Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

From the day they tried to kill me comes this little meme, from the NSA INCOMPLETE SENTENCES form, which asks you to fill out your true feelings:

1. I always wanted to be a vegetable farmer
2. I can’t stop, won’t stop
3. If my father would only decipher a coded message and find the treasure
4. People think of me as sleepy
5. I suffer most from frailness
6. What upsets me most is totalitarian imperialist regimes
7. Most men are shorter than they want to be
8. My family treats me like a prized gnu
9. My greatest worry is how to balance work, life, and everything
10. Some members of the opposite sex have mysterious eyes
11. Most women have more pairs of shoes than me
12. I regret losing my blog’s dominance and audience
13. The main thing in life is love
14. Secretly I read poems
15. If my mother would only recertify
16. I don’t like people who can’t wink
17. I wish I could forget the time i drank too much rum
18. When troubled i sleep
19. It bothers me that I am sick today
20. What angers me most is the loss of innocence

If you like this meme, do it on your blog and hit me up in the comments with the link!

I love the idea behind Cuil, the latest search engine in a long list of failures (Mahalo, Ask, Powerset) to challenge Google. As Mashable explains, they are pulling out all the stops to hit Google from multiple directions across their core search competency:

Enter Cuil, a very serious competitor, packed with ex-Googlers (Tom Costello and Anna Patterson are the backbone of Cuil, and they’ve both worked at Google), and claiming to have the largest index of websites - 120 billion - in the world.

It doesn’t end there: Cuil pulls pretty much every trick in the book. Big claims about the biggest index, privacy concerns (IP addresses of users aren’t saved, making it impossible for a third party to request it from them), semi-semantic approach (Cuil’s engine recognizes the relations between certain words on a web site, which helps it rank pages better). Hell, they even pulled the energy-saving trick: the front page of Cuil is completely black, in contrast to Google’s eye-poking whiteness.

Check out the Slashdottie thread for more discussion. I’m not interested in going there; rather I’m more concerned with how relevant the results from Cuil are, compared to Google, in a stricter context of information retrieval. After all, a search engine is about finding information.

Let’s start with a query “how to rip a dvd” in Cuil and Google:

Cuil on “How To Rip a DVD”

4 of the 9 total results are spam from Ebooksbay. An additional 4 are for converting MP3s. The final result (which is quite spammy) is for ripping DVDs to a variety of formats. Score: 11%.

Google on “How To Rip a DVD”

Google gives you 7 DVD ripping guides, and three spams site of ripping software. Essentially, you have to give it a Score: 100%, since it’s pretty much the baseline in our test. Just based on what I’ve seen so far, this will be a comparison not of relative merits, but of how much less relevant the results from Cuil are compared to Google.

Cuil on “ConcurrentHashMap”

Wait, what is that in the rightmost result!!!? Yes, that winsome young woman is carefully inspecting a ConcurrentHashMap! Ahm, bad image / search results correlations aside, the search listings fail to list the authority Java documentation source (Sun’s website) and instead list 2 mirrors (java 5 and 6), 4 bug reports, 3 mailing list discussions, and 2 random libraries with a similarly named class. Score: 50%.

Google on “ConcurrentHashMap”

Google nicely gives us the Sun Java page as the first result, 2 snippets of code using this class, 6 guides to using concurrent hash maps, a benchmark, one of the same random libraries as Cuil (Oswego), and a different random library (backport-util). I’d give them Score: 80% at this task.

Anyway, I’m getting tired of writing this. Cuil just doesn’t deliver fast, consistent, high-quality search results. The relevance is quite low, in spite of the interface improvements and searching / clustering / recommendation features.

This is interesting, and at the same time scary. According to Engadget, Apple’s Fairplay ™ DRM has been hacked for the new iPhone 3G App Store, and the applications themselves are appearing on torrent sites:

There’s also a more traditional crack which allows apps to be stripped of DRM and shared without using iTunes, although you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to do it. The first app to be widely pirated is Super Monkey Ball, which isn’t surprising, and it seems like several other apps have followed it out onto various torrent sites. In addition to the relatively simple jailbreak procedure, running cracked apps requires you to open up SSH access and do some mucking around, so unless your time is worth less than $10, it’s probably not worth it.

The latest apps appearing on a torrent search for iPhone include Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Super Monkey Ball, iBeer, and Enigmo, a total (so far) of $32.96 of potential revenue destroyed by hackers.

The original post at Haklabs, Super Monkey Ball iPhone - Cracked, explains the motivation for the hack:

After the WWDC ‘08 Keynote, everyone wanted this iPhone game, it received almost as much hype as the iPhone itself. Super Monkey Ball from SEGA definitely has some good qualities, however it does have some bad qualities as well. First off, this game costs $9.99 which might be a little steep for some.

