When someone puts a file up on a server for download, how does the host or the end-user know, for sure, the file they are about to download (or are serving up) is the valid file? What if someone hacked into the server and replaced the file with a bogus file that contained malicious code? It’s happened before and it will happen again. Fortunately there is a way to avoid downloading invalid files – checking the md5 hash. The only problem is that this method only works if the host and user knows how to use md5 tools. In this tutorial you will learn how to add an md5 checksum to a file and how to run a check on a file you have downloaded.

What is md5 and checksum?

Before we continue with the actual steps, you might benefit from knowing exactly how the process of checksumming works. MD5 stands for Message Digest algorithm 5, which is a cryptographic 128 bit hash function and serves as a “fingerprint” for a digital file. A checksum is a fixed-size datum that is computed from a block of data. When it is crucial for a piece of data (such as a download) to be valid, the datum is compared to the original block the datum was computed from to check for a match. When an md5 checksum matches, the user/host can be certain the file is valid. When the md5 checksum does not match, a red flag should immediately go up and the original block of data should be discarded. If a file changes by so much as a byte, the checksum will fail.

For most users these tasks are handled from the command line. There are GUI tools available (such as GtkHASH) that can tackle the same tasks. But for the purposes of this tutorial we will stick with the command line tool.

Creating an md5 sum

For those who plan on hosting files for download, you will want to know how to create an md5 sum. This is very simple. Open up a terminal and change to the directory holding the file you want to work with. Say, for example, you want to create an md5 on the file /var/www/files/download.tgz. To do this you would change to the /var/www/files directory and issue the following command:

md5 download.tgz

The above command will output something like:

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As for the iPhone of the present, we now have the first truly malicious iPhone malware going around while Apple continues to grow in the smartphone business, posting more profits that the Finnish giant Nokia.

iPhone Malicious Code Now A Reality

For those who paid no heed to the first ever iPhone worm, here’s a much scarier piece of a news. While the first worm never really did much other than change your wallpaper to rickroll you, there’s a new piece of code that has truly malicious intents for your iPhone.

It attacks the same way as the last one does but instead of making its presence known, it will silently steal all the personal data that it can find on the iPhone and inside the apps. Thankfully, just like the last worm, this malicious program can only infiltrate jailbroken iPhones that have open SSH sessions and have not changed their default root password. So to all those who are jailbreaking their iPhones, do take your time to understand exactly what you are doing and close this gaping security holes. [read]

New iPhone May Be Verizon Only

After the rumors of the next generation iPhone going worldmode surfaced, we now have rumors about the iPhone being made solely for Verizon. This is the result of a confusion regarding reports from chip-maker Qualcomm who have been making new CDMA chips for their parters, including Verizon. [read]

Famous iPhone Dev Quits, First Of The Many To Follow?

After enduring Apple’s shenanigans with the app store approval process, the famed developer Joe Hewitt (creator of the Facebook app)  has officially declared that he is quitting iPhone development. And he makes no bones about being vocal about why he quit, clearly stating that his decision “has had everything to do with Apple’s Policies”.

With so many other developers also complaining about Apple’s policies, Joe’s move may be taken as an example and followed. And if that does happen, Apple will be losing the most important part of what makes the iPhone tick — great apps from great developers. [read]

iPhone Now Has 17% World Smartphone Market Share

Apple is fast closing in on the others in the global mobile Handset Market. After being in the market for barely two and a half years, Apple now constitutes 17.1% of the total global smartphone market.

This is a 50% growth for Apple in recent times, showing exactly how fast a company can grow with the right steps and a brilliant product. The other reason why Nokia is so very important is because it is also one of the largest sellers of smartphones. Its smartphones are the reason why Symbian still holds such a large share of the market. Blackberries may have been very popular in different pockets (RIM is on the wane) but nothing beats Nokia’s worldwide reach. Nothing until now it seems. [read]

Want More Bang For Your Buck? Try The App Store

Analysts have shown that iPhone users have more than just the highest number of Apps to choose from. They also have more value for money when calculated on dollar for dollar. [read]

Apple Creates More Profit Than Nokia

In the last quarter (Q3), Apple made much more money than the world’s number one mobile handset maker – Nokia. And the difference is significant too. While Nokia made $1 billion, Apple made $1.6 billion. [read]

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First iPhone Worm Rickrolls Jailbroken iPhones

This has been the main worry about everything Mac, They do not have viruses now, true but as they start to get more popular they will attract the attention of malware creators. So in that vein of paranoia, we have news of the first ever worm for the iPhone.

