It seems like the gears of the underground iOS development have been rapidly turning for the past month. There has been a steady flow of new and innovative tweaks and applications over the last several weeks, and it doesn't appear to be stopping anytime soon.
FolderLock, developed by Andrea Oliva, just went live in the BigBoss repo. The new jailbreak app will allow you to password protect almost everything in iOS, from folders to the Settings app.Â
In case you needed one more reason to jailbreak your iPhone, try this on for size: biometric facial recognition. Instead of unlocking your iPhone with a simple password (How boring is that?), you can use the iPhone 4's front-facing camera to scan and recognize your face.
RecognizeMe is a new jailbreak app that helps make your iPhone safe from shady characters and potential homescreen peekers. By matching your face to a pre-defined database, RecognizeMe will unlock your iPhone and give you access to your device.
Let's be honest, passwords are a pain to remember. Once you start racking up multiple online accounts, it can be difficult to keep track of all your logins.
There are several apps out there that act as password managers. iPassword takes things a step farther by acting as a virtual wallet and storehouse for any and all of your private information.
iOS has needed its own password manager for a long time, and hopefully we'll see a system "Keychain" in iOS 5...
Passwords come by the hundreds these days. People are juggling multiple email accounts, online accounts, and computer logins. If one of those passwords should escape you for any reason, there's generally a way to get it back. I'm sure we've all clicked the famous 'Forgot Password' link at some point in our lives.
But what about your iPhone? What if you set a 'Restrictions Passcode' a long time ago and now you can't remember the digits? You've got a couple of options. For starters, you could restore your iPhone as a new device through iTunes. You can't restore from a previous backup, because your passcode is saved in that file.....
Apple is reportedly testing an Android-like lockscreen for the next major version of iOS. Google's Android OS has a gesture-based "dots" lockscreen that allows users to unlock their phone by highlighting the dots in a pre-established pattern.
Apparently, Apple is borrowing from Android's lockscreen concept and including it in a future version of iOS. There have been complaints that the current iOS lockscreen is not secure enough, and there have been numerous ways of bypassing the iPhone's 4-digit password...
It seems like at least once a month we report a story about the iPhone's security problems, and this latest security revelation is a bit shocking.
Researchers from the German Fraunhofer Institute Secure Information Technology have discovered a way to crack iPhone passwords via jailbreaking in about 6 minutes.
We don't mean your iPhone's dinky 4-digit passcode either; we mean everything stored in your keychain; email, VPN, Wi-Fi, the list goes on...
I love apps that make my life easier. And when they're really useful, I don't mind paying a little for them. The 5 apps I will mention in this list are not jailbreak apps, so everyone can use them.
Each of these apps is either designed to increase your productivity or make some aspect of your technology life better. They all aren't necessarily cheap, but there are free/lite versions of some. These 5 apps are utilities I use on a daily basis, so they're near and dear to my heart...
Do you want to know who's using your iPhone, stealing it, or just opening it up and snoop around on it? Well, iGotYa is your choice! iGotYa is a new tweak available in Cydia for $4.99, provided first by a few days of trial.
iGotYa enables you to protect your iPhone with an unlock password. If the unlock code entered is wrong 3 times in a row, then iGotYa will take a picture and get the location of your iPhone silently and send it to your email address...Â
Wifi Passwords is a new jailbreak application that displays all the wifi passwords you have entered on your iPhone when connecting to secure networks.
Let's say you're at your favorite coffee shop. You brought your iPad for the first time and you don't know the wifi password, but you did enter the password on your iPhone before. Well, instead of asking the password to an employee, just launch Wifi Passwords and find out what the password for this coffee shop network is...Â
Locktopus is a new applications that will let you password protect specific applications directly from the springboard.
After creating a password in Locktopus, you will be able to protect an application with this password by tapping and holding the app icon and wait until they start wiggling. Then tap the little "lock" badge on the app icon. Next time you try to launch this app, it will ask for the password.
Locktopus is available in Cydia for $2. I haven't tried this app so I don't know how it compares to the free LockDown app, which basically does the same thing. If you try it, please let us know how you like it.