I know there’s a lot of arguments over jail breaking your iPhone. Most are worried that it’s going to affect their warranty if it breaks but after speaking to a few people including chewie, it seems that it’s always possible to recover it by putting it into a special recovery mode and using itunes to install the original firmware… so I don’t consider it a risk. Jail breaking only opens the iPhone up to run unofficial applications, it doesn’t open it up to run on other networks such as vodafone. If putting in for a warranty claim then you simply click ‘restore’ in itunes and it puts the original, un-jailbroken firmware on

If you don’t already know how to jail break the iPhone, well you don’t need to know! Just download the application from Quickpwn, follow the onscreen instructions and you’re done in a matter of minutes… no special hardware of software needed.

Anyway, to the point… Last night I installed the UNIX subsystem using Installer/Cydia (installer comes automatically by jail breaking the phone). This allows you to SSH into the iphone using your standard SSH client (in my case the one bundled with mac os X as standard, via terminal) using the username root and password alpine.

I’ve wanted to code applications for the iPhone but not too worried about pretty interfaces and certainly didn’t wanna learn a new language or way of coding just for that. Once you’re SSH’d into the iPhone you can do all sorts of things and I thought to myself… I wonder if I could install PHP? After all PHP really is my home from home.

I ran this command ‘apt-get install php’ and about 2 minutes later I have php running on the iphone! How cool is that!? So now if I’m out and about and sitting on an unsecured wifi, I can just run a couple of spamming scripts and sit there with the iPhone spamming away in my pocket.

Also you could create some “useful” scripts to backup SMS and phonebook contacts, log your incoming/outgoing call details and whatever else you might like. If you get hold of someones iPhone for 30 mins then you could install a nice backdoor script running on a cron job which sends you data everytime they connect to the internet… you’ll probably goto jail but hey, maybe you’re a spy for mi5

Here’s a step by step guide to install Lighttpd + PHP on the iPhone

You can download a plugin for firefox/IE which allows you to generate a temporary mastercard (mastercard gift card). Basically you want to pay for something which cost $50 but the place only takes credit cards, not Paypal.. no problem, this will generate some mastercard credit card details that will use your Paypal balance. Extremely useful!

If however you’re one of the smart people using Mac OS X..

Mac users cannot install the PayPal Plug-In at this time. However, you can still use the Secure Cards feature of the plug-in.
How it works:

* Go to the Secure Cards page.
* Generate a unique MasterCard Secure Card number.
* Note the card number, expiration date, and the CVC2.
* Enter these details at checkout.

After reading about it, I realised that what they basically do is send a bot to your website and auto fill any form they can fill with email addresses and fake subject/message (hello, chinese spammers!?).

They then base the spam score on the amount of emails they recieve a month from filling out that form and then how spammy their bot thinks the reply was. In this case it’s given a 50% spam score.

I had replied just once and I can see my email address sitting there as the reply. So I’ve wasted my time emailing back this person JUST IN CASE it was a legitmate email and then they have the cheek to call me an email spammer?

WHAT … THE … FUCK!

>> SCREENSHOT (kalyway 10.5.2) <<

>> SCREENSHOT (ideneb 10.5.5) <<

I followed the OSx86 hardware compatibility list (HCL) to ensure the parts I bought were compatible with the mac operating system.

The motherboard of my macbook pro died a few months back and I’ve been missing the power ever since. Since it died I’ve been using an MSI wind laptop with mac os x 10.5.4 installed but the processor isn’t huge and its really meant more as a portable device than a daily work machine.

A lot of people still don’t realise that since Apple went over to the Intel platform a couple of years back, its quite easy to install the operating system on a whole range of standard desktop and laptop computers using either a retail disc or a special ‘hacked’ version such as kalyway 10.5.2 or Ideneb 10.5.5.

