The Spaceship Office of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs presented plans for an office building that is completely circular in shape.

Jobs himself characterized the building concept as looking a bit like a spaceship.

The building will be quite expensive to make due to its lack of flat surfaces.

The outside windows will require large sheets of curved glass, which aren't even common at Apple Stores.

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iOS 5 Jailbroken

iOS 5 just came out yesterday and only to developers but that did not stop super jailbreak MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team from successfully jailbraking it.


The jailbreak proof comes via MuscleNerd on Twitter who posted two images of an iPod touch 4G running a jailbroken version of the new iOS.

The first shows the Cydia store installed, the second shows root access has been gained.
MuscleNerd forms part of the iPhone Dev Team who are well-known for performing jailbreaks on Apple’s iOS versions. T

his latest jailbreak required the use of Geohot’s Limera1n exploit and unfortunately is tethered, meaning each reboot of your device requires connection to a PC in order to retain the jailbroken state.

The good news is that this method will work on the final version of iOS, so you can jailbreak the day iOS 5 is released this Fall.
Thanks to the work of lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iPhone jailbreaking is exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The same statute has been invoked in several high-stakes jailbreaking lawsuits involving Sony's PlayStation game console, which enjoys no such exemption.

Related articles

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The Woz Tells Paul Allen To Stop Trolling

Apple and Microsoft have battled it out on many fronts over the years, but now there's a new one: the battle of the lesser-known co-founders.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn't entirely happy with the behavior of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and decided to tell him so.

Wozniak dedicated some pointed, if not poignant, remarks toward Allen at the Embedded System Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, Calif., last week.

He reportedly declared: "That patent-troll thing...the other night Paul Allen was speaking at the Computer History Museum and I had four tickets.  And I decided at the last minute not to go, because I remembered he's suing all these companies like Apple and Google but he's not suing Microsoft because he bought all these patents."

Wozniak later said that Allen should be "investing in companies that are doing something, making products, actually making a new future for the world," rather than "get in bed with the lawyers to make my money."

Still, you might be wondering what Wozniak did instead of going to see Allen at the Computer History Museum. He reportedly wandered off with some friends to Marie Callender's. Not so much because he loves the pies, but because he loves the split-pea soup with ham.

Related articles

• Woz snubs Paul Allen, praises pea soup (go.theregister.com)

Windows Phone 7 Also Collects Location Data

Image by clintonjeff via FlickrAfter Google and Apple now Microsoft has admitted that Windows Phone 7 tracks users locations.

Microsoft revealed that it collects data such as the signal strength, the radio type, and if GPS is available also logs latitude, longitude, direction and speed and also the BSSID, which is the MAC address of the device.

Microsoft said it does not collect information sent over private, non-protected wireless networks. It said that its software specifically only picks up publicly broadcast data from WiFi access points and that packets sent over encrypted or unencrypted networks remain safe from its location tracking.

They reassured customers that it does not collect emails, passwords or similar information from open networks. It also does not monitor devices connected to access points, nor the SSID name of an access point, which could reveal the identiy of the user since many people name their networks with personal information.

Microsoft said that it does not share the data with mobile operators.

Microsoft also stressed that users can turn off this location tracking feature

Many of these questions are likely to be similar to those asked by US lawmakers recently as they probe Microsoft and a number of other companies about their location tracking policies. The fact that Microsoft is publishing the information for all to see might go down well with investigators, as the company apparently is tackling the problem head on.

iPhones secretly tracks your movements

Image via CrunchBaseAccording to security researchers, Apple iPhones and iPads are recording your every move, logging your exact longitude and latitude and stored into a hidden and unencrypted but easily accessible file that can be read by anyone with physical access to the device.

The file, which is stored on both the iOS device and any computers that store backups of its data, can be used to reconstruct a detailed snapshot of the user's comings and goings, down to the second

The researchers didn't offer any guidance on how to turn off the movement tracker, but suggested users encrypt backups when syncing devices with iTunes to prevent the data from being read by people who have access to the underlying computer.

But that advice would do nothing to deter those who steal or otherwise obtain an iPhone or iPad.

The data is stored in the /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups/ folder of computers that sync to the iDevice. While most of the folders and files inside contain pseudo-random names, it's possible to unscramble them by examining files called Manifest.mbdb and Manifest.mbdx. With a few more steps, users will extract a database in the SQLite format that's easily read with multiple applications.

The researchers said that locations are tracked by triangulating near-by cellphone towers. That suggests that the movements are tracked even when an iDevice's GPS features are turned off.

Also they have released open-source software that makes the entire process a snap. It also plots the information to a map that shows the movements of the user. While the locations are stored down to the second, the researchers said, their software intentionally reduces the time to weekly increments to make the data less useful to snoops.