Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I find this Personal Cell Phone Signal Blocker Device interesting. Not only does it retail for about $50, it offers portable jamming of all cellular signals (GSM, CDMA, DCS, PHS, 3G). All the iPhone toting Apple neophytes within a 2 to 40 foot radius will be unable to operate their shiny devices for three hours until your 1500mAh battery dies.

They note that “certain countries” like the USA forbid you from owning one:

Important Note: Usage and purchase of this item may not be allowed in certain countries. It is your responsibility to check for your local regulations. DX is not responsible for customs confiscations. if you are not sure whether you country allows importing this product, do not use EMS express shipping to avoid problems.

According to Wikipedia, this is because of the Communications Act of 1934. However, if you’re interested in this sort of thing you should read the Phrack piece on building a GPS jammer or the How Stuff Works article on jammers for a more basic overview.

I’m going to lay down the law here on the Storm Worm’s latest incarnation, w32/Ramex.A or W32/Skipi.A or W32.Pykspa.D. Although the official Skype blog refers to it as either “the worm” or “a virus”, their copy makes it clear that the Skype Storm Worm cannot spread without manual user action:

Skype has learned that a computer virus called “w32/Ramex.A” is affecting users of Skype for Windows. Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect the computer of the person who receives the message.

Dwight Silverman gives a good overview about what exactly it does to convince a user to open the evil .scr file and infect themselves. After all, who wouldn’t click “NFL Season Is Here!”? That said, a computer worm is actually a lot more serious:

A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention.

If this were a worm, all of Skype’s 10,000,000 users would have been infected in minutes, doubling or tripling the size of the “Storm Worm” botnet. So, you idiot bloggers, before you write something that scary, make sure you use the right terminology. I saw the headlines this morning at work and had a heart attack, and then read the story and cooled off. But, it’s probably not good for my blood pressure o_O.

A newly created blog http://facebooksecrets.blogspot.com has posted a single, devastating post, the PHP source code to Facebook’s home page. The front page currently looks like this, and lets users log in or register:

My first question is Where did the source code come from? Who leaked it? How? Techcrunch offers two theories, the first that a Facebook employee leaked the code, and the second that facebook’s source code repository was hacked. Neither of these make any sense; what really happened is that a Facebook third party developer on the F8 platform found an injection attack that he could use to retrieve an arbitrary file. Since Facebook is written in PHP, it was inevitable that any injection attack would lead to a source code compromise.

My theory has proved incorrect, as minutes after the article went to press, a Facebook employee left the following comment on Techcrunch:

I wanted to clarify a few things in your story. Some of Facebook’s source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.

Thanks to you and the TC readers for helping us out on this one.

Brandee Barker
Facebook

Interestingly, The Wrong Advice points out a blog entry which used to contain the source to profile.php and a commenter who claims to have gotten photo.php. Others have posted search and groups code online. Facebook isn’t just hacked, it’s leaking source code all the time.

The alleged source code contains some humorous comments, which I will list here:

• // FIXME?: is it sub-optimal to call this both in requests_get_cache_data and here?
• // Holy shit, is this the cleanest f****ng frontend file you’ve ever seen?!
• // make sure big tunas haven’t moved around
• // Merman’s Admin profile always links to the Merman’s home
• // Friend’s Feed Selector - Requires dev.php constant

I’ve got the feeling that Facebook, just like MySpace, is a web 2.0 site strung together with glue; glancing at the alleged code doesn’t make me feel great about their infrastructure. They have huge win32-api-esque functions like multiget_fresh_notstale_hashed_network_with_orientation (i made this up), a procedural, rather than object oriented structure, and no clean abstractions or MVC scheme. At least they’re using smarty for templating, though….

Update: They’ve added the code for Facebook’s s.php search feature. When will it stop!?

People have figured out how to run commands on the serial interface of the iPhone, which apparently isn’t protected:

Your friends at #iPhone made a major breakthrough this morning.
we got a serial console working, here is how
the serial has the same pinouts as iPod serial
use a 6.8kish resistor from pin 21 to gnd
tie pin 11-sergnd to the real ground
use iphoneinterface to send the following commands in recovery mode:
setenv debug-uarts 1
saveenv
reboot
that should work

IT GIVES YOU A FULL INTERACTIVE SHELL
I REPEAT, A FULL INTERACTIVE SHELL

The command list is:
iphone.fiveforty.net/geohot/cmdlist.txt

You need a level converter, like the max 232 to make this work

This means that within a few days someone will package an unlocking program and an easier-to-use interface together to unlock the iPhone’s SIM card and make it do what it was really meant to do–let anyone have three or four Apple devices on their person.

Related Stories:
iPhone Edge Network Dies
Broken iPhone Screens, oh noes!
The beginning of iPhone hacks
Activate iPhone instructions for noobs

How long will it be before someone can actually unlock the iPhone to work with other carriers? The iPhone OS passwords have already been cracked, according to a forum post on Hackintosh by sam, who claims:

The password for root is “alpine”
The “mobile” user accounts password is “dottie”

They’ve also found the encrypted restore image, which contains the machine’s instructions to run. If they can find a way to decrypt, modify, and replace it, they should be able to make the iPhone sing and dance. The other options is a mysterious service called Unlock Your Apple iPhone Today which claims to unlock “75% of all the iPhone we have currently tested with unlock codes generated from the phones IMEI.” Then again, they look like a spam operation, so trust them with your IMEI if you dare.

The sad thing is that even when someone unlocks the iPhone and gets it to work on another network, it doesn’t even have 3G support for fast internet, and the new provider probably won’t be able to provide data services, visual voicemail, or any other compelling iPhone features. Unlocking your iPhone is the same as bricking it.