1. Make sure you are on firmware 2.0
2. Download the Super Monkey Ball Cracked file and extract the .ipa file from the archive to your desktop.
3. Drag and drop the Monkey Ball.ipa file into the iTunes application folder and wait for it to install.

So because an irate iPhone user believes the Super Monkey Ball game costs too much at $9.99, he creates a hacked version and gives it away for free. I actually paid for Super Monkey Ball, because it’s one of the few applications worth my $9.99, and I advise you to as well. If there’s no financial market for creating great iPhone applications, the entire market will suffer, and we’ll have crappy apps to run on our $400 phones.

The process of updating your 1.1.4 first-gen iPhone to 1.2.0 is simple. Even though the official winpwn release for Windows and the iPhone 3G isn’t out yet, here’s what you need to do to unlock, jailbreak, and upgrade your 1.4 iPhone to the 2.0 3G firmware!

[STEP 1] Download Winpwn 1.0.0.3 RC1 from the official source, or my local mirror. The filename is winpwn_1.0.0.3_RC1_Setup.zip; after you download it, download Apple’s 1.1.4 firmware, choose that ipsw from the “browse .ipsw” button, and click “iPwner” to WinPwn it. You’ll see something like this:

7/20/2008 4:10:49 PM - This is winpwn ver.:1.0.0.3 RC1
7/20/2008 4:10:50 PM - Apple Mobile Device Support Version 2.0.0.33 installed.
7/20/2008 4:11:01 PM - Debug level:1
7/20/2008 4:11:02 PM - Debug level:0
7/20/2008 4:11:02 PM - Debug level:1
7/20/2008 4:11:10 PM - File from: iPhone1,1_1.1.4_4A102_Restore.ipsw
7/20/2008 4:11:10 PM - Recognized as:iPhone1,1_1.1.4_4A102_Restore.ipsw Type: IPSW_iPhone
7/20/2008 4:11:10 PM - Be sure to connect an iPhone!
7/20/2008 4:11:13 PM - Failed to load image catalog
7/20/2008 4:11:34 PM - Failed to load payload catalog
7/20/2008 4:13:09 PM - Setting up iPhone device object
7/20/2008 4:13:09 PM - Registering callbacks
——————-
7/20/2008 4:13:10 PM - Unzipping .ipsw file to Application Data\cmw\winpwn\1.0.0.3\ipsw
7/20/2008 4:13:10 PM - Found device product id:4752
7/20/2008 4:13:10 PM - iPhone connected
7/20/2008 4:13:15 PM - OK
7/20/2008 4:13:15 PM - Creating ramdisk
7/20/2008 4:13:16 PM - Padding ramdisk
7/20/2008 4:13:16 PM - Ramdisk successfully created
7/20/2008 4:13:17 PM - Putting iPhone into recovery mode.
7/20/2008 4:13:17 PM - AMDeviceEnterRecovery res:0
7/20/2008 4:13:21 PM - iPhone disconnected
7/20/2008 4:13:29 PM - iPhone entered recovery mode
7/20/2008 4:13:30 PM - Sending ramdisk to iPhone.
7/20/2008 4:13:31 PM - Transfer took 1734.375ms
7/20/2008 4:13:31 PM - Modifying environment…
7/20/2008 4:13:31 PM - Starting pwnage
7/20/2008 4:13:41 PM - iPhone left recovery mode
7/20/2008 4:14:44 PM - Found device product id:4752
7/20/2008 4:14:44 PM - iPhone connected
7/20/2008 4:14:44 PM - Your iPhone has been pwned

[STEP 2]: Now you need to BootNeuter your phone. Using the Installer.App download an install it. Instruction on how to neuter the bootrom can be found on the dev team’s site. It’s quite easy, just run the app, select Neuter, and hit the “Flash” button.

[STEP 3]: Update iTunes to 7.7, if you haven’t already. Get a hold of a 2.0 firmware made with iPWNAGE 2.0 for the Mac. Firmwares, for example, are available on torrent file sharing sites.

[STEP 4]: Shift-click the “restore” button in iTunes and select the custom firmware you obtained above. Thanks to PWNAGE 2.0, you now have a first-gen iPhone running the 2.0 firmware, with full ability to run games and apps from the iTunes Application store! Enjoy Super Monkey Ball!

I am running through these steps right now on my first-gen iPhone, and so far everything works as advertised. Of course, I’m not responsible if something does go wrong and bricks your iPhone…

Update: If you have trouble getting your wallpaper to show up, or just see a black background, connect to the iPhone via SSH or from a terminal on the phone itself, delete private/var/mobile/Library/LockBackground.jpg, and restart. You’ll be able to set your own wallpaper.

Update 2: It’s official, WinPwn for Windows XP has been released, so just go use that!

Also, you should check out How to Unlock the iPhone 3G on Google Knol.

Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.

The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.

The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.

The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!