Hacking News

The creator of the rickrolling worm Ikee created quite a stir the other weekend when his self-replicating software was discovered spreading around iPhones across Australia. Since then, he's been discovered, and he says he's recieved both death threats and even a job offer for what he's done.

The iPhone Dev Team has released an update to their UltraSn0w iPhone unlocking tool. The previous version had an issue where the carrier name would disappear. Version .92, the updated program, now contains another 10 lines of code that solves the bug. It is available in the http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com/ Cydia repository.

The first known actual iPhone worm has been spreading across jailbroken iPhones in Australia late last week. The worm seeks out jailbroken iPhones with SSH installed in which the default password has not been changed, and installs itself on the device. Once installed, it changes the background to an image of Rick Astley and looks for other phones on the network to install itself on, though it has the potential to be used for more malicious things.

Apple has posted a job opening located at their corporate headquarters for the position of "iPhone OS Platform Security Manager." The individual would be responsible for a team of securing the booting, installation, and running of firmware. We're guessing that this lucky individual will be the one responsible for thwarting jailbreaking and unlocking efforts from our heroes in the iPhone Dev Team.

Zottd, the developer behind GBA4iPhone (an emulator for Gameboy Advanced games) has announced work on a Nintendo 64 emulator for the iPhone and third generation iPod touch. He says that the new devices have finally become powerful enough to handle N64 games, though we won't really know how well they perform until we see for ourselves. Things like the controls and frame rate are still in question.

Several jailbroken iPhone users recently had their iPhones held hostage by a Dutch iPhone hacker. They were surprised one day to find a message on their device stating that their precious iPhone had "been hacked because it's really insecure," saying the mystery messenger had access to all of their files.

You'll never stop the struggle between Apple and the people who want to hack it, so why bother complaining? As of noon today, giddy jailbreakers can take the next step and go full-on with blacksn0w, the jailbreak+unlock for the latest 05.11.07 baseband (with tethering enabled to boot). Mac and PC versions are available and it works with iPhone OS 3.1.2.

In short, the blackra1n release is alive as well, with both Mac and Windows support and the installation instructions can be found here...

Geohot has announced that BlackSn0w, an unlock for iPhones with the 05.11.07 baseband, will be released in the near future. The new software will make it possible to unlock all iPhones, including those who upgraded to the latest firmware. An image was posted this morning showing arbitrary code running on the new baseband of the device (after the break).

George Hotz has released release candidate 2 (RC2) of Blackra1n, his one-click software tool for jailbreaking all iPhones and iPod touches. Currently, the latest models of iPhone must be tethered to Blackra1n to boot correctly or the jailbreak data is wiped, but otherwise it still works just as well as on other devices.

Good news, everyone! Yesterday, the unfortunate news broke that Apple was now shipping iPhone 3GSs with a modified boot ROM that would make the devices impervious to the Dev Team's jailbreak exploit, 24kpwn. Amazingly, this has already been cracked, and one of the new devices has been successfully jailbroken.