/dev/random

Hey guys! I know this is a bit late, but I would like wish all of my remaining readers a happy holiday season. I know I’ve been a bit busy lately, but I’m going to try to keep this site updated again.

So let me give you a run down of just what has been going on. My last post (before the iPhone how-to) was February 20th of last year. A lot has happened since then. My absence initially started with a teacher at school drafting me into the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). I was to compete in the Networking Concepts category. It was a 100 question multiple choice test on various networking topics. I took 1st place at both regional and state levels, so I qualified for the trip to compete at the FBLA-PBL nationals in Chicago last summer. I went. I had no chance, being more into coding than networking, but I guess I’m not half bad at it. :) From the people I talked to that competed against me, every single one of them had some form of networking certification.

While I was in Chicago, I snuck off from the group and took a taxi to the Apple store on Michigan Avenue a.k.a. the Magnificent Mile. I got there right as the store opened, so I walked in and bought my iPhone in under 5 minutes. (The big wtf here is that the Cingular store had a line around the block…) Once purchased, I had a 3-4 mile hike back to the hotel. It was pretty fun. :)

So the rest of my summer break after I got back from Chicago was spent on IRC trying to hack the iPhone. Yep, I knew most of the hackers and even was one of the first to start a serial dock for the thing, I just suck at soldering. I didn’t get to do much before I had to do summer assignments for school. It was fun while it lasted though. I got to meet many cool people, including Captain Crunch.

Now, we’re getting to the exciting stuff. A few weeks after school started I got offered a job at a startup in Silicon Valley doing PHP coding. The startup is called Qubescape. We’ll have a sweet product out shortly, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s been awesome so far. I work with some really good people.

That brings us up to what’s going on currently. Currently, I have very little time thanks to school. AP US History and AP Physics B are keeping me slammed with work. My AP US History teacher has an insane passing record and intends to keep it that way — which I’m cool with because I enjoy the class. On the other hand, my AP Physics teacher just can’t teach. He’s a good guy, he understands it, but he *cannot* explain it; so, I’m left to figuring it out on my own.

Time is going to get even more rare as I am involved in FBLA once again this year. I will be the first from my school to compete in the Internet Application Programming category. It looks incredibly easy. The project requires a website to track class averages and GPA with simple user authentication and a presentation explaining areas of your code the judges are interested in.

Anyone else that read this blog heard of FBLA? It’s nationwide, but many people don’t seem to know about it.

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After hanging around the osx86 crew last night on IRC, I found out that they had finally cracked the activation service and made a proof of concept tool that would activate the iPhone with a plist file. The developers refused to release the actual tokens that needed to be embedded inside the plist file for activation though, for good reason, as they are DVD Jon’s.

Now, they did tell me one thing. The keys are embedded in the .NET binary in JLJ’s iPhone activation server. So I began working and this led to where I’m at now, a how-to. This post will not provide the tokens, nor will I provide them until JLJ says I can. This article will walk you through the process of obtaining them so you can activate your iPhone on a mac though, as suggested by the developers of the tool.zip we will be using.
As of now, you can just download the newly released iPhoneActivatorTool to activate your phone. This is a newer version of tool.zip that includes the plist file required.

Step 1:
Download the following files:

• JLJ’s PhoneActSrv - Mirror
• tool.zip - mirror
• My iPhone Decrypt App
• Lutz Roeder’s Reflector .NET disassembler

Step 2:
This step is where you’ll actually prepare the data you need to get. You will need windows with .NET framework 2.0+. JLJ’s PhoneActSrv’s binary has the keys stored within it, encrypted using AES. In order to get the keys, we need to disassemble the binary. To do this, you need to open up Reflector and go to File->Open then locate and open the PhoneActSrv.exe file.

Once it’s loaded, you will see the entry in the tree view. Right click on PhoneActSrv and click Export. Make sure you save this somewhere that you will remember, you will spend a lot of time looking at the disassembly. You also need access to it over the mac.

