Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

If you bought an iPhone this Christmas hoping for some unlocking love, chances are you were disappointed. The new iPhones have a 4.6 bootloader which hasn’t yet been hacked. Specifically, they come in the following versions:

• Firmware: 1.1.2
• Bootloader:4.6_M3S2
• Modem: 04.02.13_G

For now, all OOTB iPhones with this configuration (or newer, we know 1.1.3 is coming soon) cannot be unlocked. They expect a new 1.1.3 firmware to come out in January that will contain enough information to allow them to unlock new 1.1.2 iPhones, but you never know. For now, your options are limited to:

• Buying an actually unlocked iPhone from Germany or France and paying the high unlock cost via iTunes
• Buying a Turbosim or Stealthsim card for about $100, which should be resistant to further software updates.

Good luck to everyone who bough an iPhone this Christmas and doesn’t have AT&T service. You’ll need that, and a large bucket of patience.

Update: Now that the 1.1.3 firmware is out, a method for flashing the bootloader to 3.9 has emerged. Looks complicated and risky; an official release should be out soon.

Update: There’s now a software unlock, and it’s easy. Just do:

• Set “autolock” in settings to never: Settings, General, Auto-Lock
• Add this installer location: iphone.sleepers.net/repobeta.xml
• Install the “Geohots Gunlock Script” unlock script package from BigBoss’ Experimental/Beta Repo
• Install BSD Subsystem + Term vt100
• On 1.1.2 or 1.1.3, go to settings, and set AIRPLANE mode to ON
• Open termvt100 and type:
  cd /usr/bin
  geounlock

And, that’s it! Only for 4.6 Bootloader (BL) iPhones on 1.1.2 or 1.1.3, and not from the iPhone dev team, who aren’t as elite as they wanna be.

Thanks to the often useless Techcrunch for pointing out Summize, a meta-rankings engine with a gorgeous, hip look:

It’s perfect in the way it rates Windows Vista as utter crap, and the Apple iPhone as delicious but flawed. Topically, they focus mostly on Books, Movies, and Music–the classic media triplet–but other products are present as well. In a blog post About Summize they explain the drive behind the site:

We currently provide a Summize Experience for Electronics, Cameras, Books, Movies, Toys, and other useful things you find at Amazon and other top caliber review sites. We provide clean, straightforward, un-duplicated results so you don’t have to piece together the information on your own.

The only problem–people are going to misspell its name as “summarize.”

Now the question of how many 5 year olds I can take out in a fair fight has an answer, which is 31. Find out for yourself.

Some kind of bizarre cross between the words “knowledge” and “knoll”, the name of Google’s new product Knol, according to my astute girlfriend, “just doesn’t make sense” and is “hard to pronounce.” The NYT has a good article Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google explaining what Knol is:

The service, called Knol, which is short for knowledge, would allow people to create Web pages on any topic. It is designed to include features that permit readers to submit comments, rate pages and suggest changes. However, unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit an entry, only the author of a “knol,” as the pages in the service would be called, would be allowed to edit. Different authors could have competing pages on the same topic.

The sample Knol page they give indicates what the service is and does:

You write a page, Google hosts it, it competes with other Knol pages (which probably will be given preferrential SERPs results, ala Wikipedia today), there are Adsense Ads, Google profits, you profit, and Wikipedia / Squidoo / Yahoo Answers go down in flames. There are a few problems with Google moving into the content business, and with Knol:

The name sucks

It’s un-brandable, it evokes an etymology of trolls, and it’s forgettable. The name has no association with the Google brand or any of the current Google products. Why not go with something simple and consistent, like “Google Pages?” Oh wait, pages.google.com is already taken.

The conflict of interest

Once Knol pages start ranking ahead of Wikipedia pages for various topics, Google will have violated it’s “do no evil” corporate policy. When it takes a stake in the content that appears in its search results, those results must either remain entirely impartial–which makes bad business sense–or they must rank Google content better than other content–which makes bad ethics sense. Who thinks Knol will start with a PR10? Me.

Fighting Wikipedia

Last time Google tried this, with Google Answers, it failed horribly. No one really wanted to contribute. Somehow, someway, Wikipedia has figured out the magic sauce that gets thousands of fanatical Wikipediers to build up their content. Google hasn’t done that yet, and that is Knol’s major barrier to entry.

Oh, the Spam

Building out spam pages will become easier and more lucrative with backing from Google. Instead of creating a blog about the latest keyword of choice, just make Knol pages. Google promotes them for you, and gives you a cut of the cash. How are they going to fight this?

This weekend on Necker Island Google founder Larry Page married Lucy Southworth. Valleywag has an entire special feature on the new couple–they gloat at revealing private, intimate details about a man who created a tool (Google) that has ruined so many people’s privacy. But all I have is a cute photo of the couple:

Congratulations Larry!! With Google’s influence, this event almost has the same effect as watching the Queen’s marriage.