Category: Article

Article

Apple Now Actively Taking A Stance Against Jailbreakers

For years people have been jailbreaking their iOS devices to run things that Apple won’t allow, whether it be apps or themes. They’ve never actively done a lot against the jailbreaking community, until now.

I’m due to take my iPhone into the Apple Store due to some hardware issues, but of course I was running a jailbroken iOS 4.3.2, so I spent 3 hours trying to restore it. It got stuck in a constant restore cycle. I tried using RecBoot, TinyUmbrella and iRecovery to try and get it out of it but it just wouldn’t work.

Turns out that Apple have now updated iTunes to check the hosts file on the computer and if there is an entry under ‘gs.apple.com’ it will put your device into a constant restore cycle. This is because some of the tools used for jailbreaking will add the ‘gs.apple.com’ entry to the hosts file to stop the local machine talking back to the server. Of course it’s simple to remove the entry and restore but for whose who don’t know about this will be stuck with a very expensive paperweight. It does rise some other issues, some people may have very large host files and therefore it will simply take too long and then iTunes will assume the device is jailbroken and put it into the constant recovery cycle.

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Major Flaw Found Within Remote Wipe Feature

After iTunes not wanting to restore my iPhone, I decided to use the now free, Find My iPhone service to remotely wipe my phone ready for my appointment at the Apple Store. After initiating the wipe I received an email saying it could take up to 2 hours to complete, my appointment being within the next hour didn’t help. Unfortunately I arrived late to the appointment, but my phone still hadn’t wiped. After not being seen I needed to use my phone again and it states in the email that you cannot cancel the wipe, however a hard reboot stopped the process and nothing had been deleted, within the hour that it was apparently wiping. So this displayed a massive flaw with the service to me, if a person was to steal a iOS device that was then remotely wiped, the theif could simply hard reboot the iOS device and have access to everything.

Cycorder Repair Service [Updated]

If you’ve ever used Cycorder and got a call or you’ve ran out of memory during  a video you know how annoying it is when you go to the video and it won’t play. No matter how hard you try it won’t play back. Some people simply give up, others pay quite a lot of money to a repair company.

I’ve done quite a few videos now and my service has been fully tested and worked 100% of the time. So if you have corrupted Cycorder videos you want fixed or know someone who does I will get them fixed and back to you within less than 1 hour after payment in most cases.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Upload the video to WeTransfer (Up to 2GB)
  2. Send the file to sbraidley [at] yahoo.co.uk (include any discount codes at this point).
  3. I will then download and fix the file and email you with a quote of price and a screenshot of the video for proof if requested.
  4. Send the payment via PayPal in your preffered currency, either USD or GBP and make sure that it’s sent as Personal Payment Owed.
  5. Once payment is received I will immediately upload the file back to WeTransfer for you to download.
  6. You now have your fixed video.

At the minute I’m charging a flat fee of $25/£15.60 per GB (The price is determined by the repaired video size and not the corrupt video that is sent). The video can be any length and sound is also processed with the video unlike some other services. I can also promise that you file will never been seen by anyone but you, videos are checked that the process has worked but this does not require the video to be played.

iPhone 4 Might Be Able To Playback 1080p Video?

Apple’s official specs on the iPhone 4 state that it can run H.264 video up to 720p at 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats. However if you remember back a few months it was shown that the 3GS could playback 720p/1080i video, although it was not officially supported, see related for the link. So this has made me think that due to the bump in CPU power, now that the iPhone is running Apple’s A4 chip that it should be able to playback full 1080p video.

With the extended battery and retina display, I can imagine that watching HD video on the iPhone 4 will be stunning but I can understand why Apple doesn’t include it official as it does save battery life playing 720p instead of full 1080p.

Also if you plug your iPhone 4 into your TV it would be a useful device to watch HD movies without the need for BluRay.

Related:
iPhone 3GS Capable Of HD (720p/1080i) Video

AdBlocking On iPhone Causing Apps To Stop Working

Developers of apps on the App Store worked out a way of stopping users from running cracked apps on their device but now the developer of the LockDown app on the Cydia store has stopped the application from running, if you’re blocking AdMob ad’s on the iPhone. Using the app AdMob BeGone on the device stops the app from running and requires you to remove it before it will work again.

It makes sense as LockDown is a free app from Cydia and so they rely on donations and Ad’s but will this be the beginning of all app’s doing this, or just a select few like cracked apps?