Is it Legal to Unlock Your iPhone?

The answer, as lawyers like to say, is complicated. And, for that complicated answer, there is no one better qualified than Jennifer Granick, the Stanford Law School professor who obtained the DMCA exemption in 2006 for cell phone unlocking.

Rather than give the full exposition, I'll just encourage you to read her recent explanation at WIRED.

The iPhone's fantastic user interface is inspiring another consumer-electronics revolution: making people care about cell-phone unlocking. After my clients' long, successful battle before the U.S. Copyright Office to exempt phone unlocking from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, have iPhone customers won the freedom to tinker with their cool new handsets? The answer, unfortunately, is that we still don't know.

One suggestion, however -- if you are going to be unlocking your iPhone, don't activate it using the usual iTunes process, lest you "agree" to the 21,000 words worth of contracts that await you there. Fortunately, there are plenty of other ways to activate an iPhone out of the box, which shouldn't involve clicking "I agree" to anything.

Warning: Major Flaw with Push Notification Fix for Jailbroken iPhones

One of the known issues with the jailbroken iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0 is that it disables the Push Notification feature. The iPhone Dev Team had released a fix to resolve the issue.
However, German developer and founder of Equinux has discovered a major flaw with the Push Notification fix. He discovered that when he sent a message using AOL's AIM iPhone app to a friend in Europe, he received a reply not from his friend, but from a total stranger in the US - a person who had also installed the Push Notification patch.
Though it initially seemed to be a problem with AOL's AIM iPhone app, which appeared to be broadcasting instant messages to random, unintended recipients, the issue is due to the Push Notification fix installed on a jailbroken iPhone as it uses the same UDID - Unique Device ID for the fix.
Due to this hard-coding, if you send a message to one of a user of a jailbroken iPhone who has installed the push notification fix then other iPhone users who had installed the fix also get the message.
It is still not clear if the issue was due to the patch, that the iPhone Dev Team had released or due to the app called Push Fix, that was released by iPhoneIL who had essentially packaged the fix released by the Dev Team and released it on Cydia to make it easier for jailbroken iPhone users.
If you have installed the push notification fix then the one of the options would be to restore your iPhone with iPhone OS 3.0 and jailbreak it again.
As always, please let us know if you had installed the patch and if you received random messages.

Safari 4 Beta Available from Apple

Apple has released a beta version of Safari. This new version of Apple’s web browser boasts a few flashy new features:

• See all your favorite web sites on the screen at once.
• Browse your history and bookmarks with Cover Flow.
• Improved tabs and browsing history search.
• A Windows-esque look and feel for Windows PC users.

“Want to enable 1password in the Safari 4 Beta? Here’s how.” shows you, well… how to transfer your passwords over to Safari 4 from 1password.

Mona N. of Pixel Bits says she switched back to Safari 3 due to stability issues with the beta (remember: “beta” means software that might have bugs). The ensuing conversation on FriendFeed gives a few others’ impressions of the new browser, including a few people who report not having experienced crashes.

If you have problems running Safari 4 Beta, the application comes with an uninstaller.