ikee: First worm on jail-broken iphones

BBC is running an article which is reporting a first ever worm on iphone. It is important to note that this worm does not effect all iphones. Only the jail-broken iphones are vulnerable to this problem. Moreover, not all jail-broken iphones are vulnerable. Only the jail-broken iphones, whose root password is left as the default password ('alpine') after installing SSH, are vulnerable. This worm will not spread to phones where the default password is changed to something else.

So, in a way this is a dumb virus which relies on a known root password. But the reality is that many people do not change(or do not know how to change) their default password. The current form of the worm is not harmful. It just changes the wallpaper. But the author has released the source code of the worm. This can lead to harmful virus in the future using the same technique.

Update: There is already a second worm named "iPhone/Privacy" which uses the same technique as the above. This worm is a harmful one. Its steals personal data, like e-mails and contacts etc, without the knowledge of the user. See this article.

Tutorial to unlock iphone 3G/3GS using Blacksnow (link)

Geohot, the first hacker to find an unlock solution for the iphone(2G), just released a tool to unlock 3G & 3GS phones. This tool can unlock the phones running the latest firmware (3.1.2). This is supposed to the fastest unlock solution which does things in a snap. Please note that this tool is not meant for unlocking 2G phones.

Iphone hacks is running an article which mentions that this application is available over cydia also. You can use this approach if your 3G/3GS iphone is already jailbroken.

As usual, iclarified is ready with a pictorial tutorial explaining each step of the unlock process using blacksn0w. Happy unlocking!

Hard disk usage visualization tool

Ever wondered how you are running out of disk space even when you have a large capacity hard disk. Its very likely that you have bunch of large files that you do not need anymore. Actually, I faced this problem even more because I have a small capacity hard disk. I am almost perpetually short of disk space. So, I have to be very optimal in its usage. Sometimes, I store large files somewhere and forget that they ever existed after the use. One of the things that I keep doing is to use disk cleanup tool in windows and remove temporary files. But that does not reclaim much space beyond few MBs.

One day I was very frustrated that I have to continuously hunt for unwanted files on my machine. When I turned to the net for a tool that helps me in this, I found this nice tool called "WinDirStat" which stands for "Windows directory statistics". Its is a nice tool that quickly gives a map of all the files in the disk. Its visual presentation is very good with color-coding and size-coding. It visually shows the file sizes occupied by files and the directories.

The files will be shown as rectangular boxes and the size of the box represents the relative size of the file. All the files in a directory will be given same color. If you put the cursor on the blocks, it shows the filename etc. With this tool, you can quickly identify the large files/directories in your disk and delete them if they are not needed. Or you can backup the large files and delete them from your disk. You can do some basic operations like opening, deleting, seeing properties etc directly from the tool. I feel that this is a very convenient feature.

Here is the list of other tools that are available in case you want to explore more.