So we’ve all grown to love our nifty lil iPhones.  They can make phone calls, play your music and videos, let you surf the web and allow you to watch Youtube videos, and a whole lot more.  But the question is…will it blend?

Well the curious guys over at WillItBlend.com put it to the test.  Click here to watch the video.

Hackers have found a way to hack into the iPhone using exploits via the built in Safari browser:

Source: New York Times

A team of computer security consultants say they have found a flaw in Apple’s wildly popular iPhone that allows them to take control of the device.

The researchers, working for Independent Security Evaluators, a company that tests its clients’ computer security by hacking it, said that they could take control of iPhones through a WiFi connection or by tricking users into going to a Web site that contains malicious code. The hack, the first reported, allowed them to tap the wealth of personal information the phones contain.

Although Apple built considerable security measures into its device, said Charles A. Miller, the principal security analyst for the firm, “Once you did manage to find a hole, you were in complete control.” The firm, based in Baltimore, alerted Apple about the vulnerability this week and recommended a software patch that could solve the problem.

A spokeswoman for Apple, Lynn Fox, said, “Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users.”

“We’re looking into the report submitted by I.S.E. and always welcome feedback on how to improve our security,” she said.

There is no evidence that this flaw had been exploited or that users had been affected.

Dr. Miller, a former employee of the National Security Agency who has a doctorate in computer science, demonstrated the hack to a reporter by using his iPhone’s Web browser to visit a Web site of his own design.

Once he was there, the site injected a bit of code into the iPhone that then took over the phone. The phone promptly followed instructions to transmit a set of files to the attacking computer that included recent text messages — including one that had been sent to the reporter’s cellphone moments before — as well as telephone contacts and e-mail addresses.

“We can get any file we want,” he said. Potentially, he added, the attack could be used to program the phone to make calls, running up large bills or even turning it into a portable bugging device.

Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, said, “This looks like a very genuine hack.” Mr. Bellovin, who was for many years a computer security expert at AT&T Labs Research, said the vulnerability of the iPhone was an inevitable result of the long-anticipated convergence of computing and telephony.

“We’ve been hearing for a few years now that viruses and worms were going to be a problem on cellphones as they became a little more powerful, and we’re there,” he said. The iPhone is a full-fledged computer, he noted, “and sure enough, it’s got computer-grade problems.”

He said he suspected that phones based on the Windows mobile operating system would be similarly “attackable,” though he had not yet heard of any attacks.

“It’s not the end of the world; it’s not the end of the iPhone,” he said, any more than the regular revelations of vulnerabilities in computer browser software have killed off computing. “It is a sign that you cannot let down your guard. It is a sign that we need to build software and systems better.”

Details on the vulnerability, but not a step-by-step guide to hacking the phone, can be found at www.exploitingiphone.com, which the researchers said would be unveiled today.

Hackers around the world have been trying to unveil the secrets of the iPhone since its release last month; most have focused their efforts on unlocking the phone from its sole wireless provider, AT&T, and getting unauthorized programs to run on it. The iPhone is a closed system that cannot accept outside programs and can be used only with the AT&T wireless network.

Some of those hackers have posted bulletins of their progress on the Web. A posting went up on Friday that a hacker going by the name of “Nightwatch” had created and started an independent program on the phone.

The Independent Security Evaluators researchers were able to crack the phone’s software in a week, said Aviel D. Rubin, the firm’s founder and the technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Rubin, who bought an iPhone the day after the cellphone was released, said in an interview that he had approached three colleagues, Dr. Miller, Joshua Mason and Jake Honoroff, and offered them an enticing prize if they would try to crack the iPhone. “I told the guys I would buy them iPhones.”

Dr. Miller had already been exploring weaknesses in the computer versions of Safari, Apple’s Web browser, and was planning to reveal that vulnerability, a relatively common kind of flaw known as a buffer overflow, at the Black Hat computer security conference next month. Dr. Miller instantly thought to see whether the phone, which uses a version of Safari, would be as vulnerable.

Mr. Rubin said the research was not intended to show that the iPhone was necessarily more vulnerable to hacking than other phones, or that Apple products were less secure than those from other companies. “Anything as complex as a computer — which is what this phone is — is going to have vulnerabilities,” he said.

