New IPods Lock Out Linux, But Hackers Concoct a Quick Fix
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The intrepid hacker community quickly finds a workaround for the way the latest iPods accept loaded files. Frustrated users who don't like iTunes find many of the third-party music-management apps that have worked for years don't work. With no Linux version of iTunes, users have had to choose -- ditch the iPod or switch operating systems -- until now.
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Remember a couple of weeks ago when Steve Jobs took the stage and announced a $200 cheaper iPhone. That was pretty bad. And an iPhone that's just an iPod. Who needs that! The new Nano sure is cute, but cute insn't enough. I have a 1.5 year old 60GB video iPod that still works (sorry Steve) and I never use the video, so the $300 I have burning a hole in my pocket for my monthly Apple impulse buy (above and beyond the new Mini I bought last week) is going to (drum roll please) Nokia!  Yup, my next iPod/iPhone-alike thingy isn't even from Apple and it runs Linux, and comes highly recommended by geeks everywhere. I just put in the order on Amazon, I'll let you know how cool it is in a few days.  PS: This is my way of thanking Ben Bernanke for the huge windfall I got in the stock market yesterday and today. I think the 1/2 percent drop in interest rates is supposed to make us go out and buy stuff to stimulate the economy. Just doing my part Uncle Ben!
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A series of security holes in three common Linux components has led open-source vendors to rush out several updates. Two of them, rated &quot;highly critical&quot; by security company Secunia, are in libpng, a library
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What exactly is Microsoft's media player made of, and how closely does it match the iPod? TechRepublic's Mark Kaelin dives right in.
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MENLO PARK, California  - A well-known hacker  claims to have overcome restrictions on Apple Inc.'s   iPhone, allowing highly technical users to bypass AT&T Inc.'s  network to use the phone's Internet and music features.
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Sure, the soon-to-hit-the-shelves iPod Touch plays music and offers users a cool multitouch interface like its cousin, the iPhone. But it's the inclusion of Wi-Fi and Safari that makes it revolutionary, says Computerworld's Seth Weintraub.
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After cracking the encryption system that protected DVDs in order to play the discs he had bought on a PC running Linux, Jon Lech Johansen has his sights set on liberating other audiovisual content from the format in which it is sold.DoubleTwist, a company he co-founded in March 2007 with Monique Farantzos, on Tuesday released beta versions of a Facebook application and a PC desktop application for unlocking and managing music and video files.Johansen achieved notoriety as &#39;DVD Jon&#39; when he ended up in court for co-writing the DeCSS software that cracked the encryption on DVDs and allowed them to play on PCs running open-source media player software on Linux. Until then, they could only be watched using authorized hardware or proprietary software because their content was encrypted using the Content Scrambling System (CSS).He followed that up by breaking a series of other DRM (digital rights management) encryption systems including FairPlay, Apple&#39;s proprietary DRM wrapper around the open AAC format music files it sells via its iTunes Store.While Apple&#39;s iPod is not the only portable device that can play AAC files -- many Nokia phones do too -- it is the only one that can play the encrypted AAC files Apple sells. There are ways to work around Apple&#39;s DRM, including burning the files to a CD and then ripping them back into the computer in another format, but they are time-consuming.DoubleTwist&#39;s tools, Twist me and doubleTwist desktop, are intended to make it easier to move music and video files, including those locked by Apple&#39;s DRM, from one device to another, or to share them with family and friends, the company said.Twist me, the Facebook application, lets users of the social network site put music and video on their profile pages to share with friends.DoubleTwist desktop runs on Windows PCs alongside Apple&#39;s iTunes, and can take legally purchased iTunes files in the DRM-protected AAC format and, on the machine authorized to play them, turn them into MP3 files that will then play almost anywhere, the company said.The desktop software also includes tools for sharing audio and video playlists and photo albums, and synchronizing them with Nokia&#39;s NSeries, Sony Ericsson&#39;s Walkman and Cybershot phones, the Sony PSP game console and the Amazon Kindle e-reader, among other devices. In addition to AAC and MP3, it handles WMA (Windows Media Audio) and WAV audio formats, and video in MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV (Windows Media Video), AVI and the 3GP format used by mobile phones.DoubleTwist&#39;s software may soon be obsolete, though. Digital music retailers are beginning to realize that DRM just irritates customers, and Apple now offers almost half the encrypted music in its iTunes Store in higher-quality versions without DRM, at the same price. Amazon.com, meanwhile, sells all its digital music in MP3 format without DRM, as do independent online music stores such as EMusic.
