AddictiveTips, a tech blog with a small but growing profile online, has published what it says is leaked information from an anonymous employee at Apple alleging that the new iOS will, among other things, detect whether an iPhone has been jailbroken and unlocked – then require that factory approved software be re-installed. Jailbroken phones that don’t return to the fold will be shut off from receiving a signal from AT&T. Update: Upon further discussion, it’s unclear whether the code in question will shut off all jailbroken phones or just those that have been unlocked from AT&T to run on T-Mobile. IPhone owners jailbreak their phones so they can run unauthorized software and access parts of device (which they bought) that Apple prohibits customer use of, including the ability to turn the iPhone into a wifi hotspot without paying an additional fee. Sponsor Though new versions of the OS regularly allow users to access functionality that required jailbreaking before, posts such as our nearly 2 year old Top 10 Apps Worth Jailbreaking Your iPhone to Get remain very, very popular. Jailbreaking advocates consider the tactic to be a matter of freedom, customer rights and tech innovation. See also: Why You Have to Jailbreak the iPhone In its post that we found via The Next Web , AddictiveTips quotes its anonymous source thusly: in the iOS4 there is a line of code we wrote that stands for OAU also known as “Over Air Updates”. How it works is every 7 to 14 days We (Apple) and AT&T send a message to your iPhone that gathers some data from your iPhone without you knowing and we see what is running, baseband and firmware. We then send a following message. “There are optional updates for your iPhone, Would you like to install them now?” two options “Yes” or “Later”. Those are what would would call “OPTIONAL UPDATES” Now there are things called “MANDATORY UPDATES”. They tend to work the same way, grab data from the iPhones sends it to AT&T and us then back to your iPhone with the message, “Your iPhone (name of iphone) must be updated to the current AT&T standards to run”, your only option is to “Accept” Now you can try to work your way around it until you get the second mandatory message again “You must plug iPhone into iTunes and update” If you don’t do this you will then receive no Signal from the network anymore and your iPhone will potentially lock up with no signs of use until you update your iPhone via iTunes. You all agreed to this terms and condition when you installed iTunes 9.2 and then again once you updated to iOS4. The article’s source seems to indicate that this is not just about unlocking the iPhone from AT&T as a carrier, but also about the easier hack of jailbreaking it to run unauthorized software. Those two are on occasion confused, however. Is This Credible? It’s not hard to believe that Apple would implement a technical step to back up the prohibition against jailbreaking that it has in its Terms of Service, but it’s also not hard to believe that few enough people jailbreak their phones that it wouldn’t really be worth the hassle. Do you buy it? The source, Addicting Tips, is a small blog that doesn’t appear to have a history of sensationalism. The site posts tips on things like how to remove background noise during VOIP calls in Skype and how to gain root access to various mobile devices. Previous posts have been linked-to by trusted bloggers like LifeHacker and SearchEngineWatch’s Danny Sullivan. Not everyone believes it, though. IPhone jailbreak software developer @musclenerd , of the hacking group iPhone Dev Team, said this afternoon, “So much of that article seems like nonsense. How would AT&T send an over-the-air lock command to an iPhone on T-Mobile’s network?” Others have said that any anti-jailbreaking steps Apple takes will simply fall in time to an arms race with jailbreaking hackers. Leading hacker George Hotz said at a conference in France this week that he has created an exploit that will “jailbreak for life” any iPhone, including one running the newest iOS. What do you think? Discuss

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Historical records are hard to look through casually. One solution is being explored in the case of Supreme Court justice nominee Elena Kagan’s archive of emails sent while working under the Clinton administration. That body of data is now available in a Web-based interface that looks a lot like Gmail and is open to full-text search, thanks to the watchdog Sunlight Foundation . Elena’s Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration’s day-to-day operations. It’s hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency. Sponsor Kagan was a legal eagle for Clinton, holding two different positions over five years. In that time, she sent just under 5,000 emails. Some of the emails are amusing, others enlightening, others still are both. This is a fun interface for looking through these texts, but the limitations are quickly evident as well. Full text search works well when it’s your own email you’re searching through, but when you don’t know what language someone else uses to discuss certain topics, full text search feels inadequate. If a site like this incorporated collaborative user tagging of emails into topical buckets, that would make it all the more interesting. It would also be in character for the Sunlight Foundation. It’s interesting, for example, to read that the policy focus Kagan recommended the President consider regarding race and crime was “systematic underprotection of minorities (segregation of safety).” That does sound more politically palatable than focusing on inequities in sentencing. As a public service, Elena’s Inbox is quite helpful. As Kagan faces debate and questioning over her nomination, the site will offer a very easy way to see what she said about topics 10 years ago, and how she said it, while in a position of substantial political power. That’s certainly a historically unprecedented degree of transparency around a Supreme Court nominee. Discuss

