Earlier, we updated on the iPhone getting close to being hacked. Now, it seems that the dream itself has finally come into realization, with the combined efforts of a team in hackint0sh.org and a 28-year-old hacker from Macedonia named Senad (also known as Deepdark) enabling the usage of European sims on Apple's latest gadget instead of the supplied AT&T one.

This means full functionality - ingoing calls, outgoing calls, sending and receiving text messages, edge internet - the whole shebang.

And despite the fact that the iPhone itself is an extremely complicated device, it seems that the process of unlocking it from AT&T is actually pretty simple. Using only a standard sim card reader/writer and the software required, iPhone users can finally swap out the AT&T sim with a European one.

You can check out the entire article for more info about this hack, as well as Deepdark's thoughts about hacking the iPhone in the read link we've supplied below.

 

Big, big news update for those of us with an iPhone in our pockets - hackers have recently achieved a major breakthrough in the effort to "unlock" the nifty little gadget from the oppressive clutches of the AT & T  Galactic Empire and into sweet, joyous, happy-happy freedom. Many a cup of coffee - and chinese takeout - has been digested to bring us this information.

Well, not really sure on the coffee and chinese takeout bit. But what we do know is that the hacker team currently in charge of unlocking the iPhone's many secrets have finally managed to extract the full content of the radio memory. This means that they've practically stole a whole bunch of keys - the lick here now is to find the right one.

Interested parties - whether hack-savvy or not - can help the efforts of the iPhone Dev team by either contributing directly, or by donating through PayPal. So if you're in favor of unleashing Apple's latest gadget in its fullest potential, feel free to click on the read link to find out the ways you can help.

Good things, iPhone Dev team, and good luck.

Want to take screenshots from your iPhone without having to worry about the right angle and lighting to take pictures of what's on it? Erica Sadun of The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) managed to create an iPhone screenshot utility that churns out PNG picture files of whatever is displayed on your iPhone screen. According to Sadun, there was already an existing iPhone screenshot script in circulation but it has to be used inside an application, and produces PDF output.

Her own screenshot script, made from scratch, was based on UIApplication's _dumpScreenContents: protocol.

On a related note, her daughter also found out that you can script the iPhone to take about 4 screenshots per minute, but the iPhone has to be set never to go into sleep mode and in camera mode.

Check out the Via link to download the utility script. Image courtesy of TUAW.

According to gadget news site Gizmodo, the iPhone Dev Team is making steady progress towards their goal of freeing the Apple iPhone from its AT&T network lock.

The team has announced that the software that controls the phone's radio communications has finally been reverse-engineered. Gizmodo noted, however, that total unlocking is still quite a ways away.

Apparently, the work done on reverse-engineering the software has revealed that the iPhone has two layers that need to be explored further to fully unlock it. The first layer is the phone's main operating system, Mac OS X.

The second layer is the Nucleus Real Time Operating System which runs on a secondary chip and controls access to the baseband's memory. According to the iPhone Dev Team, the latter is one of the fronts that they could possibly use to "access or disable the lock from within the system."

Remember the iPhone's "Hello" ad that was aired during the Oscars? Well, it's doing more than just a "Hello" now. The #iphone IRC channel just cracked into the system to bring users the first ever non-official iPhone application: a Hello World exploit.

As these hacks go, all it does is display the text "Hello World" on your screen and does nothing else. While the serial has been cracked into a few weeks ago, the happy family of #iphone has now released the actual binary of the Hello World app.

The source demo of the GUI app is available online and easily found if you're resourceful. And with that source code, who knows where the hacking can lead to. You can build onto the source with the tools created by the #iphone family - which are also available online, mind you.

You can't deny how impressive these guys are for having pulled off the feat. Only time will tell now how far their exploit can go.

A few months ago, there was a video in circulation of what appeared to be a successful hack for Apple TV. The video in question detailed what appeared to be Apple TV booting up from an external hard drive.

We'll be following up on that hack with this similarly reported attempt done by AppleTVHacks.net and FatWallet. This newly released patch will enable Apple TV to boot up from its internal hard drive, while using an external USB (hard) drive as its main storage unit.

We imagine owners trying to get more space out of their Apple TV will find this patch most useful. For the guys wondering how to pull this off, here's what you'll need:

• An ssh-enabled Apple TV.
• An Intel-Mac or Intel-based *nix.
• An installed version of Mac OS X 10.4 Intel. Or a full copy of the contents of the Â?/System/Library/ExtensionsÂ? folder from one.
• An original, unmodified copy of the Â?mach_kernel.prelinkÂ? file from the Apple TV.
• An external USB drive formatted using Â?Journaled HFS+Â?.
  

Full installation details are available at the read link. As a further backgrounder for this patch, the original creator was actually Patrick Walton of the University of Chicago. Patrick wrote the original patch, while AppleTVHacks further fine-tuned it after they encountered a syncing problem. Just be reminded that thus patch has been designed to work on Apple TV software v1.0 - it might not work on v1.1.

It's a fact of life that people want to customize their gadgets according to their need and preferences. After all, what speaks more about a person than the things one uses daily?

