December 24, 2013 at 5:25 pmMay 2, 2016 at 5:25 pm

Evad3rs! And the buzz surrounding the Evasion Jailbreak tool

It’s a big day for everyone is the jailbreak community. Starting from the release of evasion Jailbreak tool by the evad3rs team, and ending up with a lot of angry tweets about what appears to be a Chinese AppStore bundled into the Jailbreak and it offers pirated apps. So how all of this happened? How the hell did a Chinese AppStore ended up is in the Jailbreak tool?

Who are the evad3rs team?

The evad3rs team are: * Nikias Bassen @pimskeks * PlanetBeing @planetbeing * Pod2G @pod2g * MuscleNerd @musclenerd The team first came popular when they released iOS 6 Jailbreak in Feb. 4th, 2013. It was like a hurricane hit the Jailbreak community bcuz they were the first to break iOS 6, and that was after a lot of announcement that the team was working on it, and there was a countdown on their website, so imagine what it felt like when, from out of no where, from the middle of nothing, no news, no tweets, nothing, the team managed to crack open iOS 7 and release a Jailbreak tools in the time for Christmas for all the Jailbreakers our there.

Here comes Jay Freeman

Jay Freeman aka @saurik or the Father of Cydia posted this interesting tweet after the release of the Evasion Jailbreak tool:

So, I got no lead time on evasi0n7, nor was I asked for an official iOS 7 Cydia; I was not given builds, nor was I asked for things to test.
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) December 22, 2013

This tweet was like the flame that started the fire in the Jailbreak community, it’s really weird to see that the father of

Cydia had nothing to do with this new Jailbreak and didn’t even test it, and what’s more interesting is his next tweet:

(In particular, I will point out that the build of "Cydia" included is not official, and couldn't really include the fixes I'd been making.)
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) December 22, 2013

The Cydia build inside the Evasion Jailbreak tool is not official, and doesn’t have the latest updates and fixes, so this make Jailbreakers ask them self if it’s safe to Jailbreak at this time. But it didn’t stop there!

So what happened next?

After couple of hourse from the evasi0n7 release, Paul Haddad the developer of TweetBot twitter client sent out a tweet saying that there’s a news about the evad3rs getting paid 1 million dollar from a Chinese company:

“A Chinese company paid the evad3rs a rumored 1 million dollars …, forcing their own App Store onto the phone.” https://t.co/inqTrfGYkt
— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) December 22, 2013

And another tweet from

Jay Freeman aka @saurik saying that when you Jailbreak your iOS device with the language set to Chinese, the Evasion Jailbreak tool will automatically install a Chinese AppStore called TaiG with pirated/cracked apps. This mean that paid apps are available for free on that Chinese AppStore, and this is something the Jailbreak community don’t like.

*sigh*: evasi0n, in China, installs an "app store" for cracked apps.
TaiG/cracked: http://t.co/shsanSqxSG
Apple/real: http://t.co/e5nvc5477F
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) December 22, 2013

This made a lot of people angry, specially the

evad3rs team, and according to @Pod2g the team decided to remotely disable the install of TaiG the Chinese AppStore:

We have decided to remotely disable the default installation of TaiG in China for further investigations on the piracy issue.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 23, 2013

After that the

evad3rs team released a statement regarding all the buzz surrounding the release of their Evasion Jailbreak tool

Please read http://t.co/QSRcA0tzVf
— evad3rs (@evad3rs) December 22, 2013

You can read the

statement here And Jailbreakers were praying that all of this is over now, but yeah things don’t always go the way you want. The war has just began

TaiG the AppStore the Malware

Translation to what’s written on TaiG website:

Hearing the good news / share to fellow prisoners / We try to do more for the Chinese users, in this latest jailbreak release, we began offering a new mobile version of tai chi assistant, allowing you to more easily install applications / plug-ins, manage mobile and sources. We will continue to update, to provide better service. * Evad3rs & Tai Chi Now after all of this madness with the Chinese AppStore

TaiG, rumores started to come out, specially viruses and maleware rumores. Like these tweets from: Sawyer Pangborn @spangborn

@pod2g How do you explain this then? http://t.co/4B8XjTYnL5
— Sawyer (@spangborn) December 23, 2013

@huangzhidu @pod2g If you used @evad3rs jailbreak, you’ve got malware on your device.
— Sawyer (@spangborn) December 23, 2013

@pod2g @huangzhidu @evad3rs He’s Chinese. And how do you explain this? http://t.co/4B8XjTYnL5
— Sawyer (@spangborn) December 23, 2013

GeoHot, he started it, and he ended it!!!

For those of you who don’t know who’s GeoHot, his real name is George Francis Hotz aka GeoHot. He was the first person to Jailbreak the first iPhone, to be more specific, he was the first one to unlock it.

When the first iPhone came out, it used to work only with AT&T, but geohot had T-Mobile family plan, and since all of his friends bought the iPhone, he wanted to use it too without changing his carrier, so he did, that’s it, he cracked open the iPhone, and hacked his way into a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work. You can read the full story on The New Yorker. According to this article from iDownloadBlog geohot closed his twitter account 2 years ago and now his back @tomcr00se He tweeted congratulating the evad3rs team for their work and for releasing the Evasion Jailbreak tool first, bcuz they were in a race on who will release the Jailbreak tool first.

And in another article from The Verge which is about geohot but not about the Jailbreak or the iPhone, it appears that geohot is actually a rapper, and he have couple of tracks on his Soundcloud profile that you can listen to here, and to be honest he does look like Eminem. Going back to jailbreak related news from Geohot, he did something to end this madness, he wrote exactly what happenes when you Jailbreak your iOS device using the evad3rs Evasion Jailbreak tool. And according to him there’s no malware being installed on iOS devices when you Jailbreak it.

