Temporary messaging apps can’t keep pictures and video secure

By Mike Schnier on Jan 23, 2013

Want to send a picture or message but don’t want it shared with friends, leaked all over the internet, and potentially traced back to you? Unless you’re 100% certain that you can trust whoever you’re sending a message to, then you shouldn’t send it. The most popular temporary photo messaging apps can leak your data on devices that aren’t even jailbroken, and with a few tweaks you can easily get past one of the most secure messaging apps available.

The current versions of Snapchat and Facebook Poke aren’t secure apps. Evan Spiegal, Snapchat’s founder, doesn’t seem overly concerned about the possibility of users saving and sending their received pictures. In a comment to BuzzFeed Spiegal said: “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” That’s not exactly what you want to hear if you’re using the service to send pictures and video that you don’t want publicly shared…

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Infinity Blade II Gets Updated With Tweaks and Bug Fixes

By Zech TesfaYohannes on Dec 6, 2011

A couple of days ago we reported that Infinity Blade II has hit the App Store. Since then, it has received a lot of praise and almost perfect reviews.

However, there have been many problems with the game that people (including myself) have been experiencing. Some users have reported that the app crashes when opened on the iPad 1 and certain generations of the iPod touch.  Read More

 

Sprint: We’re Taking the iPhone Data Speed Issue Seriously

By Zech TesfaYohannes on Nov 3, 2011

When the iPhone 4S released a couple of weeks ago, many Sprint users reported very slow 3G data speeds. In a a recent interview with Sprint’s Fared Adib some light was shed on the data speed issue that seems to be plaguing so many iPhone 4S owners.

Apple itself acknowledged the problem and has reportedly been working closely with Sprint to fix the issue. We at iDB conducted our own speed test between the three main iPhone 4S US carriers and found that Sprint was the slowest… Read More

 

How to Avoid Long Lines When Buying the iPhone 4S Tomorrow

By Zech TesfaYohannes on Oct 13, 2011

Tomorrow, the iPhone 4S will go on sale in stores around the world, and many people will be (and already are) lining up to purchase one.

One problem people always encounter when Apple releases a new product is long lines. There are a couple of different ways to avoid the lines, which will save you time, and, most importantly, ensure that you get a new iPhone! Read More

 

Apple Selling Refurbished iPhones as “New” in China?

By Zech TesfaYohannes on Aug 18, 2011

In a recent report by AppleInsider, in China, Apple is being accused of selling refurbished iPhones as new. This all started when six customers complained that even though their iPhone was new, the warranty expiration date was showing January 2012… Read More

 

BiteSMS Update for JailbreakMe 3.0 Compatibility

By Guest Author on Jul 15, 2011

The biteSMS team has pushed out a compatibility update for JailbreakMe 3.0.

Just over a week ago, we discovered that Cydia’s popular text messaging tweak, biteSMS, was conflicting with Comex’s latest jailbreak, JailbreakMe 3.0.

BiteSMS’ quick reply functionality would send users device’s into an infinite boot loop. This was quickly confirmed with multiple sources, predominantly the biteSMS support forum, JailbreakQA, and of course our readers here at iDB. Read More

 

JailbreakMe 3.0 Conflicting with BiteSMS

By Guest Author on Jul 8, 2011

A couple of days ago we reported that the iPad Camera Connection Kit stopped working after using JailbreakMe 3.0. It looks like another issue has reared its ugly head which looks to affect jailbroken devices on a wider scale.

Reports are surfacing that the popular jailbreak tweak BiteSMS is conflicting with JailbreakMe 3.0. Confirmed on the BiteSMS forums, that sending a text message through BiteSMS’ quick reply feature will crash your device and send it into an infinite boot loop. The only solution to remedy this as of writing is to restore your iDevice… Read More

 

How to Fix Recording Errors in Display Recorder

By Nick Prokesch on Jun 22, 2011

Display Recorder is a wonderful jailbreak app by Ryan Petrich for creating a video recording of your iPhone’s screen. Some users, however, have been having problems creating new recordings and have seen Error Code 0 or 2. As far as I can tell, the issue is related to the way that Display Recorder stores files in the file system to circumvent ASLR obstacles and the permissions that iTunes applies to them during backup restores.

It seems that the only users affected by these errors are those who recently restored from an iTunes backup or upgraded/downgraded their firmware. Luckily, the fix is pretty simple and can be done in under ten minutes… Read More

 

Troubleshooting a Painfully Slow Cydia Update

By Nick Prokesch on Jan 17, 2011

Sometimes it seems that Cydia updates can take forever. For slower devices, it may be normal. But if you see errors while downloading or if the update takes more than five minutes, there may be a solution.