You can cut out the screaming and the deep breathing exercises because it is a) completely harmless and b) only effective on jailbroken iPhones. It does things like change the wallpaper and rickrolling users, so it is not exactly destroying your iPhone yet. A worm on a jailbroken phone is a worm on a device that has already been tampered with. So you can wait for the first ever worm on legit iPhones before you hit the panic button. [read]

Complete Car Control Via iPhone

Okay, this is certifiably crazy. In fact, we should probably start a ‘gHacks Certifiably Nuts’ award just for these fellas. But I must admit that what they are is doing is pretty cool. We know that the iPhone can already be used to start your car remotely but fully driving with the iPhone kinda takes the cake.

So what you do is you take some electronic control circuits, hook them up to control your steering, acceleration and brakes and then control them wirelessly. If you want a less vague and more accurate description, check out the videos. It is quite nicely done and I especially love the fact that they are using the accelerometer to control the steering.

The result is pretty 007-ish — that you can drive your car through your iPhone. Look M(a), no hands! [read]

HD Radio Comes To The iPhone Via Gigaware

Now that the Zune HD is out, your least favorite co-worker who loves to make fun of your liking for Apple has probably been going on and on about how his Zune HD does HD radio and your iPod Touch does not. Setting aside the all important the question of how many good HD radio stations are there near you, you can now get back at him saying “there’s an app for that!”

But that would be kinda half true because even though iBiquity has made an app that plays HD radio on your iPhone, you still have to get an additional hardware for accomplishing the feat. The device is called Gigaware Navigation Controller and is essentially an HD tuner with iPhone integration. It allows you to seek and auto tune as well. Plus there is Facebook tagging and iTunes tagging.

Works with the latest iPhone and the iPod Touch. Available on RadioShack. [read]

Sparkz Projector For Your iPhone

Do you want to spend a lot of money on a pico projector that will work with your iPhone/ iPod Touch/iPod Video? If you do, you can now have the Sparkz dock that lets you connect any of those devices and more to it so that you can project your favorites onto a nearby screen. It will support a/v and VGA inputs too.

Other than this extended support for inputs, it has a resolution of 640×480, stereo speakers and a 60-inch viewing area. It charges your docked device while it is projecting and it comes with its own tripod. The price so much goodness? A mere $495. Hey, I did say a lot of money. [read]

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New iPhone Safari Bug Could Drive Your Bills Through The Roof

It has been a while since we have seen a major bug in Safari on the iPhone that users could themselves trip. So imagine our intrigue when we came across this bug. Apparently, if the user visits a site that uses Motion-JPEG (a format used mainly by security cameras) and then closes Safari – Safari continues to run in the background and continues to feed that stream into your iPhone.

The user is not notified of this in anyway and at the end of the day, you could end up with huge data bills or over usage charges. [read]

More Macs Online After The Windows 7 Launch

This might seem a bit hard to digest but it seems like the truth. We now have more Macs online  after Windows 7 has been released. In fact, Windows’ share of the Internet is on the decline. This could get interesting. [read]

Snow Leopard Update To Block Atom

Looks the latest build kernels of Mac OS 10.6.2 lacks support for Intel’s Atom. While the intention on Apple’s part is not entirely clear but we may be looking at yet another cat and mouse game here after the current Palm Pre sync thing.

If this build goes live, then netbook hackintosh makers will face a pretty challenging situation where there is no built in support for Atom. Since removing the support does not really contribute to the further streamlining of the Mac OS, blocking hackintosh makers seems like the logical intention here.

It would make sense too, with Apple trying to convert as many people has possible from the PC side of things. However, they won’t be able to keep at it for that long because you can bet that hackers on the case already and it won’t take them long.