Because I used the OSx86 HCL, everything worked out of the box for me and was a breeze to setup. The only problem I had was finding a compatible wireless card. I tried a few usb wifi sticks I had laying around but couldn’t get any to work. I even tried buying a PCI wireless card which is meant to be compatible but couldn’t get that to work but to be fair I think this is an issue with the card or motherboard since it didn’t physically fit well in the first place!  Eventually I managed to find a Netgear WG111 (version 3) and installed it using the RTL8187B drivers for Mac.

For those concerned about copyright/pirate etc. I do have a leopard license that currently isn’t being used so bah!

Hardware

Processor - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz 8mb L2 cache
Motherboard - Intel BLKDG35EC
RAM - 2 x 2GB Kingston DDR2 PC800
HD - Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM SATA
Graphics - Nvidia Inno3d 8600GT PCIE 512mb S-video/DVI/VGA
Case - Basic case
Power - ACBEL INTELLIGENT POWER 610W ACTIVE PFC
Networking - Netgear WG111 (version 3)

Total cost: About £380

Total time putting hardware together and installing OS: 2-3 hours

However sometimes you have to pay people who live in the middle of a desert and such like. Not being a fan of scammers union western union, it kind of limits your options. So I decided to use moneybookers (MB) since it’s pretty widely used in those out of the way areas.

However moneybookers have these big warnings about doing a bank transfer to your moneybookers account from a bank account thats not in your name.. It’s a pain in the butt that you have to manually send them the money rather than them debit it like Paypal but hey ho.

So the account was funded but accidentally from an account in a different name to that which the MB accounts was in. Thinking it would be rejected as their site says, another transfer was made from the correct bank account.

Today I login and get a huge rant in red bold letters saying this..

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
YOUR RECENT MONEYBOOKERS DEPOSIT

No cash or 3rd party deposits!!! You attempted to fund your Moneybookers account from a bank account in someone else’s name:

Amount: GBP XYXYXY
Bank: Lloyds TSB

While obtaining the bank details for your 3rd party you were clearly warned that Moneybookers does not allow 3rd party deposits for funding of E-MONEY accounts.

ALL FUNDS MUST ORIGINATE FROM A BANK ACCOUNT HELD IN YOUR NAME!

You were expressly warned that you will be charged all banking and administrative costs should you attempt a 3rd party deposit to your Moneybookers account. We have therefore credited this deposit to you with a deduction of EUR 10.– administration fee.

WARNING! This is a one-time exception! Should you attempt further 3rd party deposits, you may make yourself suspicious of money laundering activities.

I might make myself suspcious of money laundering activities? Hey, I’m already suspicious but I think it the russians! Seems like some MB employee sitting behind his desk woke up on the wrong side of the bed today!

Anyway, AOL Hometown is closing its doors which means there’s currently thousands of people looking for a new free host and most of them have no clue how to move their stuff over or where to go because… well because they’re AOL users.

Go buy yourself a cheap dedi, chuck together a script that will automatically scrape the users content (or use their FTP details) and host it for free.

You’ll get good publicity for being their savour and you’ll suddenly be in control of thousands of sites

Why don’t I do it? I’m busy!

Everyone knows you can find pretty much any song old and new on youtube, I myself use it quite often instead of downloading songs.

What would be great is a community site where you can enter an artist (similar to Last FM I guess) and it brings back all songs by that artist, maybe split into correct albums if you know the right places to scrape and use as a consolidating database.

You could then select the album you wanted to listen to and using a fancy ajax front end, automatically switch between each song so you can just leave it open and running in a firefox tab.

Each song/video could be rated on its accuracy and quality by users and also have its youtube ratings checked since there are usually many variations of songs available on Youtube, some better than others.

The system would let you save, search and rate others playlists.

So if you’re bored, sitting there thinking what you could be coding…. do this!

For years there has been the obvious talk of linking to bad neighborhoods but its always been hard to know for sure which sites Google considers “bad”. When I started seeing those “This site may harm your computer.” warnings last year, it got me thinking. But I never really made anything out of it until recently.