Step 3:
Now, open the directory you saved the disassembly files to. You should see the following files:

• a.cs
• b.cs
• AssemblyInfo.cs
• d.cs
• DotfuscatorAttribute.cs
• e.cs
• e.resources
• f.resources
• Global.cs
• PhoneActSrv.csproj

If you see these files, you did step 2 correct. If not, go back and do it again. This is where you may need some coding experience, as I can’t just hand these keys out. I provide you with enough hints that I feel you can find the keys. Unzip my iPhone Decrypt application and open up iphone_decrypt.c and read the comments. For each variable needed, I provide you with a hint on how to find it. All the values needed are located in the d.cs file.

Once you find them, plug the values into their appropriate arrays in iphone_decrypt.c. Once you have what you think are the values, open up a terminal, go to the directory iphone_decrypt.c is located in and run the following in console.

$ ./build.sh
$ chmod +x iphone_decrypt
$ ./iphone_decrypt

If all goes well, you should see something like the following on the terminal:

kalashnikov:~/Desktop/iPhone-RE/AES decrypt cody$ ./build.sh
kalashnikov:~/Desktop/iPhone-RE/AES decrypt cody$ ./iphone_decrypt
Welcome to the iPhone JLJ key decryptor. Find the data in his app and set the variables in the code to this one.
Setting AES key...done
---1076
Attempting to decrypt the key...done
Key is <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<Document xmlns="http://www.apple.com/itms/" disableHistory="true" disableNavigation="true">
&nbsp;
<Protocol>
    <plist version="1.0">
        <dict>
	
          <key>iphone-activation</key>
          <dict>
            <key>unbrick</key>
            <true/>
            <key>activation-record</key>
            <dict>
              <key>AccountToken</key><data>*snip*</data>
              <key>AccountTokenSignature</key><data>*snip*/data>
            </dict>
          </dict>
	
        </dict>
    </plist>
</Protocol>
&nbsp;
</Document>??V?n9???lsQ?
Freeing up memory...done

If you do, move onto step 4, if not, keep trying.

Step 4:
Unzip tool.zip and open up the blank.plist file in something like textmate. It’s just an XML file. blank.plist contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>ActivationRecord</key>
	<dict>
		<key>AccountToken</key>
		<data>
		</data>
		<key>AccountTokenCertificate</key>
		<data>
		</data>
		<key>AccountTokenSignature</key>
		<data>
		</data>
		<key>DeviceCertificate</key>
		<data>
		</data>
		<key>FairPlayKeyData</key>
		<data>
		</data>
	</dict>
	<key>Request</key>
	<string>Activate</string>
	
</dict>
</plist>

Copy the AccountToken and AccountTokenCertificate lines and their data lines from the console output of iphone_decrypt. Paste them into the plist file so that it looks like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>ActivationRecord</key>
	<dict>
		<key>AccountToken</key><data>*snip*</data>
	              <key>AccountTokenSignature</key><data>*snip*</data>
	</dict>
	<key>Request</key>
	<string>Activate</string>
	
</dict>
</plist>

Save this file as activate.plist in the same directory as blank.plist

Step 5:
Activate your iPhone by running the following command in the terminal after changing to the directory that blank.plist is located in.

$ ./tool --activate activate.plist

You should see the following output on the console:

kalashnikov:~/Desktop/tool Folder cody$ ./tool –activate test.plist
iPhoneActivatorTool 1.0
2007-07-04 15:10:43.887 tool[10443] Found iPhone Device: 1
2007-07-04 15:10:43.887 tool[10443] Connecting…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.892 tool[10443] Checking Pairing…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.905 tool[10443] Starting device session…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.990 tool[10443] ActivationState: Unactivated
2007-07-04 15:10:43.990 tool[10443] Deactivating your iPhone…
2007-07-04 15:10:44.002 tool[10443] New ActivationState: Unactivated
2007-07-04 15:10:44.003 tool[10443] Activating your iPhone…
2007-07-04 15:10:44.163 tool[10443] New ActivationState: MismatchedICCID
2007-07-04 15:10:44.163 tool[10443] Your iPhone was successfully activated.

You will probably see a popup about your iPhone having an incorrect SIM card. Just slide the unlock slider at the bottom to the right and you should be ready to go.

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I’ll update this post after my iPhone post.

