Phodder, a consortium of passionate technologists, is seeking to hire two graduate students for part-time positions. We are a small development shop located centrally in College Station, and are focused on making great iPhone experiences and groundbreaking social media applications. If you have experience with Python, Objective-C, C++, JavaScript or other development languages, we want to talk.

We have a great time solving very interesting and practical problems and offer very flexible work schedules. We ask for 14 – 24 hours of work per week, but are very flexible with class schedules. Short code samples showing your coding abilities are greatly appreciated.

Please send a brief statement of your experience and interests, as well as any applicable code samples, to jobs at phodder.com.

It’s Complete and Utter NONSENSE!

No, really, let me explain.  This worm works against jailbroken phones ONLY.  What?  You mean phones that have been compromised to begin with?  Yes.  In order to jailbreak a phone, you have to essentially hack into it. Also, this worm propagates by using the default SSH password set within SSH, an application that can be installed after jailbreaking.  It’s not using some massively gaping hole left in by Apple when they wrote the iPhone OS.  It attacks an application, added by a few individuals.  That’s all.

Please understand, I’m not saying Apple is innocent of making stupid mistakes that lead to security vulnerabilities.  They do it all the time.  In this instance though, they didn’t.  This worm is a non-issue.

ps – On a geeky historical note, it’s method of propagation reminds me a little of the Morris Worm.  I guess everything old really is new again.

This code snippet will register a new device with Urban Airship that can then receive Push notifications.

import urllib2
from simplejson import dumps as json_dumps

user   = UAPUSH_USER
passwd = UAPUSH_PASS
base_url = UAPUSH_BASE_URL

# push_payload = {
    # 'aps': { 'badge': 2 },
    # 'device_tokens': [ 'devToken01', 'devToken02', etc ]
    # }

def _http_request(url,payload,is_put=False):
    headers = {"Content-type": "application/json" }
    authinfo = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
    authinfo.add_password("API", url, user, passwd )
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(authinfo)
    req  = urllib2.Request(url, payload, headers)
    if is_put: req.get_method = lambda: 'PUT'
    data = opener.open(req)
    return data.read()

def register_device(dev_token, tags):
    # dev_token is a string of hex returned from
    #     registerForRemoteNotificationTypes:
    # tags is a list of string based tags
    content = {"tags": tags}
    url = "%sdevice_tokens/%s" % (base_url, dev_token)
    print _http_request(url, json_dumps(content), is_put=True)

There’s nothing magical here. I just found it a bit interesting to have an HTTP base authenticated PUT request to a restful service and figured I’d show how to tie these all together.