Cryptosmith

Cousin Jon sent me this Wired link: how to bypass iPhone’s 3GS encryption using jailbreaking tools. I haven’t paid serious attention to the iPhone (AT&T hasn’t had a strong signal in my town) but crypto bypass always gets my attention.

In fact, the weakness has nothing to do with protecting personal information on an iPhone. It’s all about third parties: Apple, the cell provider, and possibly an employer who provides/manages the iPhone.

If you’re not troubled by being limited to the iPhone Apps Store, then the threat’s relatively small, especially compared to desktop systems. Moreover, I doubt we’ll see real iPhone viruses as long as most people are happy with Apple’s app restrictions.

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I just bought a Dell laptop. I generally buy from vendors I know, and St. Thomas has been buying Dell systems for the past several years. I might have bought an Apple, but their lowest base price was $1,000. I knew I could do a little better. In any case, I wanted to run both Windows and Linux. Running OS-X would have been a plus (I’m addicted to Aperture) but not worth the extra dollars.

The hardware seems solid – an XPS 1330 – and it’s comfortably compact. It has thumbprint authentication that seems tolerably robust. The major size limiters, the RAM and hard drive, are easy to replace. So is the 802.11g network card. It came with “Windows Home Premium.” I’m astonished at the amount of Dell-branded software you have to trim back. And I’m appalled that the default search engine, “Live.com,” directs you away from OpenOffice.org when you go looking for it.

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My first-order attempts to put a modern portable file system on a portable USB device have failed. The Mac, of course, has its own, proprietary file system. OS X has limited support for the Windows NTFS, so my first attempt was to try to use NTFS. This has failed, though it worked for a few months first.

For some incomprehensible reason, OS X will not mount my portable hard drive if it is formatted in NTFS. It doesn’t matter whether I format it using the OS X Disk Utility or if I format it using Windows itself. It doesn’t matter if I do fast or slow formatting. Even worse, I can’t use my third party NTFS file software (Paragon’s package) with it. Nothing works. Continue Reading »

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OK, I switched to Mac e-mail last summer on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger, or some other pussy cat). I tolerated the bumbling of the e-mail software since I knew version 10.5 would be out soon, and no doubt they’d fix the lame bits of the software by then.

But I was disappointed. Mail is just as lame in 10.5 as it was in 10.4. Continue Reading »

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