WWDC 2011 kicked off yesterday with Steve Jobs taking the stage as usual. Sadly, there wasn’t a new iPhone announced (because I’m waiting to replace mine). Nevertheless, I’m still looking forward to iOS 5. Here’s some of the features I thought were great: 1. Notification Center I think this has been on everyone’s wishlist for a really long time. If you have no time to respond to the missed calls or SMSes, notifications are now shown on the lock screen so you can see what you’ve missed at a glance.
Continue reading "5 iOS Features I'd Love"→
Recently I was passed a Nokia 7230, which committed suicide by taking a nosedive into the toilet bowl. I was asked to extract the phonebook data from it. The convenient thing about (some) Nokia phones is that they provide haptic feedback when it powers up, so I know it turned on, but the display was blank. The keypad LED also lit up, but I had no visual indication of what was going on.
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How can you tell when your iPhone baseband dies? Take a look at the top-left corner where the network status is displayed. The SIM card was inserted, the SIM PIN was entered, but it remains unconnected to the network. As you can see from the iTunes icon, this is a newer version of iOS (4.2.1). The older version sported a different iTunes icon and when you clicked the circled i, the IMEI is unknown.
Continue reading "iPhone 3GS Baseband Issues"→
OMG I can be like that sometimes [youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=EFiPR5Gg9g4] [via the Dangerous Prototypes forum]
Update 15-Aug-2011: This fix only applied to the new version of the iPhone Facebook app back in April 2011. Any problems after April 2011 is probably not the same as the one described here. I recently upgraded to the latest version of the Facebook iPhone app, but I’m not sure if that caused the problem. When you attempt to open your News Feed, it shows “Loading” for a while before showing “No Internet Connection”.
Continue reading "Solving the Facebook "No Internet Connection" Problem"→
For a long time now, apps can stream high-quality audio to an Airport Express or an Apple TV using the RAOP protocol. However, the reverse cannot be done due to the fact that the protocol uses asymmetric encryption, which means the private key is baked into the firmware of the Apple (or Apple-licensed) device. Finally, someone has done something about it. James Laird dumped the ROM of his Airport Express and extracted the private key.
Continue reading "Apple's RAOP is Cracked"→
For some time now I’ve been looking into mDNS-advertised services. My aim was to advertise a service using mDNS in a C program. Typically, doing this is really easy: call the Bonjour or Avahi APIs, and the system-wide daemon will do the rest for you. The problem arises when there is no system-wide daemon such as mDNSResponder (if you’re on a Mac or Windows) or Avahi (for the other OSes). This usually happens when you’re on an embedded system, like a router that runs Linux.
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There’s a really nice article on Open Music Labs that describe the inner workings of the ubiquitous electret microphone.
This is interesting, but I don’t have any video out accessories to test it on. You just need to add a boolean that says display-mirroring: YES to the model plist (K48AP.plist for first-gen iPad) under /System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app/ and reboot the device. Obviously this requires a jailbroken iPad for you to access the file. It also seems to work with devices that use the A4 chip. I guess this is how Apple did their presentations all along, at all of these iOS device unveiling events.
Continue reading "Display Mirroring on the iPad 1"→
I just read news that fake SSL certificates were issued by Comodo CA, but more interestingly, browser updates were issued to blacklist the certificates. Why this was necessary since we already have a protocol for doing just that? I found out from this post on the torproject blog that talks about how OCSP is not properly implemented in browsers: The browsers treat revocation errors as soft errors and a MITM is deadly for revocation.
Continue reading "Fraudulent SSL Certs & Revocation"→