When you search for certain terms in Google, you sometimes see sites marked with the aforementioned warning and when you click them, you get taken to a second page giving you another warning about the site having badware (malware,spyware etc). The great thing is, the warnings are based on reports from StopBadware and they provide a wonderful tool which lets you search for Badware sites.

The great thing is, you don’t have to know any urls, you can do a general search such as “online.com” and get back a nice list of sites:

So we have a list of badware sites submitted by Google, sites they have absolutely without a doubt considered to be bad/harmful.

Next I updated a range of different pages to link to these bad sites. Blog posts, blog comments, profile pages and a normal web page. I threw some links at all these sites I had modified and waited for Google to visit them. To my suprise Google visited them, updated the cache showing the badware links but their positions in the serps were not effected at all!

I probably should have also tested it as a sitewide link on a site to see if this would change the outcome. Also I should try changing the links from badware to spammy networks(e.g sites which have recently lost their PR for being spammy/selling links etc) and see how that works out. But in general, is linking to bad sites going to hurt you? Unlikely…

Not to say interlinked networks don’t get hurt

• Have Google PageRank (PR)
• Allow you to use your keywords as the anchor text

I’m not going to argue about how accurate PR is. At the end of the day, it’s a quick and easy way to see how much a link is likely to help you. If a page has a PR4 for example then the chances are it has at least a few external links going into it and wil benefit you in the serps.

After you have done your on-page SEO, it comes down to links links links! If you want to rank for the word “Bingo” then go ahead and buy/spam/socialise(link bait etc) 1,000 links from high quality sites with the anchor text “bingo”.

I was actually using this method quite a few years ago but in a slightly different way which I will save for the next post

Quick overview
The basic idea is to look for forum posts which already have PR, we then signup to the forum and post a relevant message on the post. After a day or two, we return to the post and edit it to include our link.

Full process

Step 1
Install an add-on for your browser which allows you to view the pagerank of each search result in Google. This allows us to quickly see which forum posts have PR without having to visit each individual page. You could use SEO For Firefox or SEOQuake

Step 2
We start by searching for forums, it’s that simple. For example, we might perform a search for vBulletin Forums.

Step 3
Select one forum from the results of step 2 and do a site: search on it.

In the screenshot above you can clearly see there is an internal thread which has a PR2 (a tell tale sign for vBulletin forums is the use of a default URL structure.. showthread.asp?t=xxx).

Step 4
Signup to the forum and verify your account. Make a relevant post on the previously found thread.

Step 5
Repeat step 2-4 many times and ensure you keep a note of all the posts and your login details.

Step 6
Leave it a day or two and return to each of your posts, login and edit the post to include your link!

Great, a free link with my chosen keywords as the anchor text from a PR2 internal page!

Top Tips

• Ensure the thread you’re looking at has only one page worth of posts, so that when you make your post, you’re also on the page with PR
• Take the time to write a relevant on-topic post. These are free, reasonable quality links and worth putting the few minutes of time! If your first post is spammy or “Wow, great thread!” then it will be removed as spam within minutes on most forums.
• Most of the threads with PR will be reasonably old, this is because toolbar PR obviously only gets updated every now and then. As such you should come up with a convincing reason for why you’re dragging up a post that is 3 months or even 3 years old! The way to do this is to associate yourself with the thing being discussed, if someone is talking about a problem then describe how you have the same problem and even if there’s a solution, state that it doesn’t help you and request further advice.
• The longer you can leave the post without editing it the better. If you leave it for a short amount of time only then there is a chance someone will notice the edit and report you to the administrator. Be aware that some forum software does put a time restriction on how long you have before you can edit a post, I haven’t ran into this problem many times.
• Mix up your search in step 2 so that you don’t hit the same forums as other people.

Side note
Because I’m making this blog post, there is a good chance that the owner of the forum I used as an example will notice and remove the link. Don’t be put off by this