Since the post about U.S Copyright Office by the Librarian of Congress Ok’ed Jailbreaking, Yahoo posted a how to.
From Yahoo
“Thanks to a set of rules issued yesterday by the Librarian of Congress, you can now jailbreak and unlock your cellular phone without violating copyright law — good news for anyone with an iPhone and a distaste for AT&T (NYSE: T – News). Put simply, jailbreaking and unlocking allows you to use your phone on any compatible network, while installing whatever software you’d like.”
“Let’s start with the first step in the process, jailbreaking your iPhone. Jailbreaking allows you to install any compatible software onto your phone, whether or not it has been reviewed by Apple, and is required before you can unlock your iPhone to run on a cell service other than AT&T.
I’ve found several guides around the web that will walk you through the process for your specific device. Follow the appropriate guide exactly, after you have read it thoroughly and understand every step of the process. It’s very easy to miss something and end up at a step where nothing works like it’s supposed to.
Note: I have not tried these tutorials, but all have been used successfully by others. I have picked them because they seem like good instruction sets. If you decide to jailbreak/unlock your phone, do not hold me responsible if you end up with an out-of-warranty broken phone. It’s a possibility. You’ve been warned.”
“When you purchase an iPhone in the U.S., it is “locked” to AT&T’s network, preventing you from using it with another compatible carrier like T-Mobile despite the fact that it will function perfectly (with the exception of visual voicemail) on the competing service. But in other countries, like France, consumers have been able to purchase unlocked iPhones for several years. So why lock phones in the U.S.? Profit, pure and simple. If AT&T is the only network the iPhone will function on, then they’re the only network that can make any money from it.
AT&T would argue that they subsidize the purchase of the phone, and so should be entitled to your business until that subsidy has been repaid. But what about after your 2-year contract ends or if you paid full price for your iPhone? You might’ve thought you were free to switch to another provider, but Apple has argued in court that doing so without their permission constitutes copyright infringement. So your only choice was to keep your service with AT&T, implying you actually have a de-facto lifetime contract with them without ever agreeing to one, or buy a new phone. Fortunately, this particular anti-competitive practice is now a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, while the iPhone Dev Team, a group of hackers unaffiliated with Apple, has successfully demonstrated a carrier unlock on the newly released iPhone 4, it’s not yet something you can get your hands on. Only the iPhone 3G and older 3GS phones can be unlocked today. But if you’ve got one of those phones, after jailbreaking, unlocking is fairly easy. You’ll need to install a program called ultrasn0w through the Cydia app. Here’s a step-by-step with pictures that will walk you through the process.
For updates on when ultrasn0w will be available for the iPhone 4 and newer iPhone 3GS phones, follow @ultrasn0w or @iphone_dev on Twitter, or check this blog post.”
“Once you’ve unlocked your iPhone, you should be able to use any valid GSM SIM card to get service. A SIM card, or Subscriber Identity Module, is a removable card used by the various cellular networks to identify and authenticate your phone. They come in three sizes (largest is the size of credit card, smallest is actually called a “micro-SIM”). The idea is, as long as your new phone uses the same size as the old one, you can simply move your SIM card from one phone to the other to transfer your service.
You can purchase SIM cards by themselves, either prepaid or as part of a monthly plan. Here’s a list of GSM providers in the U.S., the biggest of which are AT&T, T-Mobile, and TracFone Wireless. You should be able to obtain a new SIM card and cell service from any of them. Most likely, you’ll want to transfer your existing phone number to the new SIM card as well, so your best bet is to do this in person at a store after you’ve unlocked your phone.
To replace the SIM card in your phone, follow these instructions from Apple to remove your old SIM card with a paper clip, then just pop in the new one, turn your phone on and voila! You can now make and receive calls on your unlocked iPhone through whichever GSM network you prefer.
Note: The iPhone is only capable of operating on GSM radio frequencies. This means that the iPhone wont work on a competing CDMA network like Sprint or Verizon without replacing the radio hardware inside the phone, something that can not be done at home.”
Investigative Journalism made easy with Wikileaks
Wikileaks; a new tool for Journalism? A source for investigative Journalism made easy with Wikileaks, is it another value added tool for Journalist? Should Journalist depend on Wikileaks? Should Journalist use Wikileaks at all? Can Journalist depends on Wikileaks?
A few weeks ago I discovered Wikileaks after a co-worker showed me a video of how U.S Navy operates during a mission in Afghan War. It has a video of two Apache Helicopter intercepted what appear to be part of a rebel group with weapons. The video was longer than 10 minutes long. I wonder how this video could be up in Wikileaks in the first place. It might or might not be confidential to begin with, but if we can learn about this video, well, then so can those who seek to destroy U.S. Learning how we operate and how we execute every command, or maybe they already know, but with Wikileaks, it’s so easy. Too easy. But I’m not here to talk about ethical exercise of Wikileaks, I’m just awed at the video and start to wonder the what ifs.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, were asked if Wikileaks better to be separate from investigative Journalism? Would being associated with a news organization subject it to different standards of verification and transparency? “I think it’s better separate,” Rusbridger responded. Wikileaks does things the paper wouldn’t want to do or couldn’t do. And a paper is easier to attack by governments and companies; it has greater liability than a stateless news organization, as Jay Rosen calls them. “I think the Afghan leaks make the case for journalism,” Rusbridger said. “We had the people and expertise to make sense of it.”
Alright, so Wikileaks is there, what is the advantage for Journalism? The internet is so easy for us to find information, Wikileaks proves itself that it doesn’t need News Media Companies to support it, it can do so by itself. Information on the internet after all is free. Wikileaks would be a good way for collaboration, just like what Guardian did with CommentisFree. So we can see Wikileaks to be an added value for Journalist, without second guessing, and sources can be from different places, add Wikileaks to one more source now.
But as a Journalist, information can be found easily, shouldn’t just be a stenographer, but should also add value to the story. A story without opinions or perspective won’t be as good as an original story found. As long as Wikileaks is credited where it belongs, Journalist could save money, resources and time. And I believe in news collaboration, lets hope it’s going to the right direction with Wikileaks and CommentisFree.
Can we depend on Wikileaks? Just like Wikipedia, anyone can put information in, so information might or might not be reliable. Thus, Wikileaks is just merely a tool for double checking and re-checking with your source. Wikileaks would just be a provider for Journalism to add maximum value to the story.