Phodder Blog

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month, you’ve no doubt noticed the tremendous levels of chatter surrounding Apple’s highly-anticipated Jan 26th event. I know Christmas is well behind us, but I wanted to take a moment to write my own wish list for what a not-so-jolly Stevie Claus unveils. I’ve ordered these from most likely to least likely.

• iPhone 4.0., and PLEASE oh please, at least some limited ability to run apps in background. All the chatter seems to point to this being a likely addition, and yay, says me. At Phodder, we’ve had to turn clients from the iPhone to the Android platform for some projects because of the lack of this functionality. And personally, I’d REALLY like to be able to play Pandora in the background and look stuff up in maps or whatever else. I have to think this one is likely considering the hammering Apple has gotten from the HTC droid commercials.
• A Mac Tablet that isn’t called iSlate. This is a no brainer, and it’s definitely the most anticipated device since the iPhone. There’ll be a lot of sour faces in San Francisco if this device doesn’t make an appearance.
• A new iPhone with forward/back facing camera. Lots of cool opportunities with that for videoconferencing and other fun app ideas. My head starts spinning with ideas just thinking about it.
• An announcement of a service agreement with Verizon. For iPhone or Tablet. Or both. I’m not picky, but just something, anything, to make AT&T sweat a little.
• General Larry Platt sending people out of the Yerba Buena Center with “Pants on the Ground” (safe for work, I promise you) in their heads. The man is awesome. Maybe Brett Favre could sing backup?

I saw some news recently about an iPhone worm (more details here) making the rounds in Australia.  I have a brief response to those freaking out and making a big deal about this.  Ready for my quotable, official response?

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.