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Scott Rafer is a startup machine. He was one of 5 people at MyBloglog , the portable social network that caught fire in months and flipped to Yahoo, he was a co-founder of API management service to the stars Mashery and has held top executive positions at 6 other startups since leaving Kodak in the late 90’s. Today he’s unveiling his newest project and it’s a very ambitious one. Sponsor Handroll.tv is an HTML5 video delivery platform. “In the whole Jobs vs. Flash debate, the back-end implications are largely being ignored,” he writes in a blog post today. “HTML5 video makes it very tough to hide anything — media files, player code, usage, video description metadata, social gestures, editing layers, and a hundred other savory morsels. That data feast will all be floating around and available to slice, dice, layer, and roll. Bridging from data availability to great new applications will require open services in which that data is gathered and laid out for use. Handroll.TV is working to be one of those services.” Rafer is joined in founding the company by technologist and business exec Donna Romer and Aaron Wadler, who was Linux Systems Administrator at SuperPoke, the app synonymous with obnoxious if very well scaled Facebook platform applications. Right now the service is bare-bones. It’s a form that you can put any video file’s URL in and you’ll get HTML5 embed code and an API to poke it with. Eventually the service will support all kinds of analytics, authentication and even super-simple video editing. “Anyone who can hack a Tumblr or Wordpress theme,” Handroll says, “can be a video editor — and with the same tools.” Rafer aims for maximum openness with the service. He sees a giant abyss of opportunity in HTML5 video; he and his team intend to jump right into that abyss. “Basically none of the code is proprietary. It’s a big open database in the back. I don’t have any clue what the revenue model is here. It will be our database, we’ll have computationally more efficient ways to pull data from it than other people can, just because being database host has advantages. If someone is trying to pull a ton of data out of us, that’s premium. The ability to be social inside the video and mashup without video editing is going to change the online video market. Somebody’s going to figure out how to do the next big video service.” Could that somebody be Handroll.tv? Time will tell, but this is definitely an early service worth paying very close attention to. It’s sure to shake things up. Photo of Rafer by Dave Sifry . Disclosure: In addition to being awesome, Mashery is a long-time sponsor of ReadWriteWeb. Discuss

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For many folks, Memorial Day weekend was a chance to bask in the fresh summer sun and put some color in their cheeks, but for a hardy band of indoor hackers, it brought a chance to put some color in your Tweets! Tantek

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The proliferation of apps is creating a bit of a challenge for the enterprise that does significant software development. But it is also in many ways what is propelling a new generation of SaaS services that add features at an exponential rate compared to on-premise counterparts. Sponsor One of the outcomes is a shift from waterfall to agile development processes. The transition can be a bit tricky. But the result is a new emphasis on prototyping. Protoshare is a Portland, Oregon company we had the chance to catch up with at the Webvisions conference. The company offers a platform for prototyping that helps companies move from waterfall to agile. A waterfall process is traditionally marked by a long front-end process to develop a high-level scope of work. For example, a few people set the scope and then another team may put together a detailed, functional level of specs. That’s followed by creating some static wireframes to communicate the project information. ProtoShare provides a collaborative service for making application and Web-based prototypes. The service is designed to overcome many of the issues that come with waterfall development process. Clients, for instance, will often find that what they get is not always what they had envisioned. A prototyping process through ProtoShare allows for the development to be more iterative. Tasks can be assigned. Questions can be asked. It has a real-time activity stream for collaborating. Thumb tacks, for instance, point to comments. Markers will also show annotations for more detailed feedback. The input is in one place. People can literally see an app as it would look live, making iterative changes to the prototype as it is created. ProtoShare’s Josh Chaney says prototyping can save a lot of time as the code is updated as the changes are made. Companies are increasingly moving to more agile development processes. ProtoShare is one of a growing number of services that are helping the process be more collaborative, and faster in getting services to market that meet client expectations. Discuss

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