Less Radiation

Has your iPhone started displaying the message “This Accessory Is Not Optimised / Optimized For This iPhone”?

My wife’s iPhone 4 just started doing this over the weekend. Sound would come and go, and the error message would pop up frequently.

I looked around the forums and saw plenty of other people experiencing the same problem. Suggested remedies included removing your screen protector, plugging in and unplugging headphones ten times, etc, etc. Likely causes ranged from pairing up the iPhone with the car’s Bluetooth to buying a new speaker dock. Lots of people were blaming Apple & the latest software update…

In my wife’s case it was none of the above. If you think about this error message logically, then it’s telling you it thinks you have an accessory attached… Where do the accessories plug in? To the charging/USB adapter on the base of the iPhone, of course.

I inspected the connector on the base of the wife’s iPhone 4 with a magnifying glass, in good light, and could clearly see some green grunge across the contacts (likely caused by water contact – I see this all the time inside iPods I refurbish).

The solution is to get a can of ‘IPA Solvent’ (specially for cleaning electronic circuit boards) & a cotton bud. TURN OFF YOUR IPHONE. Pull & flatten both ends of the cotton bud, so they’re ‘Spatula shaped’, and then spray a little IPA solvent on one end. Clean the copper contacts carefully. Then use the dry end of the cotton bud to soak up any excess solvent. Inspect you handwork under a magnifying glass and they should be nice and clean. If the water damage was minimal your iPhone will be fine. (if you dropped it in the bath or toilet it probably won’t fix it).

http://cpc.farnell.com/pro-power/ppc103/ipa-cleaning-solvent/dp/SA01884

Ubertooth – Bluetooth sniffing for under £100.

A Youtube presentation by the developer, Michael Ossmann.

Until now, sniffing and injecting packets into Bluetooth communication hasn’t been possible for the man in the street. Commercial Bluetooth packet sniffers cost $10,000 and were typically only bought by large companies for troubleshooting their own products. The firmware in a standard Bluetooth dongle doesn’t allow you to grab hold of the radio, in the way you can with a WiFi card.

The Ubertooth USB dongle will change this for under £100.

The Ubertooth device grabs a chunk of 2.4GHz spectrum and your PC processes it. Makes passive detection of Bluetooth devices possible without shelling out £1000 for a USRP. It will be possible to predict Bluetooth hopping pattern. It will also be possible to do man-in-the-middle attacks using two Ubertooths. The hardware is capable of both these things, but the software hasn’t been written yet. Be patient.

UK Buyers can pre-order from RFIDIOt.org.
US buyers can pre-order from HakShop

Ubertooth running a 2.4GHz Spectrum Analyser.

I just tested my own Ubertooth on Friday night. I’m running a standard PC with Ubuntu 10.10 installed. If you follow the guide by HarvestGardener (link below) you’ll have your Ubertooth tested in around 15 minutes:

www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/backtrack-5-how-tos/41552-installing-ubertooth-one-bt5.html

There is one typo in the guide mentioned above, line that reads:
tar xvf libbtb.0.5.tgz
should actually read:
tar xvf libbtbb.0.5.tgz

Useful links:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ubertooth-general
http://ossmann.blogspot.com/
http://ubertooth.sourceforge.net/