The iPhone may still be a few weeks away from being released on the Verizon network, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking a page out of Apple’s playbook. To hype the event, Verizon today released a teaser commercial that plays on the pent up demand for the iPhone. The ad implies that Verizon customers are counting down the seconds until the fabled iPhone is released on their network. It’s clear that Verizon expects a great deal of AT&T users to switch carriers and they may just be right.

The iPhone will finally be available to Verizon customers on February 10, 2011. AT&T, although optimistic about the prospect of loosing customers to Verizon, is sure to loose a substantial amount of subscribers come mid-February. AT&T has the lowest customer satisfaction rating in the US. A great many people may in fact wait until their AT&T contracts are up before switching networks. This should stem the tide of defectors to Verizon, but not for long. Over the next couple of years as people’s contracts expire, it should be interesting to see how many iPhone users stay with AT&T.

Verizon, on the other hand, has the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. Given the voracious amount of bandwidth the average iPhone user consumes, I wonder if Verizon will be able to maintain the high level of service people have come to expect from them. Hopefully, Verizon will be able to deliver the one thing AT&T has had difficulty providing and that is the ability to actually use an iPhone as a phone.

Source: 9to5 Mac

In what increasingly appears to be a case of mistaken identity, a Dutch developer has threatened to release the source code of the SHAtter exploit, depriving the jailbreak community of a valuable tool. After the developer of TwitPanic, @iHaz3, had his site brought down apparently by a DDOS attack, he threatened to release the SHAtter source as some kind of revenge, but has since held off on carrying out the threat.

The story can be traced following @iHaz3′s Twitter feed. TwitPanic.com was crashed by what the developer believed was a DDOS attack set up by @ih8sn0w after he and @iHaz3 had “issues.” @iHaz3 then tweeted “TwitPanic.com is attacked by a organized DOSS hit……next week SHATTer will be posted on twitter.” The jailbreak community reacted with confusion, since SHAtter – an exploit allowing unsigned execution of code in the S5L8930 bottom that could only be defeated by a new hardware design – was developed by pod2g and p0sixninja of the Chronic Dev team, not iH8sn0w. It could be that @iHaz3 was confused because the iH8sn0w hacker he believed responsible for the DDOS had previously provided the SHAtter source to him.

As the day rolled on, @chronic engaged @iHaz3 in conversation and attempted to explain that @iH8sn0w had nothing to do with SHAtter, and so releasing it would do nothing to hurt him while at the same time burning a valuable exploit which has been held in reserve since @geohot came out with limera1n. Eventually, @iHaz3 agreed to a cooling-off period, which would expire sometime today, but he has since heard from his hosting company that they have the identity of the attacker and are pursuing legal action. So, hopefully, all this will blow over.

Source: Twitter

When Mac OS X 10.6.5 was released, support for iOS printing using AirPrint was mysteriously absent. It’s not clear whether the omission was due to technical problems or patent challenges, but with the final Mac OS X 10.6.5, you could only print from iOS 4.2 to a short list of HP printers. Until someone put some effort into re-enabling it, that is.

Developers Steven Troughton-Smith and Patrick McCarron found a way to get AirPrint to work on Mac shared printers by restoring three files from earlier developer builds of 10.6.5 that had been removed or changed in the final release. AirPrint appeared to work reasonably well in the beta, and many observers surmised that it was removed at the last minute due to a patent troll who had asserted they had invented the technology. The re-enabling process isn’t too hard – just a few Terminal commands and deleting and re-adding your printer – but the guys at Netputing figured out how to do it without using the Apple files in question, which could have raised legal issues. They’re distributing it as AirPrint Hacktivator, and once you’ve got it installed on your Mac, your iOS device will think the shared printer is one of the supported HP printers that support AirPrint.

For Windows printers, there’s a similar process for enabling AirPrint as a service under Vista, 7 and XP. If you decide to try and follow Jaxov’s recipe, note that you need to run the command prompt as administrator in order to start the service.

Source: TUAW

Jay “saurik” Freeman, the creator of Cydia and Winterboard, gave a talk at an independent TED event in California on the fundamental philosophy behind jailbreaking. Given on Binary Day 10/10/10 at the inaugural TEDxAmericanRiviera in Santa Barbara, his talk compared jailbreakers with people who like to tinker with their cars.

In a riff on the old open-source “hood welded shut” analogy, Jay noted how people like to customize their cars, adding things from air-fresheners and radar detectors to custom rims. He also referenced the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act that states that car manufacturers can’t void car owners’ warranties just by adding third-party accessories. And he explained how phone owners – like car owners – “bond” with their devices, allowing it to “become an external representation of self.” However, as we all know, Apple’s OS “jails” your experience inside apps. As Apple famously says, “there’s an app for that:” their belief is that anything you could want to do with a mobile device can and should be done with an app. Jay explained to his audience why this is not so.

Some of the most useful added functionality that is available to rooted Android devices and jailbroken iPhones, Jay observed, does not come from apps but from tweaks: extensions like custom launchers, dialers, and widgets. In a post on Hacker News, Jay aired his frustration with the argument that Apple should just open up the App Store. “In a future where Apple did exactly what you are asking them to do,” Jay wrote, “almost nothing will have changed: people will still need to jailbreak their phones and developers will still be writing and distributing all of this cool software using Cydia.”

According to saurik, rather than pushing Apple to open up the Store, we should be pushing to get them to open up their device, and to keep Macs open. “Until users are able to install whatever software they wish on the hardware that they own,” he writes, “we will not truly have won back any of our freedom.”

Plex media streaming software was recently demonstrated running on a 2nd generation jailbroken Apple TV. It’s really just a proof-of-concept demo at the moment, but it does show promise for future development on the Apple TV. Jailbreakers are quickly discovering what this little black box is capable of, and because Apple TV is based on the same hardware architecture as the rest of the iOS family, I’m sure the best is yet to come.

To use Plex on an Apple TV, you must have the Plex client-side software running on your computer. Plex then streams content from your computer to the Apple TV. As this is just a tech demo for now, Plex can only stream video content, not music or photos. The fact that developers have managed to get Plex running at all is quite an impressive feat. Officially, Apple does not allow any third party software on the device. This could all change, however, if and when Steve thinks the time is right to open an Apple TV App Store for the device.

It only makes sense that Plex would eventually come to the Apple TV. After all, Plex is already available for both the iPhone and iPad. It would seem to be only a matter of time before Plex is up and running smoothly on Apple TV. At this point, however, the tech demo hasn’t even been tested.

The future looks bright for Apple’s little hobby. I’d love to see someone get Hulu up and running in the not too distant future as well.

Source: TUAW