A few days ago I wanted to get onto a website which I occasionally use to store Web bookmarks. There are easier ways to store bookmarks online, like Delicious or spurl.net, but these were bookmarks were from some time ago.

Anyway, I was quite surprised to get a warning from McAfee Site Advisor that this was a “Reported Attack Site”. Not thinking, I clicked on the “Ignore this warning” link, and the ZoneAlarm Security Suite started popping up warnings. After I had hastily exited the web browser, ZoneAlarm informed that it had removed some spyware from Firefox’s cache.

I was rather glad that I had been browsing with McAfee Site Advisor installed (it works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer). The ZoneAlarm Security suite has previously warned me about websites,  but didn’t pick this one up as a threat.

McAfee Site Advisor is part of the McAfee Internet Security Suite 2008, but I use the free version. There are also a number of similar products available. A Firefox add-on called “LinkExtend” uses the McAfee Site Advisor database as well as a number of other sources. There is also the “Web of Trust” which has a free add-ons for Firefox and Internet Explorer. These tools can save you a lot of problems on the World Wild Web.

It appears that when you buy a book in electronic format, you are not actually buying it. Some users of Amazon’s Kindle found this out when some books they had purchased were remotely removed from their devices by Amazon.

Apparently the copyright holder notified the Amazon that the books were being been sold without its permission, so Amazon removed the two books from the accounts of users, and refunded their money.

The irony is that the books were “1984″ and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.

This has generated many humorous headlines (as well as countless tweets). Among the best were “Amazon Kindles Outrage With Ironic Removal of Orwell Titles” on the BeliefNet Blog and “Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others” from Pogue’s Posts on The New York Times Blogs.

On a more serious note, this incident highlights some of the scarier aspects of DRM (Digital Rights Management) of E-books. Apart from the fact that you cannot resell them, or lend them to someone else like a real book, now you don’t even really own them. Dennis D. McDonald has a point in “Amazon Kindle Orwell Deletion May Be Legal — But It’s Still Doubleplusungood“:
“it demonstrates how this technology can be applied and managed remotely without the owner’s involvement. Next time it will be a title embroiled in some kind of legal dispute, or a government agency will beg that a title be deleted for national security reasons.“

It was inevitable I guess, that sooner or later there would be cracked Apps available for the iPhone. (for a explanation of what I mean by “cracked app” or “pirated software” see the article “Software cracking” in the Wikipedia.).

I had heard that some cracked Apple App Store Apps were being distributed in some way on Jailbroken iPhones. It was only when I was doing some research for the Blog Entry “148 Apps“, that I came across some evidence of this. I was going to refer to a blog where someone had installed the maximum amount of apps on his iPhone, and had a picture showing all the screens of his iPhone full of Apps. Then I spotted a suspiciously named app, Googled the name and discovered it was a source for cracked Apps. It was a good picture but I could not use it.

So why am I writing about cracked Apps? Well, first I must make this disclaimer: as a former Software Developer, I’m definitely against using cracked apps. Also, searching the web for and downloading cracked apps for any platform is one of the surest ways of getting some sort of malware on your machine.

One of the primary methods to install cracked apps on an iPhone is by using tools only available on Jailbroken iPhones. However, the developers of software for Jailbroken iPhones are very much against cracked apps. The last thing they want is to give Apple another reason to want to shut them down. Also, their apps are among the ones being pirated.

Of course cracking of Applications happens on every popular platform. One of the most pirated applications in the world today is an Operating System: Windows XP Professional.

As some of my eagle-eyed readers may have noticed, one of the iPhone links from my previous blog entry showed an “unlocked” iPhone on sale. Yes, you can get a legally unlocked iPhone, but at a price. These are not cheap though, ranging from almost $900 to over $1000.

So what is the difference? In some countries, Apple is forced by law to make an unlocked iPhone available to customers who ask for one. This “unlocking” does not involve Jailbreaking, and is most likely a very closely guarded where the actual “locking” mechanism is permanently disabled or undone. An iPhone unlocked in this way would not be affected by firmware updates (although this has happened).

A large number of cellphones and smartphones are available in unlocked versions. Most of the Palm GSM smartphones are available in unlocked form, which is several times more expensive than the locked phone which is subsidized by a mobile network operator.

Continuing from my previous Blog entry, I won’t repeat the dire warnings of my previous posting.

When I got the 3G iPhone, although the upfront cost was relatively expensive, the actual cost of the contract over two years was really expensive. It was probably the fact that I have to keep this iPhone running at least until the two year contract is up that has made me cautious. So cautious in fact that I would be very reluctant to try to Jailbreak it, just in case I messed up.

Not too long ago I picked up a used first generation locked iPhone – a 2G iPhone (very easy to understand) for a decent price. It seems a lot of people are upgrading to 3G iPhones, possibly as their contracts for first generation iPhones come to an end. The idea was that if I could jailbreak and unlock that iPhone, I could safely do it with my 3G iPhone. (For an a description of Jailbreaking and unlocking, see this Wikipedia article) I’m more interested in jailbreaking the phone, as that allows for some customizations you cannot get otherwise – for example changing Battery on the charging screen to show a percentage, or giving each tab its on background.

I discovered that there are numerous ways to Jailbreak and unlock. I took what I thought was an easy way and bought a “Jailbreak and unlock kit” – software with instructions on how to do it. Everything worked fine except for the unlock. A second try, from some free (and more detailed) instructions, also got me to the put of having a “Jailbroken” iPhone without the unlocking part working. I’ve realized that I need the unlocking part to work so that I can use my (3G) AT&T SIM Card with the 2G iPhone.

Some said you learn through your mistakes (”iFails”). The hard part is trying it all over again.

