New Jott for iPhone

Pretty sweet update to the initial client. The web services integration is a win.

Hard-core iPhone tricks

The crave blog over at CNET news has a great post on a Hanoi entrepreneur’s cell phone service/repair shops, and the brisk business they are doing unlocking 3G iPhones. If this sounds boring, you are probably not familiar with the process necessary to unlock this particular phone:

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone’s motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh’s turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

Pretty hard-core. Once the soldering irons come out, you have left the Mall kiosks behind…

Hat tip to Perry Metzger and the cryptography list for the link, and the reminder that, given proper motivation, people will do unexpected and unauthorized things with technology. Assuming otherwise usually fails.

Cool UI: “Shake & Share”

Doing things securely is obviously a good thing. But it rarely adds anything amusing to the thing itself.

Well, as “security” user-interfaces go, the “Shake & Share” feature on the ZeptoPad iPhone app is a rare thing. ZeptoPad lets you draw, even mind-map, on the iPhone. It has a good UI, and an amusing slightly retro, “MacOS Classic” look. And it has cut-and-paste.

“Yes, yes, all very cool. What’s so interesting about an ‘Etch-o-Sketch 2.0′ app”?

Well, it does file sharing, in obvious and easy ways, largely by importing and exporting photos. But the really cool bit, is sharing files with another ZeptoPad user. You hold the two units together in your hand, and shake them back and forth. ZeptoPad uses the accelerometers to generate a shared secret, and transfers the selected file.

And that is very cool.

A YouTube video shows the app in action, with a Shake & Share demo at the end.

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Sexy Penetration (testing) Toy

David Maynor and Robert Graham gave a DEFCON presentation on Bringing Sexy Back: Breaking in with Style, which included one of the cooler pentesting ideas I’ve seen lately.

The iPhone wireless LAN ownage in a box is an Apple iPhone, dressed out with an extended battery (5 days of life in this example), and packed with wireless reconnaissance tools.

You ship this little gem to a nonexistent person at your target organization, where it sits in the shipping department, seemingly lost, but not lonely…

The iPhone can be remotely controlled over the AT&T network, neatly avoiding wireless monitoring gear. And assuming you give a real return address, they even send it back to you after a while…

So. Cool.

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