iHack Therefore iAm

Wow. Last night my friend Todd showed me something that almost knocked my socks off.

The iPhone is an incredible device, raising the bar incredibly high and making many people wonder why all the other phone/pda/whatever companies even bother. But it has some glaring omissions, not the least of which are 1) a carrier network (AT&T/Cingular) that really sucks, 2) a shortage of built-in apps, for example no voice dial or voice recorder, and 3) no way (currently) to install 3rd-party apps.

So I've been thinking about hacking it, but the effort and the uncertainty were a bit daunting.

Enter jailbreakme.com. Just surf to it with your iPhone's Safari browser, click the button, and in a matter of seconds the site breaks into your iPhone (via a TIFF buffer overrrun), installs an application installer, and patches the TIFF vulnerability it used to break into your phone to begin with! Slick, quick, and brain-dead easy, and you can now take your pick of numerous (though mostly quite simple) 3rd-party apps.

Now, I won't get into whether this is safe or smart or legal or even if it'll survive the next update from Apple. But it is unbearably tempting, and it's really, really well done. Hats off.