained.(..)
Apple seeks revenge and these new claims read badly for Psystar. Apple even added claims for DMCA violation. So the main question is: Is Psystar about to go down, or do they have aces in their sleeves? You may find the whole article on Growlaw.net.
Unimpressed by this current development Psystar is continuing to sell their MacClones…
CNet.com reports Tuan Anh Do, a 29 years old business man from Hanoi, now offers hardware unlocking services for the iPhone 3G. He is owner of a couple of cell phone repair stores and he now managed to find a rather painless way to unlock the iPhone 3G and offer that as a service to customers. Unlocking costs about 80US$.
Tuan Anh Do is well known to the iPhone scene as TAmobile (Link here). He was also the first to extract the bootloader from the first generation iPhones.
Unfortunately unlocking requires desoldering, binary modifying and resoldering of the baseband chip and is therefore by far not fool proof. Painless unlocking here means “painless” for experiences solder technicians. For the rest of us we either plan a Vietnam holiday or wait for a store to offer that service around the corner. Anyway, find the whole story and some more really amazing pictures on Dong Ngo’s article on CNet.com.
Picture is courtesy of CNet.com
Apple has released a technical note recommending the use of Mac antivirus software. For the first time Apple admits that Macs need protection like other operating systems aswell. Apple recommends three Anti Virus solutions:
The open source virus scanner ClamXav is not mentioned. Besides the major players Symantec and McAfee we can hope that Kaspersky also ports a version of their Anti Virus software soon. Or as Apple says:
“Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”
Adobe’s security implementation of their Acrobat 9 has been compromised. Unprotecting of documents whoes password have been “forgotten” is now possible because of a vulnerability in Acrobat’s security function.
The russian software developers Elcomsoft found this and also integrated their findings into their APDFPR 5.0 (Advanced PDF Password Recovery). This tool can handle the security systems of Acrobat 5 to Acrobat 9. Elcomsoft offers three different versions:
For legal reasons we are not allowed to link like Elcomsoft’s pages, since we are located in Germany.
yet another incomplete news (AIN)
Since David Elliot (also known as DFE) showed the OS X on PC scene how to boot Leopard Retail DVDs on non EFI systems (=standard PCs) using his „Boot 132 CD“ there is even more strong progress – OS X is technically almost completely untied from a Macintosh computer. Based on DFE’s findings a guy going by the nick Munky applied DFE’s strategy to already installed OS X operating systems. He digged into Intel’s EFI standard and found Apple fully respects it. During Leopard’s installation process Apple’s Disk Utility.app also puts a hidden first partition on your harddisk.
bash-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *149.1 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Leopard 138.0 Gi disk0s2
The diskutil list command here reveals that the disk is formatted in the GUID partition scheme (Apple’s standard). The first partition is called EFI and the second partition holds the operating system as we know it: Leopard. Intel’s standard requires to have such a partition for having space for specific hardware drivers that might be booted before the operating system gets loaded.
Munky now found a second thing: although Apple respects the EFI standard their own EFI implemented on their Macs simply does not use that partition. It is empty. He now applied a trick known in the ancient cracking days as stealth method. As he knows the real Macs don’t use the EFI partiton, he just reformats it as an HFS+ volume and turns it as the first boot partition. Inside this EFI boot partition there is an own kext-bootcache which can hold modified kexts matching the individual hardware basis while the original kexts remain untouched (and unused) in Mac OS’ original /System/Library/Extensions folder. Thus allowing to perform original Apple autoupdates without breaking the system.
But as using hacked or binary modified .kexts is not desirable for they should not be distributed because of their – well – controversal legal status, a french guy going by the name CycloneFr refined a loader technique. He defined loader.kexts that only replace device information in the Info.plist of original kexts at runtime. Thus using always the newest kexts from the /System/Library/Extensions folder but with different device information.
We are currently compiling a complete newbie tutorial for the above mentioned procedure for a standard system. You think this sounds like a dream? So we can tell you it is not. Leopard has been completely untied from Macintoshs. There is no need to illegally download hacked Leopard distros from darkest filesharing networks anymore. You can now buy a copy of Leopard and use that original Leopard retail DVD for installation.
But you may have expected it. What we described here currently requires to be able to run (and understand) commands on the terminal. This comes why the whole procedure is really new (Munky discovered and explained this about 2 months ago, DFE’s Boot 132 thing is only 5 months old). You see: this is something from tomorrow which you already get to use today. It will still take some more time, until this process is completely user friendly like an EFI-X device, but you will not be depending on a third party hardware, you will be able to maintain your system and you will learn how it works.