Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Like Lindsay Lohan, the iPhone Cannot Stay out of the News

This past week, a 17-year-old from New Jersey did what most of you college students only dreamt of doing: He figured out a way to make the iPhone compatible with another service. Instead of complaining about having T-Mobile, which doesn't carry the iPhone, he set forth on a valiant quest to "unlock" Apple's impressive cell phone; "unlocking" is just a fancy term for "allowing the device to work with more than one provider." After ingesting cases of energy drinks and soldering some of the wires inside the device together, he became the first person to use the phone without AT&T.

You see, Apple made AT&T an exclusive agreement for the phone, but if you have a soldering iron, T-Mobile and tons of patience, you potentially have everything you need to unlock the iPhone for yourself. This, of course, is assuming that you can get your hands on the phone.

The reason that the phone is only compatible with T-Mobile is because this carrier operates on the same band frequencies as AT&T. Essentially, any cell phone provider using the GSM service would work, but there are only two in the United States: AT&T and T-Mobile. You can read more about the GSM on Wikipedia, and if you don’t like what it has to say, feel free to change it.

So now that you’ve cancelled your cell phone plan and switched to T-Mobile, you need to find a way to get an iPhone. In fact, maybe you should get two, just in case you accidently break one while soldering the phone's innards.

What? You can’t afford one? Me neither, but somehow the teenager with the miraculous unlocking powers managed to obtain more than one. According his blog, his first iPhone was donated. I’m not going to weed through all of his posts, but I’m assuming the rest of his iPhones were donated, too. Still, it pains me to read that “he purposely destroyed one iPhone to figure out how the pieces operated,” which comes from the San Francisco Chronicle. I guess you really do need to sacrifice one every once in a while for the good of the group; I know this argument has been used for cannibalism, but apparently it also applies to $500 cell phones.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to unlock your (or anyone else’s) iPhone, since the legalities of this process is debatable, and I don’t want to be held responsible for your breach of contract. I’m sure you can find some other site out there with step-by-step instructions if you search long enough.

If, by some stroke of fate, you’ve managed to hit the lottery (or maybe got a refund check from your loan company), you can pay someone else to unlock your iPhone for you. Unique Phones and iPhone Sim Free both claim to have hacked the iPhone software and will unlock your phone for a fee. Of course, you must also have a lot of faith to use this method, since they may be scams. Too bad eBay pulled the New Jersey kid’s auction, since that would’ve been the easiest way to obtain an unlocked phone. The poor guy had to settle for trading the iPhone, which he didn’t pay for anyway, for a car and three more phones.

I guess if there’s any lesson to be learned by this, it’s that you don’t really need a college education, so long as you’re alright with being paid in cars and phones. It’s awesome that someone managed to open up the iPhone’s potential user-base, and the fact that it was done by a regular person makes it all the more spectacular. Unfortunately, I already have AT&T, so this whole hacking ordeal matters little to me personally; plus, I have little interest in getting an iPhone. Call me old fashioned, but I’m perfectly happy with my camera phone, two iPods and three computers, and thus have no interest in trying to combine the three.

If you have extra time on your hands and money that’s just itching to be spent, go ahead and try your best shot at modifying an iPhone: The only condition is that you must tell me about it, so I can include you in a future blog.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

What You See Isn't What You Get

Growing up with television and the internet, we have become accustomed to advertisements bombarding us in every way possible. Our sneaky little friends over at Kameraflage felt that this wasn’t enough, and have come up with a new way to get a point across, using a 21st Century version of subliminal messaging.

The company’s founders thought it would be clever to decorate billboards, t-shirts and an assortment of other objects with colors we cannot see. Sounds pointless, right? Well, it turns out the creations are visible through the lens of a camera, which still makes the discovery sound pretty silly.

Needless to say, when I started reading about Kameraflage, I thought it was a joke. I was expecting someone from The Onion or the now-defunct Weekly World News to have “created” the product. I understand how the technology works -- through using colors our eyes cannot see but can still be picked up by electronics-- but I couldn’t readily understand why anyone would want to use it. Who walks around all day with a camera stuck to his or her face?