Before you start this method, you will need to have APT Strict installed. If you have CyDelete installed, then you already have this. Otherwise, make sure Cydia is set to Developer mode, search for it and install… Read More

 

Can’t Run APT-GET from SSH/MobileTerminal? Try this

By Nick Prokesch on Oct 28, 2010

After jailbreaking for 4.1, many of you will notice you can no longer run apt-get commands from the command line, whether SSH or MobileTerminal. This is mind boggling, and none of the support sites or forums seem to have the right answer. The most common suggested solution is to delete some sources from Cydia and re-add them. This doesn’t work.

After a few hours of troubleshooting, I gave up and assumed it was a limitation of greenpois0n. However, today I accidentally found the answer, and it’s quite simple to make this work again. Read More

 

GreenPois0n First Impressions: the 4.1 Bugs

By Nick Prokesch on Oct 21, 2010

As soon as the Mac version of GreenPois0n came out, I went ahead and jailbroke my device.  It wasn’t the same eye-candy that JailbreakMe was, or even Comex’s first jailbreak, but it worked and I didn’t have to wait long.  Here’s a few quick things that I immediately noticed.

LockScreen PIN Delay

After a fresh reboot or a respring, I can no longer dive right in to tap the PIN to access my device.  The problem is either a delay or the first tap or two is not recognized.  But it definitely slows me down a little bit… Read More

 

Will iOS 4.1 Fix the iPhone 4′s Camera Issues?

By Guest Author on Sep 4, 2010

There were certainly no shortage of complaints when the iPhone 4 was released, or perhaps there was no shortage of coverage relating to every issue users experienced. Whatever perspective you take there was an issue that didn’t receive much attention compared to the rest. There seemed to be a couple problems relating discoloring of photos in certain light.

TUAW reported on it briefly while forums seem to run wild with complaints. This wasn’t the only complaint regarding the camera as Apple’s discussion board showed us. Other users seemed to be getting a green blob appearing in their photos with the intensity of the discrepancy occurring while indoors with florescent style lighting. Read More

 

iOS 4 vs iOS 4.1 – Guess Who Wins

By Guest Author on Sep 3, 2010

It was bad enough that many of the exciting features that accompanied iOS 4 weren’t going to be added to the iPhone 3G. It was a whole different debacle when we reported that the device was basically crippled in many instances after making the upgrade.

According to a demo by Life Hacker, iOS 4.1 works much smoother on the 2 year old device than the previous version. The site notes the following regarding their little experiment: Read More

 

Can Humidity Trigger The iPhone’s Water Sensors?

By Guest Author on Aug 23, 2010

This is quite the contrast to the over-heating problem experienced by some iPhone owners. Gizmodo reports that Asian countries that deal with humidity indexes that average over 95% are suffering voided warranties due to water sensors’ inability to handle the sticky conditions. As if living in 95% humidity wasn’t bad enough in itself.

Apparently message boards have been lighting up to this topic and The South China Morning Post confirms the allegations that the devices suffering from the problem have been chalked up as water damaged. Back in April in the United States a class action lawsuit was filed over the same issue… Read More

 

Fix for “Unable to Load This Page” and “Login Failed” Errors on Facebook 3.2

By Sebastien Page on Aug 19, 2010

Yesterday night Facebook updated their iPhone application to version 3.2 which brings the new Places feature to our favorite phone. While this update comes with a cool new feature, it also broke the Facebook application all together for some of us (me included).

The symptoms are the following:

  • You get the “Unable to Load This Page” error message anywhere you go in the application
  • You get the “Error – sorry there was an error” message while trying to load Places
  • You get the “Login Failed – Unable to Connect to Facebook” error if you’re trying to log in the application.

The cause? Apparently the problem appears on jailbroken iPhones running BiteSMS.

The fix? The fix that worked for me was to uninstall BiteSMS. Facebook worked flawlessly after that. Once I reinstall BiteSMS though, the problems come back.

There is another fix explained on Redmond Pie:

I opened SBSettings, More, Mobile Substrate Addons. I then disabled BiteSMSsb, resprung, and now FB works fine. Not sure what that addon does, but so far BiteSMS works fine, as does FB.

This didn’t work for me. Well, actually it worked but then BiteSMS is completely crippled (ie. no quick compose), so I don’t really consider this a fix.

Considering I use the Facebook app every other month, my choice is clear: I keep BiteSMS running and leave the Facebook app for dead. Hopefully BiteSMS will be updated soon to fix this compatibility issue.

If you’re having the same problem, please share your experience in the comments section.

UPDATE: Thanks to CDXX who provided a link to an actual fix from BiteSMS developers in the comments:

Replace the file /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/biteSMSsb.plist with the one you download from http://cydia.bitesms.com/biteSMSsb.plist

REBOOT not respring.

The BiteSMS dev also says that an update to the app will be made available on Monday via Cydia. Yippee!