Endless Racing Game For iPhone

I have not tried out the endless racing game but the video sure looks fun. If you are up for a simple racing that reminds of the old days, this one might be just the thing you are looking for. [read]

SquareSpace App Goes Live On The App Store

The popular hosted web-service called SquareSpace finally has its own iPhone. If you have an account over at SquareSpace, you will be able to access it securely over the app. The app does not take you through the website. It is a self-contained thing that is directly hooked up with the SquareSpace service and it lets you see everything about your website. You can see the stats, post on your blog, edit your blog, etc. [read]

Wadia’s High-End Dock For The iPod

Wadia has a high-end in audio and video solution for the the iPod, sort of. They have an iPod dock called the 170iTransport. Once you plug in your iPod, the device will act as a media server. It can stream your iPod digital output over an S/PDIF co-axial cable and it also has component video for all your movies. Going for $380, this might be a nice addition to your home theatre rig. Of  course, the quality will be as good as the original files, which will likely be compressed. [read]

Orange To Offer The iPhone In the UK From Nov 10, Bans Media Streaming Apps

Orange has declared that they will start selling the iPhone from November 10. But there is a problem here. [read]

It seems that Orange’s terms and conditions dictate that you cannot use your iPhone for other activities. These activities include making using the phone as a modem, using non-Orange Internet-based streaming services, VoIP and more. That means you will not be able to use apps like Spotify, YouTube, AudioBoo, etc. – all of which use Internet-based media streaming to deliver content on demand.

But Orange has clarified on BBC that iPhone users will be allowed to use these apps as long as they are within their monthly usage limits. I really hope they stick to that, because you will be signing the contract. [read]

iPhone OS 3.1.2 Unlock Coming On Nov 4^th, Unlock iPhone 3GS and More

It has been cracked folks!

Come November 4^th, i.e. tomorrow, you will be able to unlock your iPhone 3GS and other devices that are running iPhone OS 3.1.2. The hacker who made cracks of the previous iPhone OS versions has done it again. The crack is coming as blacksn0w  from Geohot. [read]

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Scientists at University of California, Berkley have actually accomplished this task. They have successfully attached tiny electrodes and other electronic parts on to living insects. Through these implants, the bug can now be maneuvered through a laptop.

The engineering principle behind is not very difficult to understand. Since we human beings can’t exactly one-up nature on engineering, this is a sort of hack in to the system. It’s like installing a malware that takes control of your computer and then the malware creator manipulates your system through the implant.

The bugs are implanted with the electronic parts at the pupal stage or around the time when they retreat inside the pupa. This way, they actually grow up with parts implanted in them. Then when they are fully grown and take flight, the electrodes transmit electrical pulses in to their nervous system and muscles. So in case the controller wants the bug to veer left during flight, the electrodes charge the left  muscles to make them work harder and the body turns left. Is it is just me or does this sound eerily similar to the way human beings were controlled in The Matrix?

The bug that is being shown off at this point is a Beetle. The developers of the system, Hirotaka Sato and Michel Maharbiz, talked to the Neuroscience Magazine and told them that they had successfully demonstrated remote control in free flight through an implantable radio-equipped neural transmitter.

Attempts to do things similar to this have been going on for several years now and it has already been tried on insects like cockroaches. But this the first time ever that man has been able to extend this kind of control on an insect. This is not necessarily a good thing though. However, as with every scientific achievement, what comes off it will depend on how we use it. And the identity of the people who are funding it already gives us a large enough hint as to what the purpose of this project might be.

The project is being funded by the Pentagon. More precisely, it is being funded by the US Defense Research Project Agency (DARPA) and they themselves have been trying to build a Nano Air Vehicle or NAV.

thankfully this is still in the realm of Sci Fi

These NAVs would be small enough (less that 7.6cm and 10g) to go to places undetected and carry out reconnaissance missions in urban areas mainly. Even though we have advanced enough in the field of nano-technology to make the insect-implants, we are still unable to build something like that completely on our own.

So the military hopes that the beetles would act like micro air vehicles and give them unprecedented advantages during war.

Thankfully, nothing like that is possible immediately because the control  implant is all that the insects can carry during flight. Any more weight and they will not be able to lift it with their wings. So things like a camera and a GPS transmitter are still quite far away from being implanted on to these insects, which would be the only way they could be of any use in war. They can still carry chemical and biological weapons but that would violate existing war laws.

It’s funny that they are expected to abide by the law during a war. The developers are saying that this is only the initial stage and practical cyborg insects are anything between two to 10 years away. [BBC news]

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Some services offer free SSH accounts, so you can edit and access files anywhere, host websites, use them as proxies (or IPv6 gateways) and some even let you run processes like IRC bots and compilers.

Generally, such free Shell accounts impose a monthly bandwidth quota of a few megabytes, so you don’t use too much of their resources. Some providers are more generous than others, though, and some charge for additional space and bandwidth.