If you feel the same way, but bemoan the lack of customizable features of the iPhone, here's a nine step procedure on how to create custom ringtones for your iPhone.

We're pretty sure you already want to start adding the ringtones to your phone, so here are the steps to do so:

1. Create a new playlist. Drag unpurchased songs from the iTunes store into your playlist. The songs will retain their "Add Song" buttons and their price within the playlist.
2. Export your playlist. Select the playlist in the sources column. Control-click/Right-click the playlist name and choose Export Song List from the pop-up menu.
3. Save the playlist as plain text. Select Plain Text from the Format pop-up and save the playlist file to your desktop.
4. Open the playlist file. It is a tab-delimited file of columns, so you can open it up in Excel (my preference, make sure to option-drag the text file onto the Excel icon) or a text editor like TextEdit.
5. Locate the file URLs. Each file URL appears in the final Location column for each line. Copy the URL.
6. Download the files. In Safari 3.0, open the Downloads window (Windows->Downloads). Paste the URL into the Download window and allow the file to transfer. Your computer must be authorized to your iTunes account. You may want to try playing back the file in QuickTime Player just to be sure it downloaded correctly. If you're not a Safari 3.0 user, use your favorite alternate such as curl, wget, or so forth.
7. Rename. Give the file a more meaningful name than, for example, "mzi.rwgtaash.aac.p.m4p". Retain the .m4p extension.
8. Upload to the iPhone. Use your favorite method (iphoneinterface, sshfs, sftp, whatever) to copy the file to /Library/Ringtones on your iPhone.
9. Select the ringtone. On the iPhone, navigate to Settings -> Sound > Ringtone and select the new file. The ringtone will play back as you select it. Please note that some newer releases (including Nicole Scherzinger's Whatever U Like--thanks Drunk Dwarf) do not work as ringtones. I'm not sure why.

As of now, you're nine steps away from customizing your iPhone, if you haven't done so already. Go ahead and give it a try.

More bug news about Apple, and this time it's about Mac OS X. It seems that a recent addition of an exploit to the infamous Metasploit hacking framework has upped the level of threat that an unpatched bug in Samba currently poses to the system it's installed on, as well as on its user. This warning came directly from Symantec Corp., the company expressing concern over what appears to be apathy on Apple's part.

Of course, the people behind Samba had already done their homework on the bug itself. In fact, the patch that resolved the vulnerability in the open-source file and print-sharing program was produced and distributed by the Samba community exactly the day it was announced. That fixes things for Samba, but not for the Mac OS X itself.

So what's the unpatched bug, really? When turning on the Mac OS X's Windows Sharing feature, it also activates Samba. Keep in mind, Samba is not just a Mac OS X exclusive file-sharing software, as it's also used by PC and Linux users. This in itself is already a very wide opening in terms of security for the Mac OS X, as users can easily take advantage of the exploit and gain root access. Of course, this "opening" is very easily closed, as users only need to disable Windows Sharing - but it's more of a temporary stopgap rather than an actual remedy.

Apple's products may have few bugs and exploits, but by no means is it an excuse to not stay on your toes when root access security is concerned. That aside, let's hope for some timely measures coming from Apple itself. Updates as we get them.

 

The last time we heard about the latest Apple gadget that's currently selling like hotcakes, the iPhone, we learned about how Independent Security Evaluators, a firm that tests their client's computer securities by trying to hack into them, has found a very critical security flaw in the iPhone. With the uncovered exploit enabling any hacker to literally take control of the gadget's main features, it should only be common sense for Apple to release a patch that plugs up that particular security hole.

So are they going to release that patch? We're not quite sure. As it is stands, Apple's got a bit of a time limit on their hands to do just that. The Black Hat 2007 Conference - pretty much where hackers and security experts converge to trade secrets and information about cracking and hacking today's latest security measures in the world of computers - is right around the corner, and suffice to say that the discovered exploit in the iPhone will be revealed there.

If that isn't scary enough, think of the consequences - after the conference, hackers will not only be able to make calls and send text messages with your iPhone, but also access your personal information and that of other people's stored in your iPhone. So it's not just your phone-slash-iPod that will be compromised, but your privacy as well.

With that aside, let's all cross our fingers that Apple beats the buzzer and puts up a security patch before the Black Hat 2007 Conference opens next week. Updates as we get them!

Hacking the iPhone's EDGE connection for your laptop's net-surfing pleasure? Nate True over at the cre.ations blog points this out as an interesting proposition with the srelay application, which when properly uploaded into your iPhone, turns it into a SOCKS server. Before interested readers can get cracking, however, the hack requires that owners run their iPhone through the Jailbreak app, and have had the phone tethered to their PC.

The instructions should be available in the read link, although readers are warned that using the iPhone's EDGE connection for their laptop may get them into hot water with AT&T terms of service agreement. Furthermore, the instructions that will be provided for were done using Windows only - the author has yet to test them on a Mac. And definitely no word if this may conflict with the previously detected Vodafone exploit.

To give you an idea of how the whole hack will look, we'll also provide for this similar YouTube video we picked up, posted by buzzert1.