Category: Hack

$200 iTunes Gift Cards Sell for $2.60 On Chinese Website

Counterfeit iTunes Gift Cards

Some clever hackers have been able to crack the algorithm Apple uses for their gift cards allowing them to create gift certificate generators. All the sellers are actually selling are the the code which are sent directly to the customer who then inputs it into their iTunes account, and some of these sellers are selling $200 gift cards for as low as $2.60.

According to the owner of one of the sellers the business started about 6 months ago, Apple hasn’t commented on the issue but I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the algorithm for their gift cards rather quickly (especially since it has been receiving a lot of press over the past few days).

What confuses me about this is why anyone would purchase these counterfeit codes anyway when bittorrent is even cheaper and is less likely to be cracked down on. That is unless you are using the purchased code to buy apps in the App Store.

AppleInsider | Hackers crack Apple’s iTunes gift card algorithm.

iPhone 3G Unlock Completed and “being packaged into a user-friendly application”

Many have been waiting for this and it is finally here. The iPhone 3G has been unlocked and will be released soon.

The Dev Team has also announced that sometime before Christmas there will be a live demo of the unlock streamed over Qik. The stream will be announced via Twitter as it begins.

We have been working hard on a few other things. The main one being the 3G unlock codenamed “yellowsn0w”. This is now completed and is currently being packaged into a user-friendly application with the simplicity that you see in QuickPwn or BootNeuter.

Dev-Team Blog – ‘Tis the Season to be Jolly! – yellowsn0w.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Crack In Less Than 2 Weeks

With every new release of Creative Suite all of those clever hackers spend countless hours finding ways of getting around all of Adobe’s anti-piracy systems.

This time around it took hackers a little less than two weeks to release a crack for Photoshop CS4. Both Windows and Mac versions of the entire Creative Suite are now available on various torrent trackers and many of them even contain the files necessary to crack the applications in the suite.

The first crack came in the form of a keygen that would let you use the CS for a full year before the software would deactivate itself but newer cracks actually modify your computers HOSTS file so that the application can’t actually access adobe’s servers and therefore is unable to deactivate itself.

The game of cat and mouse continues and it seems that no matter what Adobe does someone out there will be able to crack it.

CyberNet

Finally a Good Reason To Hack Your Apple TV, Hulu

The Apple TV is a great device and I absolutely love mine but I haven’t really had much of a reason to hack it. Yes, the idea of being able to watch unsupported formats on my Apple TV sounded nice but honestly I have just much rather spent the time to convert those files to supported formats to keep away from that whole hacking mess.

But now I may be changing my tune. The wonderful media center software “Boxee” now supports the streaming of Hulu content through the Boxee interface and now that you can install Boxee on your Apple TV that means you can get Hulu content on the Apple TV (obviously, if A=B and B=C then A=C).

Along with this announcement Boxee has also announced that they have added CBS.com to their internet video sources.

What does worry me about this is that Boxee has not actually partnered with any of these content providers, so it is possible that these content owners would be able to block access to the content from Boxee essentially making this new features useless. I don’t really know why they would want to do that but seeing as how these guys are always so careful with where their content goes it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities.

Boxee

EFiX OS X Installing Coming on the 7th For $125

Wilhelm von Vnukov, the CEO of EFiX has said that the V2 edition of the OSX installing device for non Macs will be available on July 7. The V1 edition will come a few weeks later.

The difference between V1 and V2 is that V2 will have support for more motherboards and experimental support for some prototype motherboards. The price for the V2 will be €80 (about $125).

Taiwan and Bulgaria will be the first countries where the device will be available with the US listed as being “in negotiation.” EFiX is promising that the price for the device will come down with mass production.

My initial thought would be that EFiX won’t ever sell this in the US because of Apples TOS for Leopard but, Psystar hasn’t seen any legal action taken against them so maybe EFiX will try the hope-Apple-doesn’t-notice-us route.