The obvious answer is the paparazzi. I guess the celebrities who don’t enjoy being followed by the media can now voice their displeasure on a t-shirt, a refreshing change from the traditional vulgar hand signal or bouts of profanity. Big-name fashion designers can add another dimension to their clothing lines and annual fashion shows by featuring Kameraflaged garments. In fact, a prototype garment was worn during 2006 Fall Fashion Week in Paris, according to the company’s Web site.

The film industry could also benefit from the invisible text in order to cut back on movie piracy; a big “nice try” stamped on the entire film may deter people from distributing illegal copies. If this idea doesn’t fly, film makers could always use Kameraflage to provide subtitles to a deaf audience or on a foreign film. Of course, theaters would probably have to distribute a viewing device, since the screens on camera phones are only so large.

But then there are the people who would use Kameraflage for the purposes of evil, such as advertising agencies.

Imagine taking photos of a landmark on vacation, only to later find McDonald’s famous “golden arches” proudly displayed on the structure, or the Web address for internet casino GoldenPalace.com. Although I’d like to think that corporations have better things to do than deface buildings with invisible ink, there is no way to tell what tricks the executives may have up their sleeves; I would hate to see the Statue of Liberty’s green torch replaced with an invisible bottle of Coca-Cola.

Although it is pretty neat that someone thought to use these invisible colors, I still don’t think Kameraflage will be the next “in” thing for the American public. A line of Kameraflage garments are being released in September, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

You can read more about here and here, although all of the news articles about the product basically say the same thing.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Alcohol and Cell Phones Are Never a Good Idea

Drunk driving, a favorite pastime of celebrities and average Joes alike, is going to get more difficult thanks to auto giant Nissan.

The Japan-based company has developed a concept car that can detect whether or not the driver has been drinking through odor and sweat emissions, reports New Scientist. If alcohol is found, the car may lock the ignition system or issue an alert; an alert which hopefully involves some sort of public humiliation through a loudspeaker on the car's roof.

Ok, there is no loudspeaker, but I can dream, right?

While there are still snags in the current design, such as registering one beer as intoxication for everyone, this could be a step in the right direction to cut down on drinking and driving, an act which killed 16,885 Americans in 2005. Yeah, I know, it's also a step toward the government having a tighter control over the people, but you don't need to put on your tinfoil hat just yet; this wonder-car is still far away from mass production.

Although it is also designed to prevent drivers from falling asleep at the wheel, Nissan's concept car does not prevent against a fairly new -- and fairly common -- type of driving impairment: cell phone usage.

Live Science reports that college-age adults on cell phones drive as poorly as the elderly who can't seem to find the accelerator. Ok, that's not how Live Science phrased it, but you catch my drift. Chatty drivers were also responsible for 330,000 injuries and 2,600 traffic fatalities in 2003.

And I know that every time you pass a horrible driver on the road, you glance over to see if the person is either elderly or on a cell phone. I do it too, especially in Palm Beach County.

Some of the gabbers try to throw you for a loop by using Bluetooth or another hands-free device, but I've found that it's usually easy to point them out: Just look for a swerving vehicle traveling at inconsistent speeds. Doesn't that sounds awfully like a drunk driver? Researchers at the University of Utah thought so, too.

The researchers were determined to find the differences between the way drunks and talkers drive. Using willing participants and a driving simulator, they found that "drunk drivers were more aggressive, tailgated more, and hit the break pedal harder," whereas "[c]ell phone drivers took longer to hit the breaks, and got in more accidents," reports Discover Magazine.

Wait a minute. If it's safe to assume that more people use cell phones than alcohol while driving, and cell phone users "got in more accidents" than the drinkers, why don't the statistics reflect this?

Because something tells me that the police are more likely to whip out a Breathalyzer than check your call log. Plus, only one of the two impairments is illegal in Florida.

While I am not against using cell phones while driving, I am against leaving your common sense at home. Driving in a late-afternoon monsoon? Don't use the phone. Weaving through heavy traffic? Don't use the phone. Been drinking heavily all evening? Don't use the phone, because drunk dials are obnoxious. And don't think about driving your car either, because everyone will hear the alert coming from your Nissan.