There are far more viruses, worms and other malicious software affecting Windows systems than Apple systems. But Mr. Rubin said that Apple products have drawn fewer attacks because the computers have fewer users, and hackers reach for the greatest impact.

“Windows gets hacked all the time not because it is more insecure than Apple, but because 95 percent of computer users are on Windows,” he said. “The other 5 percent have enjoyed a honeymoon that will eventually come to an end.”

The iPhone is becoming a victim of its own success, he said. “The irony is that the more popular something is, the more insecure it becomes, because popularity paints a large target on its back.”

Mr. Rubin said his goal was to discover vulnerabilities and warn of them so that companies would strengthen their products and consumers would not be lulled into thinking that the technology they use was completely secure.

Mr. Rubin said, “I will think twice before getting on a random public WiFi network now,” but his overall opinion of the phone has not changed.

“You’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands to get it away from me,” he said.

Looking to add custom ringtones to your new iPhone. Here’s a step by step guide on how to do it. The instructions make use of both the iPhoneInterface and jailbreak hacks which opened up full access to the iPhone’s UI and filesystem. Unfortunately, the former only works on the Intel-based Macs at the moment.

The instructions (23 steps) can be found here: http://www.hacktheiphone.com/iphone_ringtone_installation.html

So as I sit here writing this, next to my laptop lays the Holy Grail of cell phones right now – the Apple iPhone. I purchased my iPhone on the day of its release, Friday, June 29th. Its been a week since I’ve owned this extremely coveted device and I think I’m ready to report on what I like and dislike about it.

First and foremost, without any bias or to simply praise the iPhone, I want to start off by saying that the iPhone is the nicest, slickest, and the phone with the best interface that I have experienced to date. Mind you…I’ve gone through my array of mobile devices through the last decade or so…

As I had mentioned in a previous blog entry, I had no issues activating my iPhone through iTunes on June 29th. It was an extremely easy process and went quiet flawlessly. In less than 5 minutes, my iPhone was registered, a new number assigned to it, and it was ready to rock. In order to register and activate the iPhone, the most recent version of iTunes – v. 7.3 needs to be installed on your PC or Mac.

To make a phone call using this device is pretty quiet simple. All you have to do is either type out the phone number on the touch screen or select one of your contacts. The clarity of the call was ok although in some instances there was a problem with the volume/loudness on the call and I could barely hear anything the person on the other end was saying. This may have just been signal strength or network issues, even though I had a very strong signal as did the person I was speaking with.

In addition to the simple way of making phone calls, another neat feature unique to the iPhone is the visual voice mail feature. It’s a totally new and refreshing way to get voice mails and it makes you wonder why no other phone company thought about this yet?!

The iPhone has a built-in, 2.0 mega-pixel camera that works great for a camera phone. The large screen on the iPhone makes picture taking more fun than even on a regular digital camera. You can view the images in landscape or portrait mode just by rotating the iPhone ninety degrees in either direction. You can then flick through the images or play a slideshow. The only downfall with the iPhone here is that you cannot shoot any videos at all.

The iPhone also has built in speakers that are great to use with the iPod feature. The volume can be easily controlled and is adequate for being able to listen to your music without headphones/earbuds.

Browsing the web or watching YouTube videos by simply clicking a button on the screen is great. The videos off of YouTube look really good on the iPhone’s screen. While surfing the web, you can zoom in on content real easily by touching the screen with two fingers and moving them apart at a 45 degree angle.

Setting up an email account was quiet easy for me as well. I use Gmail for my email right now, and in less than a minute, the iPhone was setup and able to receive my emails. Just make sure that you setup/turn on your POP email on your email providers site.

The Google Maps feature is another very cool tool. You can easily look up businesses by name or category, plot a course from one location to another, and easily call them with a touch of a button. As you type in a location, the iPhone tries to match it to one of your contacts. You have access to both Google’s regular and satellite maps and can view a list of driving directions with traffic information turned on or off.

To use all of these Web features you need to be either connected to a Wi-Fi network or use AT&T’s EDGE network. The iPhone easily finds Wi-Fi networks, and displays them on the screen. By simply clicking on one, you can easily connect to it.

The battery life of the iPhone is decent, but on mine I come no where close to Apple’s ratings of 8 hours of talk time and 6 hours of internet use. My iPhone is usually in need of a charge after an extensive period of use in a couple of hours. This might be because of my settings and the giant screen using up a lot of power. I’ll have to do some real testing on the battery life and report back!