Most SSH providers offer Unix-based hosting. Mitja Sladovic offers a very large list of such free providers.

The most popular service is the SDF Public Access UNIX System, established in 1987. Free users are offered email hosting (POP or IMAP), games, access to the text-based ‘Lynx’ web browser, web hosting, various network utilities and 80MB space. For access to gcc, php etc., one must a one-off fee of $36. In order to validate your account, and receive access to network utilities, one must send them $1 or €5 (in order to deter spammers).

Blinkenshell is another interesting option. Free accounts get 50MiB of space, access to several compilers, an IPv6 tunnel, hosting, email, IRC access and even the ability to have MySQL databases. One can’t use Blinkenshell for IRC bots, though. A few services do provide access to eggdrop, a popular IRC bot, such as Polarhome and aeshells.

Naturally, novices may struggle with such services as no graphical interface is provided. These services do, however, provide a rapid way to compile applications on different platforms (like Linux and BSD) and allow boring processes, like IRC bots, to run for you.

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You may read Make Use Of, if you don’t then it’s one of the larger tech blogs dedicated to webware and software reviews and has over 25, 000 daily subscribers.

You hear about hacking stories and security alerts all the time around the internet but you never really expect it to happen to you, however Make Use Of certainly wasn’t taking any risk, I’ll give you the summary of what this hacker did:

A certain Al Ferank of Dubai hacked Aibek, MakeUseOf’s owner and editor’s Gmail account, it’s worth noting that Aibek was using a secure scrambled password of 15 characters, if it’s that easy to gain access to Gmail perhaps their security needs to be looked at.

Within the account he than set up an email filter to forward GoDaddy communications to another email account, using these details he called up GoDaddy directly and identified himself as Aibek, he simply stated the username and password of the account and requested the domain be transferred, this was carried out within the hour.

Viewers of MakeUseOf where suddenly greeted by a static page filled with nothing by paid links and advertisements, editor Mark O’Neil found out via Twitter shortly afterwards and contacted Aibek.

As they where trying to figure out what happened they received a charming email from the man himself:

I said it very simply and very easily !

2 K !

Deal or not ?!

You own the domain I get the money…

Regards

Make Use Of was hacked and the domain stolen within an hour, the process of getting it back took significantly longer:

Aibek contacted NameCheap – the hosting company the domain had been transferred too and they agreed to lock the domain down while they and GoDaddy investigated the situation, although they warned it might take between 20 hours and 3 days. In the end after much back and forthing between Aibek, GoDaddy legal and their PR department the whole process of getting the domain back took about 15 hours, getting MakeUseOf online again took another day or so.

I can actually think of no way this could have been avoided on MakeUseOf’s part, however I definitely think Gmail needs to look at their security measures, obviously a ‘strong’ password isn’t strong enough.

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FEMA recently installed a new voicemail system in their Maryland Training Center, which uses the Private Branch Exchange or PBX phone network. This kind of system is used by thousands or maybe even millions of companies throughout the world.

Last weekend though, a hacker broke into the network and made over 400 international calls, totaling up to $12,000. Calls were made to various countries in the Middle East and Asia (ironic, huh) and lasted anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes per call.

When the fraud was discovered, all outgoing long-distance calls from FEMA’s National Emergency Training Center were halted. What’s even more embarrassing is that according to John Jackson, a security consultant, this type of attack is very old-school and used to take place around 15 years ago. Most telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the initial password assigned to users.

FEMA is busy investigating the situation, trying to determine who made the calls as well as the people who received them. As of now, it looks like a “hole” was left open by the contractor when the voicemail system was being upgraded. The agency refused to specify what the hole was or the name of the contractor believed to be responsible.

For something like this to happen to an organization like FEMA, it’s extremely embarrassing. It also underscores just how vulnerable a phone system is, which is why companies are shifting to Voice Over Internet Telephony services (VOIP).

In all likelihood, this is a practical joke that went a bit too far and the person responsible is just a fresh-faced kid who was fooling around. Then again, maybe not, considering the destinations of the calls. What do you think?

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Well, all that is about to change. Digital Inspiration has come up with a way to embed or hide an mp3 file within a jpeg image uploaded to these photo-hosting sites. The process is quite simple and only requires a little bit of command-line work.

