It’s likely that you’ve heard the latest controversy over a security loophole which was discovered within Apple’s iPhone Firmware 2.0.2 earlier this week.  As expected, Apple has already come out with a semi-reassuring PR statement to silence baffled customers.

“The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September,” Apple representative, Jennifer Bowcock, said in an email to Macworld.

Will that update be the already in beta 4 iPhone firmware 2.1? Kevin Rose has rumored it for September 6th, but we’ve already seen push notification fall off the feature list. With more bugs to fix, will Apple pull a Vista, or settle for a less ambitious, more urgent 2.0.3 in the interim?

I’m favoring the 2.0.3 at the moment. I’d rather stability over features at this point. Nail 2.0.x, then move on. What’s you preference?

-Jameson

Lets face it. Safari on the iPhone is nothing like browsing via your home computer. While the slow speeds of Safari are a known fact, they aren’t exactly set in stone. If you want to speed up the speed of page loads, all you need to do is turn of Javascript support via the Safari settings in the iPhone’s Setting’s App. Turning off Javascript will show a noticeable decrease in the amount of time which it takes to render pages.

-Jameson

[Source: The iPhone Blog]

Whenever I rip DVD’s or convert videos to fit on my iPhone I always use a program called Handbrake. I have used many other video converters, and thus far Handbrake is the best I have encountered. Handbrake is open-source, and also available across multiple OS’s. The version I use is for Mac, but there are also versions available for Windows and Linux. Best of all, it’s free to download. Check out some of the specs:

Supported sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files
• PAL or NTSC
• AC-3, DTS, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks

Outputs:

• File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
• Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
• Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

Credits

HandBrake uses a lot of (L)GPL librairies from the Linux world:

• liba52 (AC3 decoding)
• libavcodec (picture cropping, scaling and deinterlacing, MPEG-4 encoding)
• libdvdcss (CSS decryption)
• libdvdread (DVD navigation)
• libfaac (AAC encoding)
• libmp3lame (MP3 encoding)
• libmp4v2 (MP4 muxing)
• libmpeg2 (MPEG-2 decoding)
• libogg (OGM muxing)
• libsamplerate (audio resampling)
• libvorbis (Vorbis encoding)
• libx264 (H264 encoding)
• libxvidcore (MPEG-4 encoding)

-Jameson

[Source: HandBrake]

The other day Gizmodo discovered a very large security flaw in Apple’s iPhone software.  When an iPhone is enabled with a passcode lock, purportedley none of the information within it can be accesed without first entering the code.  This however can be circumvented very easily.  If you have your iPhone ‘locked,’ it can be circumvented very easily with very little trickery aside. On the ‘lock’ screen, you can still make an emergency call. When you tap that, you can then double-tap the home button to bring up your favorites (assuming you have that set).

The issue is that your favorites are basically the keys to the kingdom. You can tap the blue arrow next to a favorite to gain access to a contact’s information. From there, you can further tap email, a url, or sms to gain access to email, Safari and your bookmarks, or all of your SMSes, respectively.

Rene notes in an email that this is reminiscent of the old PalmOS bug wherein you could still search the device while it was locked. This, though, this is definitely worse.

Thankfully, Apple has the best ROM update system in the entire smartphone industry — able to push out updates to every iPhone via iTunes with minimal carrier delays. Let’s hope we see 2.0.3 very soon. Meanwhile Giz recommends you set that double-tap behavior to either ‘Home’ or ‘iPod’ to temporarily fix the issue.

Of course, this only applies to people who actually use the lock function on their iPhones, the rest of us just live dangerously.

Update: Macrumors reports that Apple is aware of the issue and has a fix on the way:

[...]this security flaw was already reported to Apple earlier this month and has been acknowledged as an issue. A fix will presumably be included in a future firmware update

Last night a Bloomberg employee accidentally publised a premature Obituary for Steve Job’s death. Major newspapers and publishing companies often keep pre-composed Obituaries written of prominent public figures, and occasionally they are published early by accident. As this is standard practice, it shouldn’t be considered a flap about the recent questioning of Job’s health status. Anyways, if you are interested in reading how Job’s obituary would read check it out:

-Jameson

[Source: Gizmodo]

We’ve just upload a brand new set of iPhone Wallpapers to our Servers.  They are all available free of charge, and can be found within the iPhone Wallpaper pages on the blog, or on our forum.  The theme for this set of wallpapers is “3D”.  Be sure to give the a look, and enjoy!

-Jameson

If you ever wanted a diamond encrusted iPhone, here is your chance to live in decadence. It will cost $10,000 to the first 10 customers, with the next 40 being priced afterwards. There are 50 in total, and they are going to rich people with too much money whom would rather buy diamond decorated electronics than donate it to a good cause- like charity.

Here’s the lowdown on the diamonds:

• 475 Diamonds
• Brilliant Cut
• Color: F
• Clarity: VVS
• Carat 3.75ct

-Jameson

[Source: The iPhone Blog]

Over in England, they have deemed a certain advertisement which depicts the iPhone 3G as misleading.  Thus, it has been pulled from the airwaves until Apple makes the correct changes to it.  So what is the problem with this advetisement?  According to the Advertising Standards Authority, the advertisement is innacurate due to that it claims that:

“…all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone.”

I don’t know how anyone would expect ALL of the internet to be on the iPhone, but I suppose there are a few dimwits who would be tempted to buy it as a result of this obviously metaphorical statement.  And well, we know that isn’t exactly true. We still don’t have Flash or Java support on our iPhone and Flash and Java are a pretty big part of the internet. Apple claims that the advertisement implied the availability of webpages, rather than their specific appearance. Which honestly sounds like a cop out to us. But still, pulling the advertisement seems a bit excessive.

-Jameson

Apple recently released a beta preview to developers of the newest version of Apple’s webkit based browser- Safari 4.  This new version according Apple Insider will contain among other things:

Safari 4.0’s implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) includes support for masks, gradients, reflections, and specifying a named canvas. Also being carried over from the latest WebKit builds is rudimentary support for the WAI-ARIA (Rich Internet Application) and cross-site XMLHttpRequest specifications. Among the technologies supported from HTML 5 are the ability to send messages between documents, storage of data either locally or just for the user’s session, the option of running web applications outside of a browser or when disconnected from the network, and canvas pixel manipulation.

My greatest hope however, is that this will transfer over to MobileSafari with the released of iPhone Firmware 2.1.  I for sure want to see some Firefox-esque features come to Safari.

-Jameson

Yesterday the iPhone Dev Team Released the 2.0.3 Update of their Pwnage Tool iPhone Jailbreaking program.  This new version is much like the last, except in now includes support to Jailbreak phones with the iPhone Firmware 2.0.2 installed.  The Pwnage Tool is only for Macs, so Windows users will have to use the QuickPwn for now.

-Jameson

[Source: The iPhone Blog]