So…now that you have your pretty little iPhone, wonder what the inside of it looks like?!  Here are some pictures of what the innards of the iPhone look like:

Breaking the iPhone Open:
  The $27 touchscreen module that enables the iPhone’s cool touch navigation originates from Balda and TPK Solutions.

This closeup shows the bottom of the iPhone’s applications circuit board. The open slot (1) houses the AT&T SIM card; the iPhone not only is locked to AT&T service, but it’s also locked to the specific AT&T SIM card that comes with it. We tried inserting a non-iPhone AT&T SIM card–and the phone wouldn’t recognize it. Hidden under (2) is 8MB of multipurpose flash memory–which is in addition to the iPhone’s 4GB or 8GB of primary flash storage.

The heart and soul of the iPhone…Pictured here: The quad-band GSM (850-, 900-, 1800-, and 1900-MHz)/EDGE transceiver (A); power amplifier (B); Bluetooth 2.0 chip set (C); the wireless 802.11 a/b/g chip set (D); the baseband chip set (E); and power management chip set (F).

The iPhone’s lithium ion battery cannot be replaced by users. The battery is built into the unit, and soldered to the wireless interface board, as shown here. Apple says the battery should be able to be charged 300 to 400 times. To replace the battery, you’ll have to send the phone in to Apple, and it will cost you $79 plus $6.95 for return shipping. Apple will replace the battery in warranty if it drops below 50 percent of its original capacity; but the iPhone only gives you a visual, not a numeric, reporting of battery life.

The iPhones Brain: this view shows the top of the applications circuit board, home of the iPhone’s core components. The flash memory is among the most expensive elements in the iPhone–even with flash prices having fallen almost by half since the iPhone’s unveiling in January. “Memory pricing has fallen right through the floor,” says iSuppli’s Rebello. The 4GB Samsung NAND memory costs $24 (seen here), while the 8GB costs $48. The Samsung memory uses multi-level cell (MLC) technology, which stores more bits per cell than single-level cell (SLC) technology, but also means you’ll have higher power consumption.

The iPhone’s Brain – Part 2: Other core components on the applications circuit board include the motion sensor/accelerometer that enables the iPhone’s whiz-bang ability to auto-rotate the display’s orientation (A), the 24-bit RGB display interface from National (B), and Wolfson Microelectronics’ audio codec (C). In the upper left, you can see the iPhone’s camera. The Apple-branded processor (D) is one of the largest components here: The 620-MHz ARM1176JZF application processor has 1Gb of DDR SDRAM memory from Samsung. (iSuppli has narrowed down the processor’s source as being either Samsung or Marvell).

   The iPhone’s Camera: The phone has a 2-megapixel, fixed-lens camera module with a CMOS sensor.  Roughly costing about $9.50.

In summary, the total cost of the hardware components is $225.85 for the 4GB version, and $249.85 for the 8GB version. The only difference between the two versions lies in the flash memory.

Cool vid of a guy performing “street magic” with his iPhone!

In the midst of the whole iPhone release and launch, one question that kept coming up was how long will it be before someone can actually unlock the iPhone to work with other carriers? The iPhone’s OS passwords have already been cracked, and the encrypted restore image which contains the machine’s instructions to run has already been found. 

An unlocked iPhone will spoil the deal that AT&T has with Apple in being the sole service provider for the iPhone’s for the next 5 years… July 2012 in the US. 

Hacker: Unlocked iPhones Coming in One Week or Less

Hackers have already succeeded in cracking the iPhone’s activation process, a step towards unlocking the iPhone.

Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service

Hackers may successfully unlock an iPhone in as soon as three to seven days, according to a representative of one effort that aims to unlock Apple Inc.’s new handset.

“We believe it will be easy. We are privately aware many of the iPhone engineers came from other handset manufacturers, and we understand their design techniques fairly well,” said gj, speaking in an interview conducted using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). He requested that his real name not be used.

“Easy to us means inside one week,” he said, offering an estimate of three to seven days.

Unlocking the iPhone means users will be able to use the handset with other service providers, not just AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive deal to sell the phone in the U.S.

By Tuesday night, U.S. time, hackers succeeded in cracking the iPhone’s activation process, a minor step towards unlocking the iPhone but a significant technical challenge.