EFiX

Published
Categorized as Apple, Hack

Turn Your Geforce 9600 into an 8800GTS With Bios Modding

If you have a certain kind of Geforce 9600 like this one, all you have to do is flash the BIOS and it will unlock the unused shader units and the 2 memory units that Nvidia has deactivated. To simplify this you are adding 128MB of RAM and some extra hardware pipelines only by modifying some software.

Unfortunately the graphics card that this hack works on isn’t very common but if you can manage to get a hold of one you can save a lot of money and get a huge performance increase over the 9600.

Original Guide

aTV Flash Allows for Plug and Play Apple TV Hacking

I actually first heard about the aTV Flash a month or so ago but decided not to write about it because it seemed a little fishy to me. But, now that some of the bigger blogs out there decided to write about it I figured it must actually work.

The idea behind the aTV Flash is very simple, it is basically just a USB flash drive preloaded with some software that once plugged into the Apple TV it automatically hacks the Apple TV to add multiple codec support, the Couch Surfer browser, SSH access, etc.

The aTV Flash is compatible with all Apple TV’s including the old software and Take Two and the makers of the aTV Flash offer free updates for a year. It is a little bit expensive, coming in at $59.95 it isn’t exactly cheap, especially since all of these hacks can be done by yourself for free but the convenience may be worth the cost.

aTV Flash Product Page

OQO Running OS X Leopard

A member of the forum OQO Talk named TRF has managed to successfully hack the OQO to run OS X Leopard. The OQO is setup in a dual-boot of Vista and OS X Leopard.

Wifi, sound, power management, and Bluetooth all work, the only thing missing is WWAN access and TRF is already working on getting that running.

While it isn’t exactly an easy hack TRF says that it is “definitely doable.” This makes the OQO now the smallest computer to run OS X (that I know of at least).

This is absolutely amazing to me, I don’t think that I would ever use this, mostly because I would rather just buy a MacBook and an iPhone and save myself a lot of trouble messing with stuff, BUT, I can appreciate the novelty of it.

Forum Post
Full Video On YouTube

PSP Playstation Network Games Get Decrypted, Played On Any PSP

So those clever hackers are at it again, this time decrypting games purchased from the Playstation Network for the PSP. Currently you have to decrypt the games on the PSP that you purchased them for, but this is a giant dent in the shield of Sony so that users can get their content where they want it.

PSN Store DRM Cracked – NP Decrypter Released

Just to let all of you PSP owners out there know (who haven’t found this out already) hacking your PSP could change your life in meaningful ways. Not only can you do things like decrypt games bought on the Playstation Network (like I mentioned above) but you can also play games using emulators and all sorts of other great little hacks. to find out about PSP hacking go here.

iPhone Pwnage Tool Released To The Public

After a bit of a delay the iPhone Pwnage Tool (previously posted about here), which is used to flash your iPhone with hacked firmware and give you the ability to basically do whatever you want with your iPhone, is now available for download. Gizmodo has been trying it out and says:

“it works well, but you will need a hacked version of the iPhone firmware to try it.”

All you have to do to use the PWNAGE tool is:

  1. Get your hands on a hacked version of the firmware
  2. Backup your iPhone data using iTunes
  3. Open up Pwnage Tool
  4. Select the hacked firmware from your hard drive
  5. iPwn the iPhone

Gizmodo also mentions that you shouldn’t use the latest 2.0 firmware because it isn’t very stable.

iPhone Dev Team

Video of the tool after jump

Continue reading iPhone Pwnage Tool Released To The Public

PWNED Tool Lets You Load Unsigned Firmware Onto iPhone

The iPhone Dev Team is getting ready to release the PWNED tool, which will patch the iPhones bootloader allowing you to load any firmware image you want, even ones not signed by Apple.

This means that custom patched firmware can now be loaded directly from iTunes which will simplify the jailbreaking and unlocking process. This also means that a patched version of firmware 2.0 beta should be available soon as well (since it doesn’t have to be signed by Apple).

This video shows the process of “PWNing” the iPhone with the new PWNED tool.