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After a successful jailbreak, my iPod Touch was effectively bricked. It would work normally for several seconds, and then pause, and return to the home page, displaying an informative message about how to make the icons wiggle so that I could rearrange them.

Nothing I did would make it stop, and it wouldn’t connect to iTunes. Utterly useless.

But:

None of these disasters affected the ssh daemon, or the WiFi. I was able to establish a ssh connection, immediately, with my shiny new root password, via the swell radio.

I don’t know many UNIX commands, so picking a favorite one is easy: it’s “top”. This command shows you the top ten or so processes in your brain, every second or two, in an attractive text-mode display. I found out that an application called “Springboard” was crashing, and restarting, over and over.

I eventually learned that Springboard is the application launcher, and that it apparently expects the root password to be “alpine”.

Astonishing.

Well, that’s easy to fix. I set the password back to “alpine”… No joy. I rebooted it repeatedly (you can just type “reboot” at the command line). Still no luck.

At this point, I was getting pretty disturbed.

Finally I found a blog post from a dude named Dave Smith.

Dave ’splains, quite cogently, that that I needed to get the iPod into “DFU mode.” “DFU”? I would have called “BFU.” Whatever. This is a state that will indicatse to iTunes that there is a bricked iPod that needs to be restored.

To do this, I needed to make Springboard quit. I found the application, at /System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app and renamed it to SpringBoard.BiteMe.

I rebooted, and the machine never got past the apple logo.

I plagiarize herewith from Dave, who’s a pretty good writer, and explains how to put the little machine into the holy BFU mode:

• Turn on your iPod (in my case it would only get as far as displaying the Apple logo
• Hold the power and home buttons down (the iPod will power off after 10 seconds, but keep holding those buttons down)
• After the iPod powers off, release the power button (but keep holding the home button down

After a few more seconds, the Mac announced that it had connected to a BFU’d iPod.

“Excuse me,” intoned the Mac. “Your iPod is BFU’d, and so are you.” (Or words to that effect.) I released the home button.

iTunes restored the machine to its original state. Nothing was lost, except for my swell HP calculators.

I intend to re-jailbreak it immediately.

April 19th, 2008 | Category: Apple | Comments (10)

It’s now ridiculously easy to jailbreak your iPhone. I tried ZiPhone, and found that it involved about four clicks, including the download.

What happens is that the jailbreak installs a tool called an Installer. The installer smells strongly of Linux, which is a very good thing: there are “sources” of applications, and you get lists of interesting applications. I found and installed two excellent HP calculator emulators: a 12C (financial) and a 15C (scientific), which gave me great joy.

Plus it’s always great to stick it to the man.

I found, to my further delight, that the jailbreak process also installs a ssh daemon. So you can use your favorite ssh file-transfer client (I like cyberduck) to rummage about in your little machine

Great!

But there’s a huge security hole: the root password, with which you authenticate (as user “root”) is “alpine”. As any cleaning lady can tell you, default passwords are a massive security risk.

So I used the standard UNIX command-line utility passwd to set it to my standard, which is the string “GWBushStinks,” interleaved with the hex representation of the CRC of the page in question.

Worked great.

For a while.

After about a day, I found, to my horror, that my little machine had entered a freakish loop: terminate whatever application you’re in, and go to the home screen. Pop up an informative message explaining about rearranging the icons. I’d click “dismiss,” and find that all was well. For about ten seconds. Then the loop restarted.

Well, that’s OK, I’ll re-boot it: hold down the power button and the home button and count to ten.

That got its attention! It reloaded… but then went back into its idiot loop!

Horrors like this make one want to consider a reset, from iTunes. So I plugged it in, to see what was what.

NOT RECOGNIZED. My machine was too involved with re-starting its home screen to communicate with its master.

Bricked!

April 19th, 2008 | Category: Apple | Leave a comment

These bonfire photos are cool.

April 11th, 2008 | Tags: bonfire, Photos | Category: Photos | Leave a comment