iPhone Hill

Thanks to the hard work of comex, a new jailbreak is available for iDevices running 3.2.1, 4.0, and 4.0.1. This jailbreak requires you to visit http://jailbreakme.modmyi.com/faq.html. Visiting that page will initialize the jailbreak process, and soon enough you will be downloading all your favorite 3rd party apps and themes from cydia! If you’re ready to enter the jailbreak scene on your 3.2.1+ iDevice, head on over to the website.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20…re-fair-use.ars

“Jailbreaking

The most surprising ruling was on “jailbreaking” one’s phone (exemption number two), replacing the company-provided operating system with a hacked version that has fewer limitations. Make no mistake: this was all about Apple. And Apple lost.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that jailbreaking one’s iPhone should be allowed, even though it required one to bypass some DRM and then to reuse a small bit of Apple’s copyright firmware code. Apple showed up at the hearings to say, in numerous ways, that the idea was terrible, ridiculous, and illegal. In large part, that was because the limit on jailbreaking was needed to preserve Apple’s controlled ecosystem, which the company said was of great value to consumers.

That might be true, the Register agreed, but what did it have to do with copyright?

“Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones,” wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the “four factors” of the fair use test. “Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone’s ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address.”

And the Register concluded that a jailbroken phone used “fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple undermines the significance” of Apple’s argument.

The conclusion is sure to irritate Steve Jobs: “On balance, the Register concludes that when one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

As has been rumoured for some time, Apple has today announced a slew of product updates and entirely new products.

Updated iMacs featuring new Intel Core i3, i5 & i7 processors

The iMacs received an update, with overall cosmetics remaining unchanged, but under the hood are a new range of Intel processors from the entry-level Core i3 right up to a newer Core i7 with Hyper Threading. New graphics processors are also present in the form of the ATI Radeon HD 4670 (21.5″ only) and 5670 (21.5″ & 27″) with 256MB GDDR3 and 512MB GDDR5 memory respectively. The top-end quad-core specification 27″ iMac is configured with an ATI Radeon HD 5750 with 1GB GDDR5. Like the Mac Pro, SSD drives are now also available as a CTO option.

12-core Mac Pro with 2TB SSD drives CTO option

Apple’s Mac Pro powerhouse computers had been starved of an update, but finally got a healthy refresh with new processor configurations including the new “Westmere” Intel Xeon processors, running at up to 2.93GHz in a dual processor configuration with 6 cores each, deliver up to 12 cores.

Hard drive options now include, for the first in an Apple desktop, SSD drives, with configuration options allowing up to four 512GB SSD drives. Apple has posted test results showing SSD’s outperforming 7200RPM HDD’s by up to twice the speed, although it hasn’t posted any comparable results against 15,400RPM SAS HDD’s.

27″ LED-backlit Cinema Display

Based on the same IPS panel as used in the current generation iMac, a new 27″ Cinema Display has been announced for a September shipping date, and features the same style housing as the existing 24″ LED Cinema Display. With a 2560×1600 resolution which almost matches the 30″ Cinema Display, the new 27″ Cinema Display is Apple’s first standalone monitor to feature a 16:9 aspect ratio, compared to the previous 16:10 offerings.

Like the 24″ Cinema Display, the new 27″ monitor also features built-in iSight camera, microphone, speakers including subwoofer, and utilises the industry-standard Mini DisplayPort. The connections also include a MagSafe adaptor for charging Macbook models via the monitor’s power source.

Magic Trackpad

Another entirely new product, the Magic Trackpad is Apple’s offering to desktop users of a trackpad, just like the ones found on Macbook models, so that desktop warriors can take advantage of multi-touch gestures too, like their mobile-using counterparts.

The new Magic Trackpad is 80% larger than standard trackpads found on Macbooks, and the whole pad area acts as a mouse button click too. The design is based on the same structure as the Apple Bluetooth keyboard.

Combined with useful 3rd party tools such as BetterTouchTool (based on the MultiClutch project), the Magic Trackpad could add a nice new ‘touch’ to desktop Macs… pun intended. Sorry.