i unlocked my phone while i was in india a friend di...

Iphone unlock in India

G1 Hack Watch: Garage Door Opener

Looking for yet another cool use for your G1? How about as a garage door opener? The Android Guys wrote about this particularly clever G1 hack over in their weblog.

Android Hacker Brad Fitzpatrick created an Android Activity that scans for his home's WiFi, presumably by looking for its unique MAC address. When his G1 detects that the house is in-range as he drives home on his motorcycle, it sends out what he calls a magic HTTP request to the garage door's web server. Yes, you read that right. His garage door (as well as presumably most of his house) has been fully automated. The garage door server requires a timestamped HMAC-signed URL in order to authenticate the request and open itself. So even if Brad's mom decides to buy a G1, she's not getting in to re-arrange his furniture without getting past his secure system. Unless, I suppose, there's a power outage, a large handy prybar and local law enforcement willing to look the other way.

Brad has posted his Android Garage Opener as an open source github project. You will need to provide your own garage with its own web server.

So what's up next for Brad? According to this Live Journal post, he may next use in-house triangulation to detect which room he's in. Then he could turn his G1 into a "magic wand of light" to automatically turn on the lights for whichever room he enters.

Google updates, smartens SketchUp 3D modeling apps

3D modeling for the rest of us became a little more intelligent today with Google's announcement of SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7, new versions of its popular modeling software.

Amid a healthy collection of new features in SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7 is a new type of "Dynamic Components," or 3D models that "are aware of what they are and behave like the real-world objects they represent." Google uses the example of a dynamic staircase which can automatically gain or lose steps when using SketchUp's Scale too to increase or decrease its size. Dynamic Components also maintain resolution when scaling them, can be designed for easy configuration out of the box, thanks to a new Component Options dialog that allows for adjusting aspects without having to get one's hands dirty with modeling tools.

Also new in SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7 is the integration of the Google 3D Warehouse, a public area where users can upload and share models they have created. Google announced the 3D Warehouse when it originally released a free version of SketchUp in 2006, after the acquisition of the application from @Last Software.

Until now, however, Google 3D Warehouse and its millions of user-generated components could only be searched and accessed externally via a browser, outside of SketchUp. Along with this integration for Google 3D Warehouse, the company has also introduced an attribution layer to the warehouse that allows users to tag their creations with their name, ensuring that credit is given where due.

A number of other features have arrived for both SketchUp and its big Pro brother, including an Interact tool that can trigger built-in Dynamic Component behaviors like animations or color changes, custom templates, antialiasing for textures, various UI tweaks, and the ability to edit textures in external photo editors. SketchUp Pro 7 pulls ahead with tabular report generation, LayOut 2 (which brings the component out of beta) with Vector Rendering for resolution-independent drawings of large or complex models, editable paths for curves on any shape, image exporting options, a new Styles feature that can bring an organic look to models, and an "explode" mode allows users to perform more fine-grained tweaking.

Check out a new Google-produced video below that demonstrates the new features in SketchUp 7.

SketchUp has enjoyed a healthy amount of interest from users and the third-party community ever since Google purchased the software and introduced a free version. Besides the aforementioned 3D Warehouse that Google says is packed with millions of shared models, a wide variety of SketchUp plug-ins are also available, including one from Adobe that allows Photoshop CS3 Extended to search and work directly with models from the warehouse.

The base version of SketchUp 7 remains free for personal use, and is available for Mac OS X (10.4+) and Windows (2000/XP/Vista) users. SketchUp Pro 7 costs $495 for professional use.

iphone unlock is a very expensive brick

But we have reason to believe that Apple may go much further than just "breaking" the SIM unlocks that have been released so far. One move that the cat (or is Apple the mouse?) could make in this game would be to permanently and irreparably brick unlocked iPhones when they run this month's pending software update. It would serve as a warning shot to potential unlockers in the future—even if crafty hackers manage to rewrite their unlock apps to get around the changes made in the update, they could always be at risk of suddenly owning a shiny $400 chunk of metal and plastic.

We believe this is a significant possibility, so here's a word for those who have unlocked their iPhones: be extremely careful when the software update lands; let others be the guinea pigs before you run it. A software restore of the iPhone likely won't save you, either, as the radio baseband firmware used to identify the SIM card will still remain unlocked (as it stands now, those who have run unlocks can still do a software restore and have an unlocked iPhone). And if Apple writes its update to make changes to the radio baseband firmware based on what it was expecting, the iPhone will not react well.

Welcome to your new iBrick Extreme: the new paperweight from Apple.

Apple iphone Hacking is okay... sometimes

Apple's stance on stopping hackers is different depending on the hack. When it came to hacking the Apple TV and introducing the first set of native iPhone applications—something that cannot be done the "legit" way because of Apple's lack of a formal SDK for developers—Apple took a neutral stance. Apple's Greg Joswiak said last week that Apple wouldn't stop anyone from writing the apps or actively work against them, but the company would also not make an effort not to break the hacks when releasing its own software updates. After all, the hacks are not officially supported.

But when it comes to SIM unlocking the iPhone, the game changes drastically. Although Apple has less to lose by customers unlocking the device than AT&T, the company is bound by its contract to AT&T to do what it can to ensure that customers use the designated carrier. And Apple does have something to lose—the company is widely known to be getting a cut of subscription fees from AT&T for each person that buys and uses an iPhone. While it's unclear exactly how much Apple gets per customer, analyst estimates amount to millions of dollars per year in subscription fees going directly to Apple.

Apple's contractual obligations aside, consumers in the US are legally allowed to unlock their mobile handsets after the US Register of Copyrights approved an exemption to the DMCA late last year, noting that "The underlying activity sought to be performed by the owner of the handset is to allow the handset to do what it was manufactured to do—lawfully connect to any carrier." But don't tell that to Apple and AT&T—unless the government bars them from locking out the unlocks, there's virtually nothing stopping them from making sure that the unlocks mysteriously stop working.

Apple's fight against iPhone unlocks

Iphone unlocks

Apple will actively work against any SIM unlocks of the iPhone, says Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Jobs made the comments during a Q&A session that took place after yesterday's press event in London announcing availability details of the iPhone in the UK. When asked by a journalist whether unlocking was a concern for the company, Jobs said, "It's a constant cat and mouse game," according to ComputerWorld's account of the discussion. "We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in."

The break-ins that Jobs spoke of have been flying fast and furious in the last month or so. One of the first full SIM unlocks involved using a Turbo SIM card, a somewhat complex process for the average consumer. Then teenager George Holtz published a way to hardware unlock his iPhone with some soldering iron-fu and released instructions for other adventurous unlockers. But none of this was "big" news to the world until the first (commercial) software unlock of the iPhone was announced by iPhoneSIMfree. This sent waves through the iPhone community to push for a free unlock from the iPhone Dev Team, which was achieved just this week with the release of iUnlock, followed by the GUI app to go along with it, anySIM. This app began to appear in the third-party iPhone software update app, Installer, which enabled many iPhone users to install the unlock and experiment with ease.

Apple's fight against iPhone unlocks may result in expensive bricks