UPDATE (26-10-2008): a newer post related to this

I am for a short period in USA. So I was looking at some prepaid GSM SIM cards and the most attractive for me was T-Mobile’s prepaid service. From those, I’ve chosen for some reasons Prepaid SideKick plan, which (not surprisingly, as it is states in the presentation of the plan) is working ONLY on SideKick device for the data traffic, voice is fine.

I was basically looking for a way to use this plan on my iPhone. For the SideKick plans, the APN to be used is for sure hiptop.t-mobile.com - only this APN seems to communicate/process something with the network, any other APN will NOT work and will give you on iPhone “Could not activate EDGE".

However, this APN implementation has some kind of software check that is allowing only SideKick devices to route data thru it.

I was able to get IP address and DNS IP address for the EDGE interface of iPhone, but no pinging/routing was availabe, not even to the proxies mentioned in other blogs nor pinging/routing of DNS IP addresses it have gotten from the network.

Since the EDGE interface is not having a MAC associated (someone, correct me if I am wrong. I have checked it also with ifconfig from iPhone terminal). Having no MAC, what are the other information the APN software/hardware could use to identify and permit only SideKick devices. Could it be IMEI? If it is IMEI, then IMEI change utility for iPhone would do the job - but we need IMEI patterns for SideKick devices. If it is anything else, what is it?

Here are some logs which I got from iPhone’s BB dump (baseband, GSM processor, whatever you call it):

_________

173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789393 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173789405 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.116.158.163″
_________

174312526 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgdcont=1,"IP","”
174312535 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312535 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xgauth=1,1,"","”
174312542 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312542 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns=1,1
174312549 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312556 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgact=1,1
174313489 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313490 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
174313500 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
174313502 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313502 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
174313514 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.119.157.172″
174313515 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313516 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

173789374 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789393 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173789405 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.116.158.163″
173789408 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789409 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

173830458 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
173830469 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “0.0.0.0″, “0.0.0.0″
173830471 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173830472 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173830482 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.203.202.171″
173830484 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173830484 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

DISCLAIMER: this post is intended purely for research and educative purposes. Any use of this information is sole responsibility of the reader/user and the author is not to be held liable for any miss-use of the above informative technical details.

TAGS: iPhone, IMEI, change iPhone IMEI, iPhone EDGE T-Mobile, TMobile, T-Mobile, EDGE, iPhone Sidekick, iPhone T-Mobile, Sidekick prepaid, Sidekick data iPhone

Many, many, actually a manyfinity of blog-posts and opinions about recent mass Apple addiction. It’s like people can’t get enough apples. Where they “eating” only “vegetables” all these years? I will not reiterate the idea that can be seen here and here and many other places.

What I want to put in light is a simple comparison. Nowadays you can see the Apple stores overcrowded. It’s like a mass hypnosis, a sense of all-so-waited sense of freedom. It’s like the 90’s in my country (from exUSSR) and neighboring ones.

Those times, people got sick of communism which they called a slavery. This is a parallel to Microsoft for the recent years. And then people rushed head-ahead to democracy, blinded by the sense of freedom, never wanting and waiting to see that there is a slavery in democracy itself - just another flavor and more fancy-boxed. It’s the same with Apple – people blindly follow the sense of freedom they have about Apple (based on supposition of Open Software ideology behind the Apple initial philosophy), not seeing the closed boxes into which they sell themselves to Apple (iPhone 3G, players, DRMs, etc.). All this turnover of open-Apple into slavery-Apple – it’s all because of the money. This is the same as discredited democracy by money-greed of Enron, BlackWater Corp, Helliburton and alike.

If taking a conspiracy perspective and thinking lunatic way, here are some thoughts. Behind all big corporations (who aim your money and freedoms and whose goals are to make you dependent on them and sell yourself to them metaphorically speaking) are usually and mainly the same persons and circle of interests. It doesn’t matter who is today ruling the masses – as long as they keep the people mind’s busy. Yesterday it was Microsoft with their PC and Win, which separated each individual into it’s own social cell, who prefer to date virtually rather than trying to socialize in a park for example. It may have distracted masses minds from essential things like Federal Reserve Bank being a private corporation and things alike. Today is Apple with their highly addictive, nearly hypnotizing and entertainment-oriented devices. Entertainment is good, but with limits, because as someone once said “This country is a fucking amusement park”. Tomorrow it can be Google, which is being prepared now and every single second now for it’s social-center-command-and-control-point. It’s all about your money, your freedom and your mind.

And for the end – don’t get me all wrong. I am not saying technology and it’s advancement is bad. It is a wonderful thing. The problem is it’s final and real use, it’s way of being delivered and the way it acts and affects people and societies.

Just my two cents…

I have waited bit of a time to finally install a document viewer which would open documents (especially PDFs) and would sense iPhone’s rotating to take advantage of it’s larger reading horizontal line.

WildEyes! application didn’t seem a very good option since it also wanted:
- lighthttpd - a lightweight http server/daemon
- Safari file:// patch

So, right on time Boss created an alternative Docs application. It didn’t require lighthttpd, but:
- it required Safari file:// patch
- from the Installer repository XML, only version 1.3 and 1.4 are supported to install

So, it left only with the manual option.

1. Downloaded Boss repository XML.
2. In the XML from above, found and manually downloaded Docs 1.14 zip.
3. Unzip the above archive Docs.app into /Application folder on your iPhone (use WinScp or alike as you prefer).
4. For some reason, in the Tweaks categories are present only MobileSafari file:// patches for 1.1.1, 1.1.3 and 1.1.3 - WTF?! 1.1.2 is not a humble human or what?
5. Anyhow, some good people followed George Zhu’s blog and created a 1.1.2 patch version for MobileSafari. Download here - http://rapid$hare.com/files/95711418/MobileSafari.html. Found on this forum.
6. In /Applications folder of your iPhone, find MobileSafari.app. Inside, find MobileSafar binary executable file. Make a backup of it (on iPhone or on your local PC) and then put in MobileSafari.app the one from the archive downloaded above at point 5.
7. Enjoy your reading! Knowledge is light …

Here are some screenshots:
- happy one

iPhone Docs Safari 1.1.2 patched - PDF loaded

- fuck it - now you have to split some nice PDFs in chunks…

iPhone Docs Safari 1.1.2 patched - page too large

Hehe - first milestone accomplished.

What it means is:
- installed Linux Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibson
- configured and build iphone-dev’s toolchain
- build the “Hello iPhone World!” application
- didn’t use Apple iPhone SDK nor any Java-like framework

My first iPhone native application

More on some details later

As some already know (especially my cubicle neighbors at work - i keep bugging them), I own an iPhone - which of course I am not satisfied to use only as a simple user.

Below are some videos related to my iPhone testing.

iPhone - Calculator Math Bug:

iPhone - Calculator Keytouch Feature/Bug

iPhone - CameraPro Dummy Crack

I am very interested by the progress of *NIX toolchain porting to iPhone, as well as gcc, gdb and of course mplayer.

zveriPhone details:
1.1.2 OTB (Week 50)
Jailbreak + Activate 1.1.2
Unlock with gunlock for 1.1.2 & 1.1.3
Carrier - CYTAVODA