Thoughts on Tech

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Hacked iPhone

Hacked iPhone

To Jailbreak or not to jailbreak.  That’s the question.

No longer.

For a while my iPhone 2G was jailbroken.  It was a neat novelty back when there wasn’t an app store and there were a few cool features you could add via a simple web hack in iPhone OS 1.1.  Some days I miss the customization of the lock screen and the ability to change the icons and background – enough that I was considering the really quick and simple blackra1n for my 2G.

Two things happened over the course of this past weekend.

First – my trusty iPhone 2G finally bit the dust through no fault other than my own (dropping it firmly and matter of fact on a ceramic tile floor).  No worries – blackra1n jailbreaks 3GS just the same.

Second and more concerning – rootkits have now appeared for jailbroken iPhones.  The first being harmless (rickroll, anyone?), but this iPhone banking exploit showing just how nasty the potential really is.

So, jailbreakers – change your password.  Now.

Me, I’m not jailbreaking my shiny new iPhone 3GS.

Reality check.  I’m a customer in good standing with AT&T and have been for over 15 years now.  For some reason, and I guess I should consider myself lucky, I don’t seem to have all the other nasty problems people claim they have.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t live in New York or San Francisco.  I can’t speak to others’ experiences, only my own.  Jailbreaking your phone will, indirectly so, violate your contract and void your warranty.  I like both and want to keep both.

Big deal? Who can tell?  Take me as pessimistic if you would, but it would trivial to add a check to iTunes to see if the root password has been changed (and you did change it after you jailbroke your phone, right).  I expect as word of this malicious hack trickles down to Apple and AT&T that they’ll be doing just that.  I certainly would.

This sort of exploit allows Steve Jobs’ original concern to come true.  Maybe he was smarter than we gave him credit for.

I’ve recently taken the plunge and purchased a new aluminum macbook, the first mac I’ve owned in nearly 16 years. This article is the first in a series on my return to Apple as my primary computer.

Many years ago I was an avid fan of the “other” computers out there. I’ve had, over the course of many years, several variants on Atari and Amiga computers. I even spent a short stint with a few homemade devices. The first machine I really enjoyed using, however, was my Mac.

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twitter-bird

Mashable has a post up about the most popular twitter clients according to TwitStat.

I’m not surprised by many of the notable entries on this list, such as TweetDeck.   I use it regularly at work and load it up occasionally on my Mac, but like most AIR applications it is a resource hog and doesn’t integrate well into the rest of the desktop experience (growl support, please?).

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I’ve decided that improving the SEO level of WordPress will be my next plug-in project.   I expect it to be a learning an eye-opening experiment, as there are at least as many opinions on what is optimum SEO as there are themes for a WordPress blog.

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According to this early review from Gizmodo, the best feature so far in Windows 7 is the dock.  Not surprisingly, the dock looks a lot like the OS X dock that’s proven so useful in the Mac world. continue reading…