iPhone hacking woes

I have no intention of writing another review or suggestions for this or that. My wife bought the both of us iPhones back in August. I've loved my iPhone ever since and frankly, it's the best phone I've ever had.

What I'm writing about is a cautionary tale. Shortly after we got our phones, I discovered the world of jailbreaking the phone. Jailbreaking, for those that don't know, is basically hacking your phone so you can install unapproved, third party applications on the phone. There are numerous programs out there to accomplish this. One of the first programs out there was AppTap. It is still the primary program to install third party apps on it. Back in the 1.0 to 1.0.2 firmware days, all you had to do was basically put the program on your phone and you were good to go. Then Apple came out with firmware 1.1.1 and that all changed.

Many people that wanted the phone, were also not happy about being locked to AT&T as their provider. So some clever people figured out how to unlock the phone using software. There are numerous ways to accomplish this. When 1.1.1 came out, Apple "bricked" a lot of those phones. And by bricked, I mean they were no longer able to use the phone, period! Apple requires that the iPhone be activated through iTunes. This enables Apple to maintain control over YOUR phone! And I'm sure AT&T wasn't too happy about losing that revenue, since they're locked in to a 5 year exclusive agreement with Apple.

When 1.1.1 came out, it was hacked by exploiting a security hole in Safari. Fortunately, after 1.1.1 came out, a lovely little site came out simply called, jailbreakme.com. All you needed to do was point Safari to that website, and with a couple of clicks, your phone was hacked.

Then 1.1.2 came out and that hack was changed. Now what had to happen was your phone needed to be downgraded, then hacked using the aforementioned security hole, then upgraded again, that is, if you were dumb enough to upgrade it in the first place. Yes, I was that dumb.

Here's the dumb part, I did this not only to my phone, but I did it to my wife's phone as well. Well, I left her at 1.1.2 and I eventually grew tired of my phone crashing. That's the problem with some of this hacking and what not, you never know how reliable it is going to be. My phone would repeatedly crash and I'd have to reboot. This would happen several times a day. So I eventually eliminated the hacked (I HATE that the geeks out there call it jailbreak!) part of the phone and went legit again.

I left my wife's phone hacked. So when 1.1.3 came out in January, shortly after Jobs' keynote at Macworld, I was stoked about the pseudo-GPS capabilities on Google Maps. I upgraded again and left my wife's phone hacked with 1.1.2. Then 1.1.4 came out at the end of February and I heard about this iPhone jailbreak app that I hadn't heard about before. It's called Ziphone and the app is quite handy and user friendly. In the early days of jailbreaking, there were some one-touch apps that would do the job, but a number of the techniques required command-line access and hacking that was beyond my scope of skills. The thing is, after I went legit again, I still missed a number of the third party apps out there. So I just couldn't resist.

Well, after hacking it again for the umpteenth time, all was fine, for about a week, that is. The first thing that went wrong, was after getting off the phone with my wife, I lost speaker volume and couldn't get the phone to make any sounds. That was enough for me, so I went legit AGAIN! Wait, didn't I say earlier, "The first thing that went wrong..." Yes, you guessed it, I couldn't resist! So I hacked the phone one more time.

It was nagging me that my wife's phone didn't have the latest firmware. So I updated her phone and put her legit as well. That's when hell broke loose (note the spelling folks!) for me! I couldn't get her phone to activate. Oh crap! Did I just brick her phone? I tried everything. I restored, I forced a manual restore. I used Ziphone to "refurbish" it and nothing! The site said the iTunes store was not able to activate and gave me error (-4). I was crapping myself! I couldn't get it to work. So finally, I tried another jailbreaking app called iNdependence and used that app to finally activate it. All was well in the world.

Or so I thought. Then I attempted to sync my now hacked phone, and guess what? Remember how I said, "The first thing that went wrong..."? Well the SECOND thing that went wrong was I got another error that said iTunes couldn't sync my bookmarks because the iPhone canceled the sync! WTF!!!!??? That's it! So I decided to restore it and put it back to it's legitimate ways again. I had had enough!

Well, here's the THIRD thing that went wrong: I couldn't FUCKING ACTIVATE MY PHONE!!!!! So I had to use iNdependence again, this time on MY phone. Guess what? A fourth thing went wrong! I STILL couldn't sync my bookmarks and got that same error as before. Well, it turns out that one of those lovely third party apps I had installed, put some bookmarks on my phone's bookmarks that iTunes apparently did not like. Simple solution for this was just to erase those bookmarks.

Oh yeah, remember all that trouble I had with activating both my wife's and my phone? Well, it looks as though the iTunes site was indeed down for that. Because during my typing of this post, I restored my phone again just to make certain since I found it odd that both phones would have that problem. It activated through iTunes with no problems.

Here's the moral of the story: Think long and hard before you decide to do something like this. Keep in mind, I am a computer geek and I am, for the most part, very comfortable with the inner workings of apps and hardware. Not that I am an über geek, but I am a geek. If you don't know what you're doing, DO NOT attempt this! Hell, I am going to take my own advice and not do this ever again. I loved a lot of those third party apps, but it just is not worth the instability and the possibility of your phone getting totally fucked.

Fortunately, Steve Jobs announced the long awaited SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone on March 6. Unfortunately, we have to wait till June for that. And who knows, they may even have a new, updated iPhone come out the same time.