Firstly, copy your mp3 file and an image file to one folder. Next up, switch to the command-line interface. You can do this by going to Start > Run > Cmd. From here, navigate to the folder where the song and image are saved. Then, type in the following command:

‘copy /b mypicture.jpg + mysong.mp3 mynewpicture.jpg’

Replace ‘mypicture’ and ‘mysong’ with the actual file names. The resultant image ‘mynewpicture’ will contain your mp3 file in image format and can be uploaded directly to Flickr. When you want to save this song to your computer, open up the page containing the image, select ‘All sizes’ and download the original image size. Change the extension of the file to mp3 and you are good to go.

While I’ve used an mp3 as an example of embedding a file within an image, you can pretty much use the same method for any type of file. However, remember that you cannot hide file size so if you upload images that are 5MB and 10MB big, Flickr is obviously going to get suspicious. What do you think of this trick? Are you concerned about the potential for abuse? Let me know in the comments.

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Thankfully though it is fairly easy to authorize additional computers so that the Netflix Watch Now option is also available on them. The check if a computer may use the Watch Now option is done in the Windows Registry. The Tech Recipe website found a simply way to copy the key of an authorized computer and import it to another computer to authorize that computer as well.

A user who wants to do that needs to start the Windows Registry on a computer that has the Watch Now option enabled. This is done by using the Windows R keyboard shortcut, entering regedit and hitting enter. Now navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Netflix\ Movie Viewer\ and left-click the Movie Viewer key.

Now access the export option under File > Export and save that key to the computer. Now copy that key to another computer running the same operating system. Open the Registry again and import the key using the File > Import menu. The key is specific to the operating system of the computer which means that you cannot import an XP key into Vista and vice versa.

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Again the User Agent is used as the only mechanism to check if an iPhone connects to the service. If you have already installed the Firefox User Agent switcher add-on and added the iPhone user agent to it you are ready to visit the iPhone start page at Texterity Magazines to read any of the 50 magazines for free in your browser.

If you have not done this visit my first article that explains how you can change the User Agent in Firefox to be identified as an iPhone (Iphone user agent) when browsing the Internet.

Magazines seem to be specialized way more at Texterity. Some titles are The American Lawyer, Electronic Products, Extreme How-To, Greenlight Magazine and Popular Science.

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Yes, the same insecure User Agent check that did not work on so many occasions before. All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.

The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.

Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

just add the line into the User Agent field in the options of the add-on and any name in the description. Then switch to that User Agent and visit the Zinio website that was created for iPhone users. Thanks Scott for the tip.

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Worldproxy (via Technospot) makes use of that by offering its visitors a country based proxy map. Currently only three countries are available: United States, Canada and Great Britain. The United States proxy is currently not working, the other two are working fine and it is probably just a glitch that the US proxy is not working right now.

Proxy selection by country is unfortunately the only new aspect of that proxy website. It does come with a toolbar that can be used to quickly switch between different country proxies but I normally do not install toolbars because they tend to take away screen space.

Users can suggest new countries which means that it is likely that other countries will be added to the map in future updates. The proxy obviously can be used for different things as well. It is for instance possible to check ads that are running on your website when a visitor of a certain country visits it.

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Words are chosen by probability and suggest alternatives which more often than not make more sense than the first word. This introduces a new technique to spy on users without having to actually access the computer at all, all that is needed is a good view of the hands and the measure of the keyboard.

The second spy tech could come right out of the latest James Bond movie. The researchers at Saarland University managed to write a computer algorithm that is capable of interpreting reflections of the computer screen on objects. The quality of the telescope plays an important role, a normal $500 telescope was able to read 12 point fonts of a reflection that was 5 meters away from the computer and 198 point fonts from a distance of ten meters.

A more powerful Dobson telescope for $27500 was able to yield the same results from a maximum distance of 30 meters. Other tests allowed the researchers to view the monitor from a white wall that was 2 meters away from the computer screen.

The best way to defeat the techniques ? Don’t access a computer in public, always close the curtains when working with your computer and make sure no cameras are installed in the room with a computer.

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The User Agent of the iPhone browser is Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone. A user with Firefox or Opera could now easily change his User Agent to the one used by the iPhone to access the Internet without costs at every AT&T hotspot. One possible add-on that can be used for Firefox would be the User Agent Switcher.

User Agents are definitely not a secure way to protect a network or website from unauthorized access. The same can be said for referrer checks which are as insecure. It probably will only be a matter of time when AT&T decided to change the way the free access is granted to the iPhones only. Probably through a small application that is run on the iPhone instead.