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After talking to a few people in #OpenID on irc.freenode.org last night, I finally decided I was going to get OpenID working with my own custom database library. The only full featured PHP library I could find was the one produced by JanRain. It’s not that I don’t like the features in the library, but the fact that it’s a PEAR style library, so it requires a few other PEAR libs that I absolutely refuse to use due to bloat, specifically PEAR::DB.

This caused a real issue for me. Function names are extremely different, along with how queries are performed, compared to my mysqli library. Sometime last month I tried to make a PEAR-style wrapper for my class, but for some reason it failed with the library. Well, last night I found the Wordpress OpenID plugin. Knowing that WP runs it’s own MySQL class, I downloaded it and studied the wrapper. This allowed me to see what I had been doing wrong and get a system working before school started today.

Once I had it working, I wrote a simple class I call EasyOpenID. This class allows me to minimize the amount of code in JanRain’s consumer example to very few lines of code. I’ve decided I was going to release this library, so I converted it to FileStore, which is the default the library ships with, and packed it up. I am going to release it here to hopefully get some feedback. If the feedback is good, I will probably continue to expand on the class.

I will have a page up for the library later on tomorrow, but for now, download the file located here. This zip file contains the converted consumer example and my class. The class is released under the new BSD license, while the rest of the code is GPL. Please, provide me with any of your thoughts on the library. Even if you don’t use it on a real, live site, please just let me know what you thought.

Talking with the folks in #OpenID also got me invited to be on the first official OpenID podcast recording, no idea if I’ll be involved, but I’m listening. You will be able to obtain the podcast on http://idcast.org/ sometime tomorrow night or on Thursday. I hope all goes well. Hopefully this new podcast will provide a great resource for developers looking to learn and expand on OpenID.

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There are times when people or companies make you mad, this is one of them. I was planning on beginning this post with a video from youtube called “The Knack.” It was a family guy video about computer and electronic tinkering. Well, Sony somehow feels that this 1:01 minute long clip violates their copyrights, so it has been removed in the last round of DMCA cease and desists on youtube. So, I won’t be starting this post off this way…

Last week, I got “The Knack.” It seems to bite any computer guy that comes into contact with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware. It all started when a fellow programmer friend of mine sent me a link to a DEC Easy WebServer. This is a relabeled DEC Alpha Multia that shipped with Windows NT 4.0 Server. It included some sort of Netscape software for setting up a webserver easily. Well, I figured I would go ahead and add it to my watch list, since it was only $20 + shipping. I continued browsing and around and found a DEC VAXstation 3100 for $18 + shipping. I have been wanting a VAX for a while, so I bought it. 2 days later, I bought the DEC Easy WebServer.

So in total, I spent over $100 in a week on computer hardware that is older than me.(almost as old as me in the Multia’s case) The VAXstation came and it ended up missing the whole SCSI controller board, so I’m still looking for one of those. The Multia came today and works great, but it seems to operate in “Space heater emulation mode” all the time, I’d hate to see it under a full CPU load.

I tried installing OpenBSD/Alpha on the Multia tonight, with little luck. The installer boots and then says it can find no drives, but the hardware compatibility list clearly says the Multia is supported. So, I tried to find Debian net boot floppy images and failed. I’m currently installing FreeBSD/Alpha as I’m writing this, hopefully it works better.

Here are a few pictures of my new machines, more pictures of the Multia can be found here; more pictures of the VAXstation can be found here.

School has been crazy lately. I’ve been loaded down with homework most of the time, and on top of that I’ve been drafted by a few of the teachers at school to participate in the FBLA competitions. I’ll be competing in the single person test on computer networking. The test is a 100 question test given at a local university. I’m competing in the area my school does really bad in, so I hope I can change the tradition…

As I said above, school has been crazy lately. This has had it’s negative effects on Threadbound. When I do have time to code, I’m working on my client’s website, which I got sometime after my last post, or I’m doing coding for thunder-it.com. Today, I’ve been hit with a new block of inspiration and ideas for threadbound, so hopefully I can make some time to work on it. The stuff I came up with today is definitely new for the area I plan to implement it in.

For those of you still not quite sure about this whole Web 2.0 thing, check out the video below. It’s the best one I’ve ever seen that describes how I feel about it.

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