The activation process uses a software token that is sent from the phone via iTunes to Apple, which signs the token and returns it to the phone. When that process is completed, iTunes tells the phone to activate.

Hackers developed tools for both Windows and MacOS that allow users to activate their phones without iTunes. But users will have to use a token from an activated iPhone, which can be used to activate multiple phones. The hackers are not providing a token with the tools.

“If you don’t have a known token (which does contain identifying information) you won’t be able to use the tool,” gj said.

At least one other hacker found a way to activate the iPhone without using iTunes. Jon Lech Johansen — better known as DVD Jon, a hacker who helped develop the DeCSS tool for decrypting DVDs — released a tool that can activate the iPhone without iTunes on his blog.

“The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and Wi-Fi work,” Johansen wrote.

Cracking the activation process brings hackers one step closer to their goal of unlocking the iPhone. The phone requires iTunes to activate functions such as its camera and music player. But the process also requires signing up for a two-year data plan with AT&T.

“Activating the phone really just makes the device more ‘usable’ for those who want to use it as a Wi-Fi device, for instance,” gj said.

With the activation process cracked hackers turned their focus to unlocking the iPhone, a challenge that is expected to be easier than cracking the activation process.

“Unlocking is a function of the radio and the radio’s interaction with the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) logic, and these are mostly standards based,” gj said.

A rumored software update for the iPhone, expected to be released on July 5, could undo some of the progress hackers made towards unlocking the phone. “If Apple releases an update on July 5th that includes ‘fixes’ for our efforts so far, it will be a setback,” gj said. “I don’t know if it will be a permanent one.”

Hackers working together to unlock the iPhone don’t belong to a specific group, and don’t plan to claim credit for their work, gj said. “We just want to see the hardware freed. We accept that others will exploit those works but hopefully it will be a lesson to Apple,” he said.

“They’re such a great company, it’s a real shame for them to lock everything down like this. The design is top notch,” he said. “They would win far more business by setting an example for the industry.”

Guy takes a sharp Microtech knife and draws circles with it on his iPhone screen. Surprisingly, no scratches appear on the iPhone’s screen:

After watching the video of the guy dropping his newly purchased iPhone on the concrete pavement, I decided to do some research on the internet and see how people’s iPhones were holding up 5 days into its release. Interesting enough, the guys over at PC World had already been experimenting with the durability of their iPhone and here are their results:

PC World manhandles the new Apple phone to see how much abuse it can take.
Eric Butterfield, PC World

It would be a shame–after waiting hours in line and spending $500 to $600 on an iPhone–to lose it to a minor mishap. To see how well Apple’s phone can stand up to abuse, we stressed it with increasingly rigorous scratch and drop tests, which we informally conducted in the PC World kitchen, hallway, and back alley.

To see how it did, check out the video here: http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,545-page,1-bid,0/video.html.

Scratch Tests

First, to simulate how it will hold up when parked in a pocket or purse alongside house keys and car keys, we stuffed the iPhone into a plastic bag containing several key chains. We then gave the bag a few good shakes to see if the activity would scratch the iPhone’s screen. It didn’t.

Then we rubbed keys against the screen with a fair amount of force, to see what might happen if the phone and keys were in your jeans pocket and you leaned against a counter. When the iPhone emerged with its screen just as pristine as when it went in, we tried to gouge the screen with one of the keys. We were very impressed that even this deliberate attempt to scratch the screen completely failed.

Drop Tests

Next, we conducted three drop tests, increasing their severity in each round. In each instance we conducted the test several times.

First, we released it from waist height onto a carpeted floor. Then we let it fall from chest height onto a hard linoleum floor. Lastly, we let it slip from our fingers and bounce onto a concrete sidewalk from head height–as if we had been talking on the phone.

The iPhone not only continued to work after each drop test, impressively it still looked good, too. The only obvious damage it suffered was a few gouges along its metal edge from the drops onto concrete. But its glass screen came through without a scratch, despite our best efforts to mar it in repeated tests of both types.

PC World’s conclusion: There’s no need to coddle this sexy little device.”

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133636-pg,1/article.html

Here’s a video of a guy who got a bit excited in showing off his newly purchased iPhone on cam and drops it right out of the box on to the concrete pavement. OUCH! Poor new iPhone!