Okay, first things first : Jailbreaking or unlocking you iPhone may void your warranty. Jailbreaking your iPhone could be illegal soon, if Apple had their way (see “Apple says jailbreaking is illegal” from The unofficial Apple Weblog). Not only that, it is possible to “brick” your expensive iPhone or iPod Touch.  By writing this article I am in no way suggesting that anyone go out and attempt to jailbreak and unlock your iPhone or Jailbreak your iPod Touch.

Before I had an iPhone, I had an iPod Touch. This was also before the Apple App Store was announced, and jailbreaking was the only way to get third part applications onto the iPhone and iPod Touch. I decided to try jailbreaking my iPod Touch. There were large a number of Jailbreak applications around.  It seemed that Apple had given up fighting the jailbreaking apps, but they were actually busy with the App Store. I chose the easiest to use Jailbreak application, but was still cautious. Fortunately I didn’t try that application on an iPhone, because apparently it was not as good with unlocking. The next firmware update was the App store update and I didn’t bother to Jailbreak the iPod Touch after that.

Then I got a 3G iPhone…(to be continued)

By now you are probably sick of hearing about the iPhone, and what’s an iPhone doing on a computer blog anyway? (It has an Operating System). So, how about the Palm Centro? It is a really cute little phone with a QWERTY keypad. There’s one somewhere in the pile on my desk, recently unlocked for someone. The Centro has a real Operating System, the Palm OS, which has been around since 2002, but has had multiple revisions since then. Ah, but the Centro only has EDGE data support, not 3G – it doesn’t really need it with a 2.25 inch screen with a resolution of  320 by 320 pixels.

Hang on, there’s a message for me. Okay, the Apple iPhone 3G it is then.

The second generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G has proved much more difficult to unlock via software. The “iPhone Dev Team” (no affiliation with Apple) finally released a software unlock for the iPhone 3G earlier this month. A SIM card based unlock has been available since not long after the iPhone was released.

With the official Apple App Store having hundreds of applications, why bother with Jailbreaking? Simply because the applications available to a Jailbroken phone are able to do things prohibited by Apple, such as tether your iPhone to a laptop and use it as a modem.

Unlocking is still done for the same reasons – to use the iPhone 3G on the carrier of your choice. However, here in the US you lose the 3G speeds because T-Mobile and AT&T make use of different UMTS frequency bands for 3G support.

When the first (generation) iPhone was released, It was done a lot differently to the way other cellphones, even smartphones, were sold:
First, the iPhone did not appear to be subsidized. This was virtually unheard of. To pay the full price for a phone and then be expected to sign a two year contract? Sure, the iPhone was a cellphone like no other, but initially it cost a fortune. There was a loophole in the way it was purchased though. The iPhone was purchased and taken home to be activated on iTunes. Only then was a credit check done. If a purchaser did not pass the credit check they were offered the iPhone on a “Pay As you Go” prepaid plan. This meant no 2 year contract, but the iPhone was still locked to AT&T.

Meanwhile another, unrelated battle was taking place. The iPhone runs a slimmed down version of the Unix like BSD operating system, with a graphical front end. It was long before clever programmers had found their way into this closed system , and had opened it up (”Jailbroke” it) for a whole bevy of unsolicited, warranty-breaking third party-apps. A large number of these applications improved on the functionality of the iPhone. See Wikipedia’s article on Jailbreaking the iPhone.

At first Apple brought out firmware updates to close the loopholes in its Operating System, but the programmers were a step ahead – advising people running “Jailbroken” iPhones not to upgrade their firmware until the coders had everything working on the iPhone again.

The pressure from other countries to obtain unlocked iPhones either caused unknown developers (possibly with iPhone hacking experience) to take their programming further to the actual unlocking of the iPhone. I have heard that an estimated 40 percent of  first generation iPhones probably ended up outside of the US.

Before continuing with the free security applications, I just want to mention Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2009, which is a full security suite which has some very good user reviews on PriceGrabber.com. It also has anti-spyware and malware protection.

There are a number of anti-spyware programs available for free. One of the most popular is Ad-Aware 2008, which was one of the first applications built to find and remove adware and spyware (of course, it was an earlier version than the 2008 version!). The free version of Ad-Aware 2008 is available at lavasoft.com. There is also a paid upgrade available, which adds an antivirus and other features.

Another free anti-spyware program is Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.6. It also has been around for a number of years.

Then there is Spyware Terminator (currently at version 2.3.0.487), which also includes an anti-virus. I’m not so sure about using this as your anti-virus protection, I would recommend turning off the antivirus feature and using other antivirus. Remember that only one anti-virus program should be running on your PC at one time. As for anti-spyware, experts tend to recommend at least two – one paid version and a free version.

And Malware protection? According to Wikipedia, “Software is considered malware based on the perceived intent of the creator rather than any particular features. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software.”
So most anti-spyware and antivirus programs would also deal with malware in one form or another.

Some of you may be asking: what about the best of free security software, the “free Internet security suite”?

When it comes to the components for “building your own security suite”, there are a number of free ones to choose from.

First is the Antivirus. “AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition” is a well known Antivirus. There is also a paid version called “Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus & Anti-Spyware“, which has  an anti-spyware component. I have found AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition to be a solid antivirus on machines I don’t use often.
Then there is Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus, which I have also used. As with the AVG product there is also a paid product available

ZoneAlarm makes my favorite free firewall “ZoneAlarm Firewall“, which I have used for years. Another free firewall is the Comodo Personal Firewall. It looks like Comodo has just released a free firewall and Antivirus combination this month, I would tend to wait for the reviews before trying it out, but here’s the link for those who like to be on the “bleeding edge”.

Next – free Anti-Spyware and Malware protection