Category Archives: iOS 5
Apple receives iPhone unlock requests from law enforcement
The decryption on your iPhone is apparently secure enough that law enforcement agencies are waiting in line to have Apple “crack” the lock and provide data to be used as evidence.
According to a report by CNET, Apple has the ability to decrypt seized iPhones and has created a waiting list to handle requests. At one point last summer, the wait was over 7 weeks long and one ATF agent reported that it took his request at least four months to be processed. The ATF had tried to decrypt the iPhone 4S of a Kentucky man accused of distributing crack cocaine and became so frustrated that it contacted Apple for assistance. That’s where the wait started…
For those who are concerned about how secure their personal information is on an iOS device, the fact that the devices can’t be cracked by Federal agents is good news. No one is sure exactly how Apple can decrypt the information for police, whether there’s a backdoor that only Apple knows about, has custom hardware for decryption, or just has better-trained cryptologists.
Apple rejecting iOS apps for "cookie tracking"
Apple is moving developers towards adopting the company’s own iOS 6 tracking technology and not their homegrown methods. One of these alternative techniques is cookie tracking and, according to a report in TechCrunch, Apple may be rejecting apps that use this method.
To understand how we got to the point where Apple is rejecting apps that use tracking cookies, we need to take a step back to iOS 5 and earlier. In previous versions of iOS, developers used a device’s UDID to track users. The UDID is a 40-character unique identifier assigned to each iOS device that developers used to track game progress, check subscription status and monitor ads. Apple phased out UDID tracking in iOS 5 and added support in iOS 6 for its own tracking methods, advertisingID and identifierForVendor.
Apple reportedly to remove Emoji apps from App Store
Now that iOS has provided default support for emoji icons for over a year, the company finally appears to be taking action to remove the seemingly endless number of third-party emoji apps on the App Store.
TechCrunch obtained an email sent by Apple to one particular app store developer, letting the seller know that their previously-approved emoji app would be removed from sale. The email cites App Store guidelines that prohibit the sale of apps that “are not very useful.”
iOS’s Notification Center cares more about my contacts’ birthdays than I do
I love Notification Center, but there’s one thing that’s bugged me about it since its introduction in iOS 5 and that thing is even worse in iOS 6: Notification Center always shows your contacts’ birthdays no matter what.
In iOS 5 this wasn’t too annoying, because most people probably didn’t have a birthday listed for every contact in their address book (just the important ones — like close friends and family). However, with the introduction of Facebook integration in iOS 6 (if you’ve enabled it), if a Facebook friend has their birthday listed, it’s now in their contact card in iOS 6 Contacts. And if it’s in their contact card, it will always show up in your Notification Center.
How To Downgrade iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 4G From iOS 6 To 5.1.1 Using Redsn0w
Apple is pretty adamant that once a user opts to upgrade, they don’t want them to be able to roll-back the software on their device to a previous version of iOS.
In a lot of circumstances, this wouldn’t be an issue, but there are a number of legitimate reasons for users wanting to downgrade to an older version, in this case, from iOS 6 to iOS 5.1.1.
Potential reasons for downgrading firmware could range from wanting the iPhone or iPod touch on a version of iOS that currently has an untethered jailbreak* available or could just be because updating to iOS 6 has brought with it some unexpected battery drain or caused other problems. Thankfully, it is entirely possible for owners of specific devices to downgrade with Redsn0w, and we have covered the complete process below.