He said and I quote:

I found nothing sketchy in my reversing, your phones most likely aren’t being backdoored by Chinese. So as you can see here, he did put an end to all this madness and all the buzz surrounding the TaiG Chinese app.

Is this all over now?

Translation from the site:

Thanks for bricking* our devices on Christmas Thanks for bundling TaiG Seeing as you guys have got the money to “partner” with the Evad3rs Why not do the community a service? You guys should replace the bricked* devices for free This is a huge letdown, you guys have defeated the whole ideology behind jailbreaking Can’t you guys just stop challenging how low users are willing to go? No!!! First of between all of this there was a leaked audio recording of geohot, The removed link of the audio recording is currently listed on Google’s list of known phishing sites. in this audio recording that was first posted in reddit, you can hear Geohot Talking to Someone in The JB Community, Negotiating Sale of iOS 7 Jailbreak, and it was reported by iClarified. Then there was some news on reddit saying that TaiG related domain hacked and defaced. And now there’s this tweet:

@i0n1c TaiG released a 1.0.1 "update" to the evasi0n, to force chinese locale setting and skip the remote check that disable TaiG install.
— David Frank (@bitinn) December 24, 2013

So yeah, I guess the madness is not going to end!!!

December 18, 2013 at 2:11 pmMay 2, 2016 at 2:11 pm

Walt Mossberg leaving All Things D

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Today Walt Mossberg announced on his twitter account that he wrote his last article for All Things D, after 22 years writing tech reviews in one of the biggest website The Wall Streat Journal, and his planes to start his own tech news website with Kara Swisher.

December 6, 2013 at 12:17 pmMay 2, 2016 at 12:17 pm

Spotify is planning to release a free on demand service for mobile

by Ahmad Al Maaz

According to the Wall Street Journal Spotify is planning on releasing a free on demand service for mobile users.

With it users can listen on demand for music they want but also they will be a target for ads.

Spotify already have a free radio for mobile users that works like Pandora and iTunes Radio so it’s unclear yet what’s the company is going to do about it and what changes it could make.

These news comes 1 day after Beats Music started advertising for it’s own music streaming service.

The competition is clearly started to get intense in the streaming service industry between Spotify, Beats Music, and Google Music, and also the soon to be available in the US Deezer.
All of them trying to lure people with their own unique features.

From: The Verge, Source: The Wall Streat Journal

December 5, 2013 at 11:16 amMay 2, 2016 at 11:16 am

Beats Music, Claim your name!

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Beats Music is almost here, and it’s ready to compete with Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, and others with its brand new Music Streaming service.

Drones are coming to your front door with Amazon PrimeAir

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Have you ever imagined that one day while your walking on the street you will see drones flying high in the sky with product being shipped directly to the buyers house?
Well I guess we should perpair ourself for this Bcuz Jeffrey P. Bezos the CEO of Amazon started working on a new service called Amazon Prime Air and it’s gonna happen soon…like in 4 to 5 years soon.

November 28, 2013 at 7:55 pmMay 2, 2016 at 7:55 pm

iOS 7.0.3 bug in Game Center

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Apple released iOS 7.0.3 in October 22 2013 and with it the company added iCloud keychain and password generator.
It also fixed couple of bugs here and there but I guess apple forgot about one funny bug that’s hidden inside the Game Center app.
And it’s the perfect Happy Thanksgiving dinner for all the hungry tech news readers around the world.

Two Factor Authentication and which website that support it

by Ahmad Al Maaz

A lot of us who read technology news have must heard about the Adobe security breach lately. This announcement came from Adobe itself on a blog post they released on OCTOBER 3, they said that customer names, encrypted credit / debit card numbers, and expiration dates. Source code for “numerous Adobe products” was stolen. And due to this indecent a lot of big internet companies started working hard to make their services more secure by comparing their users email database with the one that was leaked from Adobe, and notifying people who have and Adobe account to change their password and secure their account. These steps came from companies like: Facebook, Evernote, DreamHost and others, but what’s funny about it is that Adobe it self didn’t notify people at all, I do have an account on Adobe, and according to Evernote and DreamHost my email address was among the emails and password that was leaked from Adobe but I didn’t get any email from Adobe telling me about this security breach. And recently Buffer A service that manages your social media networks Was also hacked and users was surprised when their accounts started sharing spam links across social media networks.

Yesterday buffer took a great step toward protecting their users by enabling Two Factor Authentication, a secure way to protect your account with something you know (Your Password) and something you have (Your Phone).

With 2 Step verification enabled, after you enter your user name and password you will be asked to enter a code that was delivered to your phone (By SMS or by using an app like Google Authenticator). Having 2 Step Verification is really good to protect your account from hackers, it’s not %100 secure, bcuz in this article by Adam Goodman from Due Security, he explains how hackers can bypass 2 Step Verification by capturing a user’s application-specific password (ASP), if you wanna know more about it make sure to read his article.

All of this made me think to write this article to collect in one place all the internet services that offers two factor authentication to make sure my readers secure their accounts if they use these services. So let’s start:

First you need one of these apps:

Google:

If you have a Google account then you must enable two factor authentication, it’s really important to protect all your Google Data from emails, contacts to documents saved on your Google Drive. By enabling this feature you will be asked to enter a random code generated only for you by many methods:

How to access your account after enabling two factor authentication:

SMS
A Phone Call
Google Authenticator
Registering your Computer
Backup phone number
and Back up codes.

Dropbox:

With Dropbox I think it’s also obvious that you must enable it, to protect all your document and files, in Dropbox you will be able to chose a primary and a backup way to access your account after entering the password.