 

Bump App Shares Your Data With Random People

By Sebastien Page on Aug 14, 2010

I just got an email from Gurps, an iDB reader who tells me his story about Bump, an application that lets you share images, contacts, and more simply by bumping 2 iPhones into each other. Here is part of Gurps’ story:

Basically, I was sitting in my room, introducing my sister (a new iPhone user) on the Bump application. I proceeded to send her some photos. Occasionally it didn’t work since it said only one of us had bumped, but we did have some success. Then, we bumped phones again and a message popped on my screen saying, “Connect with Junaid’s iPhone”, obviously not my sisters name, but I clicked yes anyway. I ended up receiving a picture message from someone totally random, that I’ve never met in my life.

After looking into it, Gurps found out he was receiving pictures from a guy who was about 15 miles away from him.

Now this is not a big deal as Gurps was just sending and receiving pictures. But imagine if he had been using Bump to send money via the Paypal application. The bug could have lead to something much worse than receiving pictures from randoms.

That’s something that should be brought to Bump’s developers attention.

Have you ever had such problem with Bump?

 

PDF Patch Fixes the PDF Exploit in iOS

By Sebastien Page on Aug 12, 2010

In my previous post today I was telling you the Dev Team was working on a patch for the PDF exploit found in iOS and not fixed by Apple on older iPhones and iTouch. The PDF Patch has been released in Cydia for free and you can install it now.

PDF Patch will fix the security hole that was used by JailbreakMe and could potentially be used to inject malicious softwares on your device.

If you have updated your iDevice to 4.0.2, there is no point using this patch. However, if you’re still on an older iPhone 2G or iPod Touch 1G, or if you don’t want to update to 4.0.2, then this patch will be for you.

 

Fix: FaceTime Failed – xxx is Not Available For FaceTime

By Sebastien Page on Aug 6, 2010

Today I want to post about an issue I recently had when trying to FaceTime with Tina. Everytime I tried to initiate a FaceTime call, I would get an error message saying “FaceTime Failed – Tina is not available for FaceTime“. What was strange with this issue is that she could initiate the FaceTime call and reach me, but I couldn’t.

So really I thought the problem was from me since I was the one not being able to reach her. This drove me nuts for days. I even went as far as restoring my iPhone, thinking it would fix the issue. It didn’t. The solution was in fact much simpler. Ironically, the issue didn’t even come from my iPhone, but from hers.

I found the fix somewhere deep inside Apple’s support pages. Apparently the problem arises if you ported an old number to your iPhone 4, or if you recently changed your number, which was the case for Tina’s phone.

According to Apple, some of the symptoms are:

  • When you are calling someone on FaceTime, the number on their screen is not your number.
  • People are unable to initiate a FaceTime call with you.
  • After installing a new carrier settings update, FaceTime does not activate.

The fix is really simple:

  • In Settings > Phone, turn FaceTime OFF and turn it back ON again
  • Go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset all settings
  • Done

Immediately after performing this on Tina’s phone I was able to initiate a FaceTime call with her.

Hopefully this will help other people stuck on this issue.

 

JailbreakMe is Down

By Sebastien Page on Aug 1, 2010

If you have tried to use JailbreakMe to jailbreak your iPhone in the last couple of hours, you probably were unsuccessful as the site appears to have technical difficulties. JailbreakMe.com actually loads ok but when you “slide to jailbreak”, nothing seems to happen.

I have noticed weird little things going on on my iPhone 4 after trying to unsuccessfully use JailbreakMe. For example, my iPhone 4 doesn’t save pictures anymore. While I can snap pictures, they are not being saved to the camera roll. Only a reboot seems to fix this.

There is definitely something going on with the latest version of JailbreakMe Comex uploaded to the servers.

I suggest we call it a day and try again in the morning. What do you say?

 

How to Fix MMS and FaceTime Issue After Jailbreaking with JailbreakMe

By Sebastien Page on Aug 1, 2010

Most of you who jailbroke their iPhone 4 using JailbreakMe lost their MMS and FaceTime capability. I just found out about a fix thanks to Krapps and Branden3112.

To fix your MMS and FaceTime issue, simply follow these steps:

  • Go to Cydia and add this source: http://iphonedelivery.advinux.com/cydia/
  • Once this source has been added, install “iPhoneDelivery” from it.
  • Reboot your iPhone
  • Go to Settings > Phone > Turn FaceTime ON
  • Done!

Thanks Branden for the  trick!

This is not an “official” fix from the Dev Team but I tried it myself and I can tell you it works. The Dev Team is still working on a fix that will most likely be available via Cydia.

If you use JailbreakMe now, you shouldn’t have any problem as it’s been updated to fix the issue. If you can’t wait for the official fix and if you don’t want to try this unofficial fix, you can always restore, and jailbreak again with the updated JailbreakMe.

 
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