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More jailbreaks than a spaghetti western The latest version of the firmware for Apple's iPhone has fallen to hackers less than a week after its release.â¦
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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For the Wall Street Journal, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write, &#147;In Monday&#146;s column, we predicted that the combination of the iPod&#146;s popularity and the increasing worry over viruses, security holes and spyware in Windows PCs will lead to the second coming of Apple Computer as a home-computing power. To say that struck a chord would be putting it mildly. Boy, did we ever get mail &#151; including a significant number of people who said that the iPod, Windows security concerns or a combination of the two had made them switch to a Mac or plan to do so.&#148; [Paid WSJ subscription required.] [Dec 23]
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Bundle of fixes includes patch for zero-day Wi-Fi hijack flaw and other bugs, some that could let an attacker commandeer Macs.
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Blog: Popular add-ons could have their update process hijacked by man-in-the-middle attacks.
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Intrusion prevention capabilities in IOS can be circumvented by hackers, putting companies at risk of attack.
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Reg review Does colour screen + touch-sensitive control pad = iPod killer?
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(InfoWorld) - A hacker group released a free, open source unlock for Apple's iPhone late Tuesday, just a day after a commercial company started selling something similar for as much as $99 through a network of online resellers. The iPhone Dev Team, a dozen programmers who began their attempts to break the iPhone's reliance on AT&T in early July, have posted their hack on download servers. According to several sites, including Gizmodo and Engadget, the iPhone Dev Team unlock exploits the same iPhone bug as the for-money iPhoneSIMFree hack to do its magic. The two groups, however, came up with their solutions independently. But the process isn't for the faint of heart. "This unlock is not for everybody!" the iPhone Dev Team warned. The procedure involves several separate programs -- some of which must be obtained elsewhere on the Internet -- and requires that iPhone owners execute commands from a shell screen on the Mac or PC. Even so, reports have been posted to the team's site from users in more than 40 countries that the unlock hack works, and after a swap of the iPhone's included SIM card with one from another cellular service provider, that they've been able to access more than 90 different carriers. The iPhone's distinctive Visual Voicemail, which lets users select voice-mail messages rather than listen to them in the order they were received, is missing after an unlock; that feature relies on AT&T's back end. Some users have also reported that the iPhone's connection to YouTube no longer works after the hack is applied. The iPhone Dev Team is already working on a one-click tool sporting a graphical interface that will unlock an iPhone, but it had not been released as of this morning. "A new version of the GUI tool is almost complete," the group said on its site. It's likely, however, that any unlock will be undone by the next iPhone update, which Apple has said will be issued sometime this month to give the device new capabilities, such as Wi-Fi downloading from iTunes. The iPhoneSIMFree group, for example, has hammered the caveat into potential buyers' heads: "We cannot offer any guarantee should Apple Inc. choose to re-lock the phone after a future update," it stated in a FAQ. Resellers of the iPhoneSIMFree hack, who have priced the unlock as low as $45, have repeated the no-guarantee mantra. Apple has repeatedly refused to comment on the various iPhone unlock hacks -- paid versions or free ones.
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A hacker group has released what it says is a one-click way to install unauthorized third-party applications on an iPhone or iPod Touch. You still can't switch the iPhone to another wireless carrier.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.