Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Hack your iPhone Apps

Hackers have succeeded to break the Apple copy protection for iPhone applications. This crack makes it possible to copy applications bought in the App Store and distribute them to other iPhones or iPod Touch.

The tool, Crackulous, scans installed applications and saves them as ipa-files. These files can be distributed to other devices through iTunes. Obviously, you'll need a jailbreaked iPhone to perform these feats.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Turn Firefox into an iPhone HOWTO

At Sogeti Netherlands we've done our fair share of development for Mobile Devices, but we've only recently started developing specifically for Google Android and Apple iPhone. As we lack experienced colleagues in this field to teach us the tips and tricks, we've got to go out on the net to find out how things work. Sometimes you end up in the weirdest places.

We're an IT company and have a massive amount of laptops and desktops, but guess what, just two Macbooks. One specifically allocated to a client account and one we bought to get a good and working development environment to start programming for the iPhone. There are a few options to develop without a Mac environment, but they're a real hassle. Maybe I'll get into these later.

With only one environment to develop (and a few iphones) we started looking for emulators. Developing and testing Native Applications requires a bit more than developing web applications, so turning your browser into an iphone would help. And in this case we wound up in a strange place... ismashphone. Well, not really the strangest of places when developing for an iPhone, but the context wasn't exactly office material.

Back in may 2008 the ismashphone team reviewed the new Zinio magazine reader for iPhone. Zinio is a distributer for Technology magazines and they were offering a number of magazines to iPhone users for free, including magazines like Penthouse and Playboy, which do have some bits about gadgets and tech to let you have an excuse. The ismashphone team was kind enough to provide you with a hack so you can update your Firefix or Safari browser to act like an iPhone and be recognised as an iPhone.

It seems the hack still is pretty hot, also judging by the fact that the same article (Read MacWorld...) on the Aplletell blog is among the fastest rising blogs on Technorati this week.


In case you're looking for pictures go their, if you want to try out the hack inside your office for serious testing, here's the version without distracting piccies. The hack is rather easy and gives webmasters an easy tool to check how their websites look when visited by an iPhone. Here's the 7 steps to walk through:

Turn Firefox into an iPhone - HOWTO

(by ismashphone)

The Issue: With a few steps you'll be able to turn your computer's Mozilla Firefox into an iPhone browser. This is similar to our post on turning your computer's Safari browser into an iPhone browser.

Why? To access iPhone only websites with your Firefox browser in order to preview them, or to obtain data from iPhone mobile-web targeted sites.

The Lesson:
1. Open your Mozilla Firefox browser
2. In the URL bar, enter "about:config"

3. Right click anywhere on the page, go down to New and over to String

4. You will be prompted to enter the preference name. Enter: general.useragent.override

5. You will next be prompted to enter a "string value". Enter: 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) 6. Once you have hit OK, you have morphed your Firefox into an iPhone mobile browser! Woo!
Here is a sample of what Google now looks like: Associated Press has made an iPhone only website: http://www.apnews.com/
Without this configuration you would not have been able to access this page.

To reverse this process and return to regular Firefox mode, you must go back into "about:config".
Then scroll down to the "general.useragent.override" and right click it. Select Reset.

You're back to regular Firefox.

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Hotspot Shield as your own Television Decoder

Regularly someone tells me about new television series which are out in the United States and aren't shown in the Netherlands. Usually I visit the website of the broadcasting company, like NBC or FOX to see what the series is about. About every show has its website with information on episodes and the cast. Almost every website offers the option to view the shows as well...

Only in America though. Viewing the series is only possible if you live in the USA, access from other countries is blocked. This nuisance is called geoblocking:

"Geoblocking is a technology that is used to prevent access to web sites from visitors in particular countries or regions.

At the moment it is mainly used by traditional broadcast companies who are moving their television, radio and music content online. Because of distribution contracts with the producers of these programmes many broadcast web sites limit access to people with in their own country.

Whenever a person connects to the internet, their computer or mobile device is assigned what is called an IP address. This is a sequence of numbers in the form 255.255.255.255. The IP address is assigned to you by the internet service
provider (ISP) that you are connecting through and these in turn are assigned to the ISP in blocks. It is therefore possible to say that a particular IP address is from a particular country or even city.

Site owners that want to use geoblocking simply choose to only allow access to a particular range of IP addresses or to block certain ranges.

This type of location based services can also be used to serve alternative content (e.g. with advertising) instead of just blocking the visitor." (Definition Web Dictionary)

The Hotspot Shield offers a way out. The application was designed to make your pc safer when you are accessing the internet from public places. To prevent you from being hacked it opens a VPN connection to the hotspot-shield server - which is USbased - and uses that as a gateway. So suddenly you're US-based and can view every television series you like.

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