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You will be delighted that there is a speedy url hack (thanks to the Google OS blog) that bypasses both restrictions. This means that country restrictions as well as age restrictions will be bypassed. The following video for example points to one that is only available to US-residents: Youtube Video. If you click on the link and do not have a US IP address then you will receive the message that the video is not available in your country. US-Residents who can watch most videos on Youtube will run into difficulties when they try to watch some BBC content for instance.

All that needs to be done to watch the video is to change the URL of the video slightly. The above example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU would be changed to http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU to watch the video. This can be done with every video available at Youtube. So basically the watch? part is removed and the = after the v is replaced by a /.

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The benefits of using the so called Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, which is Open Source by the way, are manifold. Among other features pictures can be saved in RAW format, videos can be recorded with a length of up to 1 hour, faster shutter speeds, longer exposure time, additional data display on the LCD and more.

If you would like to try this you need to make sure that your digital camera is supported. Many Canon Powershot and Canon Digital Ixus models are supported right now. You’ll also need a SD card and a SD card reader to add the files of the firmware to the SD card.

Now you simply download the appropriate firmware, put it on the SD card and do the following to manually load the new firmware.

• Start the Camera in Play mode
• Press the Menu button and select “firm update”, say yes when asked if you want to update. Remember it’s not permanent
• The Camera will reboot and if everything worked fine you will run the new firmware
• If the camera hangs it is not compatible with this firmware. Remove the batteries then and place them in again.

The FAQ on the developers homepage contains information on how to load the new firmware automatically once you checked that it is working correctly.

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The Chaos Computer Club, a renowned and popular club of hackers and privacy advocates, decided to let the minister taste some of his own medicine by replicating the fingerprint of the minister and publishing that fingerprint in their magazine.

The fingerprint was available as a print in the magazine and on transparency slide ready to be put on the fingers of the readers of it. The sample was apparently taken from a glass that Schäuble was drinking at a panel discussion in Berlin.

The club also published a step by step instruction on how they managed to replicate the fingerprints. The process itself requires only a handful of common materials, a computer and laser printer, nothing that can’t be acquired in a regular tools store.

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With all these restrictions, it’s no wonder that most people who own an iPhone are frustrated and are always on the lookout for ways to run applications on their devices. After all, you would not want to pay so much money for something that has hardly any functions. However, it’s understandable to also be reluctant. These devices are expensive and if something goes wrong, it’s a lot of money down the drain.

Adam from Lifehacker has found a solution to your problems. He uses a software called ZiPhone. ZiPhone is free, open source application that works on both Windows and the Mac. This software basically hacks or jailbreaks the firmware code on your device so that all the restrictions are removed and you can use your device to its full potential. What ZiPhone does is put your phone into recovery mode while it hacks the firmware. The entire process is accomplished in under one minute.

All you have to do is download and run the application. Select the device (iPhone or iPod Touch), choose the jailbreak option and you are good to go. I haven’t tried this out for myself because I do not own either device but a fair number of people have used ZiPhone with excellent results. The only precaution is that if you applied a jailbreak to your iPhone previously, make sure to restore it to the latest firmware (1.1.4) before you use ZiPhone.

All in all, I’m curious. How many of you have hacked your devices previously because you were unhappy with the restrictions. Do you know of any other ways to jailbreak your iPhone?

Via (Lifehacker)

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I was checking out Lifehacker and a user called Bugmenot21 has posted a way to use your old extensions in Firefox 3. Now, I’m not a fan of this method since I prefer to wait till the developers themselves release compatible versions. Still, if you’re interested, you can give this a shot. I’m not guaranteeing anything though.

• Open Firefox and type ‘about:config’ (without the quotation marks) in the address bar.
• Right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Boolean. A box named new boolean value will open. Type extensions.checkUpdateSecurity in the preference field. Click OK. Set its value to False.
• Similarly, create another new boolean value entry. This time, type extensions.checkCompatability. Like earlier, set the value to False.

That’s it. Now, all your extensions that were previously incompatible or did not secure updates should work in the Beta version. Be warned though that this is not a foolproof solution to the problem. Don’t be surprised if one or more of your extensions stats behaving strangely.

Do you know of any other ways to get extensions working in Firefox 3? Or would you prefer to wait till it becomes stable?

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