Mike Wilks' Blog

I spend a fair amount of time using both my MacBook and iPhone on public wifi networks and this has always nagged at me. I’ve looked at various VPN providers before but never signed up for one. I came across Witopia today while doing something completely different (playing with with Boxee). For $40 with a free PPTP  VPN (for use on my iPhone) too I thought I’d give it a go. Installation was dead simple as they email you a personalised install package (presumably with the certificates contained), a quick reboot and it was done. Configuring the iPhone was a little more manual but not especially onerous, I just don’t like how the VPN dropped out when the iPhone turns of Wifi to save power when the screen goes off!

Witopia also has the advantage of having a US IP address – which is apparently which it is so popular in the Boxee community … can we say Hulu? I suspect they would also be popular if they had UK IPs as well because of BBC iPlayer for people outside of the UK. I suspect there is an entire cottage industry of providers supplying IPs from different countries which has never really occurred to me previously.

Anyway I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but I’ll probably blog about it when I do.

It seems Apple have introduced a fairly large hole in iPhone security in the 2.0.2 release. This has been posted at various places including http://www.iphonebuzz.com/iphone-202-security-flaw-puts-your-info-at-risk-274527.php where I saw it.

To cut a long story short:

• Take a locked iPhone and slide to unlock.
• Hit emergency call.
• Double-tapping the home button takes you to favourites without ever entering a code.
• Click the blue arrow of a contact who has a SMS or mail entry and you can write a mail or SMS to them.

But It gets much much worse, if you hit cancel while composing an email or SMS to those contacts you get free reign in those apps!

The way to fix it is to change the behaviour of the home key so it doesn’t take you to favourites – until Apple patch it.