Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
Waiting in the Leopard-Line
Apple released the newest version of their OS X operating system yesterday. Named “Leopard”, it contains many interesting and useful features.
This article on Engadget does a pretty good job of summarizing. I’m most interested in Time Machine (for backups) and Spaces.
The line was about 100 strong when we got there, and rapidly added another 100 or more after we arrived. Lauren loved waiting.
It actually wasn’t bad. The line moved very quickly, and she had fun looking in the windows of the stores (many of which had Halloween items on display.)
Interesting to me was the number of computers being sold. People were streaming in and out of the store to pick up Leopard, but many also had large computer boxes in tow. I guess some people were waiting for the Leopard release to pull the trigger on their desktop/laptop purchase.
Best Buy has dozens of boxes of Leopard for sale, but the Apple store had FREE T-SHIRTS, and we obtained 2.
Later that night I upgraded my Mac Pro, and the process took about 45 minutes. One thing of interest so far – I had to turn off FileVault security in order for Time Machine to work. Leopard uses a different version of FileVault that is incompatible to a degree.
New iPod nano
I used my iPhone “credit” to buy Diane an iPod Nano.
It’s a great little player.
New Photo Gallery
I’m playing around with the new .Mac service and iLife ’08 suite. Check out the new photo gallery I’ve created here (also available from the menu to the right.) Photos taken with my iPhone will be dumped into the “iPhone” gallery, whereas others will get their own home.
I’m going to keep using Flickr because I enjoy the community sharing and unlimited storage, but this is kind of interesting…
New Apple Stuff
Apple introduced a bunch of new products yesterday. There’s a new iMac, a couple of new keyboards, a new version of the iLife suite, more disk space for .Mac, and a new iWork (with a spreadsheet!).
Check out the video of the press event here.
My thoughts? The iMac kind of doesn’t do much for me. Yeah it’s thinner, but we’ve seen variations of this design before. I think I was expecting a more drastic reworking of the outer shell. Not yet.
The keyboard looks awesome. I’ll be picking up one of these soon. I’ll also be purchasing the upgrade to iLife and probably will join .Mac for at least a year.
My Seattle pal Mike recently bought a bushel of Apple gear… he needs to get on the phone to Apple “pronto” about free upgrades. At the very least he shouldn’t be stuck with iLife ’06.
Will we ever unlock the iPhone?
All problems with unlocking lie in the baseband, the radio chipset for the iPhone. The chipset is an S-Gold2, and don’t come in the chat and give us links to PapaUtils, we can’t use them.
Now the iPhone only has one lock, a network personalization lock. This lock means the MCC(US=310) and the MNC(AT&T=410) must match the first six digits of the SIM cards IMSI. This check is done in the baseband firmware itself. I’m not really sure where yet, but that isn’t really relevant.
The only thing standing in the way of an unlock is the baseband. All the other sim checks are known and can be patched out. We even know the AT command to do the unlock. It’s ‘AT+CLCK=”PN”,0,”xxxxxxxx”‘. But good luck finding those x’s. They are called the NCK, or Network Control Key, and are believed to be unique in everyones phone. Forget brute force(time impractical) and the obvious entries. If you still think bruteforce is a good idea, read this. Further, there is a limit of 3-10 unlock attempts per phone, after which the firmware will “hard-lock” itself to AT&T.
So why can’t we just patch the firmware? The firmware, located in the ramdisk at /usr/local/standalone/firmware/ICE03.12.06_G.fls, is signed. See here for what is known about the file. The sig is checked in the baseband bootloader. The updater program, bbupdater, only checks a checksum, which can be changed. The update will take, but then the phone won’t boot because the sigs don’t match.
We worked two solid days on disasseming the radio fw. There are a few backdoors, but none that would lead to an unlock. If you are *good* with disassembling ARM, PM geohot for the idb. We’ve documented a lot of functions pretty well. Although, this firmware is very difficult to work through. I’m 90% sure the password check happens in the function called pwdcheck, but I haven’t found it yet. For all we know there could be a simple algorithm to generate the NCKs that we’ve missed.
I LOVE how the thing hard-locks itself to AT&T after a random number of attempts… It sounds like a considerable amount of effort was put into securing this device. All the tech podcasts were flippantly saying how the thing would be cracked within a week – well it’s going on 3 and they’re still struggling.
I have no doubt that the iPhone will eventually be cracked, but I wonder how many phones will be “bricked” in the process.
Excited by Proxy
My friend in Seattle recently ordered a Mac Pro and an iMac.
These are his first Apple computers, so this is something of a bellwether day. From this point forward, nothing will ever be the same for him. 
You can congratulate Mike here. The photos are here.
If you don’t get it…
If you’re one of those people who don’t “get” what all the hype about the iPhone is about, this post by Jeff Harrell sums it up quite nicely.
