When it comes to creating customized wallpapers for your iPhone or iPod touch, this app handles the task quickly and easily.
Is your iPhone jailbroken? Do you know anyone with a jailbroken iPhone?
Have you ever considered jailbreaking your iPhone? Have you read how-to
articles then chickened out at the last minute?
If so, why? If
you are among the small group of iPhone owners who’ve decided to break
out Apple’s controlled environment sandbox, why did you do so, and what
would make you come back?
Wayne Dixon over at Macgasm has just
published his thoughts on the answers to that last set of questions
above and it makes for an interesting read. In essence, Dixon breaks
down jailbreakers into three handy categories.
The first group
are your hard-core jailbreakers, those who work within the dev
community, those who are insistently and defiantly against the
limitations Apple places on the iPhone. This group, he concludes (and
rightly in our estimation), are unreachable by any sticks or carrots.
These people, while appreciating the additional functionalities, apps,
and customizability jailbreaking brings with it, aren’t in it solely for
that. Their reasons go deeper.
Image Source: http://www.multifl0w.com
Then there is a second group,
the curious. They just have to know what’s on the other side of the
fence. They may jailbreak their phones, try out the Cidia market, and
discover they like it or they may come back within the folds of Apple’s
embrace. This group Dixon also rightly puts out of Apple’s reach.
Curiosity is a devil of an itch and if all it takes is a Restore in
iTunes, then little will stop these people from seeing where all that
horizon leads.
No, it’s the last group that Dixon sees as the
most persuadable to either come back to Cupertino’s sandbox or never
leave it in the first place. This group we’ll call the "customizers."
These people want home page wallpaper like the iPad has (or even
different wallpapers for every page of apps they have), they want to
change their iPhone’s colors and personalize the appearance of their
iPhone’s software and put on as many sparkles and bangles and beads and
shiny toys as they can.
But it is one feature Dixon doesn’t talk
about that PatrickJ at Just Another iPhone Blog nails that we think
would be the big megillah of jailbreak-habit-breaking — the elusive
multitasking. Haven’t you had that experience where you’re listening to
Pandora and you think, "Oh, right, I have to text my wife to pick up
some beer on the way home," and you hit Home only to have your tunes die
on you? Or maybe you need to look up something in the middle of an
instant message chat, but you don’t want to have to sign back in after
you break your connection. There’s an app for that, but it’s only
available on the iPhones of jailbreakers.
Either way, we think
PatrickJ’s on to something and even if multitasking is a big ol’ drain
on the battery, we’re big kids here. We think we know how to use our own
stuff. We can remember to pack a power cord.
What about you,
readers? What about jailbreaking appeals to you?
Among the numerous advantages that iphones offer for their users, the producers from Apple have also created people the opportunity of choosing their most preferred wallpaper for displaying on the desktop of their own iphone. The overall quality of the images in an iphone is notable, as the colors in the pictures and videos are [...]
In their statement regarding the recent threat, a worm that potentially
can steal financial data, Apple parentally tsk-tsks users sporting
jailbroken phones that modding in this way "not only violate[s] the
warranty [but] will also cause the iPhone to become unstable and not
work reliably."
It has the benefit of being true, though.
Opening up your phone through jailbreaking, while giving you greater
app flexibility among other things, can leave your iPhone exposed to
hackers. If you’re going that route, be sure to change your root
password from the default "alpine."
Image Source: Instructables.com
As might seem natural, the
first hack merely Rickrolled the user’s wallpaper, but the threats have
grown worse. A few weeks back, jailbroken iPhones were at the center
of a 5 Euros scam where a hacker compromised the same security hole and
changed the wallpaper to a message directing users to his site. There,
with a PayPal link, he offered instructions to close the hole for five
Euros.
This demonstrated a low level of of malice, but the
scam paved the way for others. According to Sophos, the latest threat
is a worm that attacks jailbroken iPhones in the Netherlands, Australia
and other countries. The worm changes the handset’s root password,
scans through your SMS database looking for other phones to infect, and
will redirect users of a Netherland bank site to a fake site to collect
their login info. The only way to get rid of the worm is to restore
your iPhone’s firmware.
As smartphones become an ever more
prevalent part of our lives, it’s clear that such threats are going to
be with us for some time to come and are only going to get worse. If
you’re going to strike out on the road away from the protections
offered by Cupertino, remember to be vigilant.
iPhone jailbreakers beware: a malicious worm for the iPhone is making its rounds.
iPhone owners with jailbroken devices running a Secure Shell network (SSH) are the only users affected due to the owner not changing the default SSH password, making their device vulnerable to hackers.
Once infected, the user will be tricked into thinking they’re being Rickrolled with a wallpaper that features Rick Astley and the words "ikee never gonna give you up."
This isn’t the first time that this hack has been used against unsuspecting iPhone owners, but this new malware is the first to spread from affected devices to other jailbroken iPhones using the default SSH password.
Ars Technica is reporting that there are at least four variants of this worm that are making their rounds.
The worm debuted in Australia on the Optus mobile network and has currently spread to Optus iPhones in other countries.
Protecting yourself from this virus is as simple as getting rid of the default password on your Jailbroken iPhone’s SSH feature. You can get the instructions for doing this on the F-Secure website.
Sophos anti-virus firm has more details on this worm on their website.
Once again, this shows the potential security risk that could arise from jailbreaking your iPhone/iPod touch.
