Mike Keller

If you’re one of the millions of people who have jailbroken their iOS device, you undoubtedly know and love the unofficial app store known as Cydia. The hub for unapproved apps, hacks, and UI tweaks has become so ubiquitous with iOS hacking that most jailbreak tools install Cydia automatically.

Jay Freeman, the hacker otherwise known as saurik, created Cydia, along with many of the essential behind-the-scenes tools that continue to make hacking Apple’s closed environment not only possible, but approachable to those who aren’t command-line ninjas. I recently spoke with Saurik about the past, present and future of Cydia.

Have you ever looked at someone's iPhone home screen, and noticed that it has five icons in the dock? Or maybe you've seen a classic console emulator running on an iPad? Don't go looking for these apps on the App Store--these features and more are only possible with a hack called jailbreaking.

So how does jailbreaking work, and what does it actually do to your coveted iDevice? Can you jailbreak on other platforms or hardware besides Apple's? What are the risks involved, and is it even legal? Read on as we try to answer all of your jailbreaking questions. And if we don't, feel free to ask more questions the comments!

A somewhat unrelated photo of Star Wars cookies. Because cookies are delicious.In a lengthy New York Times interview posted Tuesday, George Lucas talked about his final major film Red Tails, feuds with the fanboys, the definitive end of Star Wars, and his own future in filmmaking. After a long and incredibly fruitful career as a blockbuster filmmaker, Lucas, now 67, is finally retiring.

While Lucas made sure to "leave himself a clause for a fifth Indiana Jones film" after his final film Red Tails is complete, he will be “moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.” Lucas will instead devote the rest of his life to return to the types of experimental art films he made while a student at USC film school in the 60s.

No, Liquipel is not simply a case for your iPhone. It is a patent-pending process of coating a device inside and out with a "nano" coating that is impervious to moisture. No, I wouldn't take your iPhone SCUBA diving or anything, but if you're accident prone, this may be just the thing to save yourself another embarrassing trip to the Apple Store.

The process apparently has no effect on features such as battery charging or network strength. It also does not seem to affect the look or feel of your treated device.

Since 2010, the Swedish piracy group Kopomi has been attempting to gain official recognition as a religion, in an interesting attempt to remove the legal stigma from file-sharing. After several repeated and failed attempts, The Missionary Church of Kopomism is now officially registered as a religious organization in Sweden.

Kopomi is Swedish for "Copy Me." Kopomists hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols and believe that "communication is sacred." The Church was founded by Philosophy student Isak Gerson, who shared something of a manifesto with file-sharing site TorrentFreak in a recent interview:

While Google were pioneers in speech recognition technology on their Android platform, Apple’s Siri for iOS has been the real star of listening, virtual assistants of 2011. Siri’s natural language processing has given Apple the edge for the time being, but Google aims to change that in the near future, albeit with a slightly different approach.

In this Slashgear interview with Matias Duarte, Google’s Director of Android OS User Experience, he describes Google’s more cut-and-dry approach to speech recognition with a metaphor I think you will all understand:

Don't let this happen to your gadgets.

Last month, a faulty electrical outlet in my charming turn-of-the-century studio apartment sparked a fire while I was out of the house. Many of my gadgets were singed, and what wasn't directly burnt still suffered damage from smoke and/or water from the automated sprinklers. Truly, it was a geek's worst nightmare! My trusty MacBook Pro, iPad, Xbox 360, and countless other gadgets were bricked, including my primary backup hard drive (thank goodness for data recovery). So, for my first blog back at GeekTech I thought it would be apropos to compose this short list of fire prevention gadgets I only wish I knew about before the incident.

If you have an Android smartphone and a T-mobile unlimited text plan, there’s a new, free, way to browse the web. Smozzy Beta, developed by Jeff Donahue is a free app available on the Android market that is at first-glance simply a wrapper for the built-in web browser. The brilliant difference is that instead of transferring data over 3G, packets are transmitted and received entirely via text message (SMS and MMS).

So how does it work? Most URLs can be sent within the 160-character constraint of SMS (if not, they are simply broken up in multiple messages). The resulting web page is then sent over in a fairly hackish manner: the entire site is loaded on Smozzy’s remote server and compressed in a ZIP file. The ZIP file is encoded as a hacked PNG image file, which is an acceptable file to be sent over MMS (in parts, if necessary). The Smozzy app simply reverses the process and displays site content.

Two researchers from UC Davis have successfully created a proof-of-concept keylogger using a smartphone’s built-in gyroscope. TouchLogger was written for Android, but there is no reason the same couldn’t be done for iPhone or any modern smartphone or tablet for that matter.

Many modern gadgets feature a three-axis gyro to gather device-orientation data for the purposes of gaming or navigation. Hao Chen and Lian Cai analyzed minute variations in pitch, yaw, and roll (X, Y, and Z axis) paths during onscreen-keyboard input to see if different keys produced distinct results. The keylogger has a 71.5% accuracy in 10-key number pad input. That percentage is lowerered during input on a more crowded in-screen QWERTY keyboard, but I imagine accuracy could be increased with more tests, as well as contextual word analysis (i.e. auto-correct). Larger devices such as tablets also boasted a higher accuracy as there are greater margins between key presses and therefore more room for spatial variation.

The Portal videogames by Valve are one of my favorite series of all time. After completing the groundbreaking first game I remember walking around thinking of where I would shoot portals to expedite my route. The long-awaited sequel that came out earlier this year exceeded lofty expectations and left fans wanting even more.

While it would have been easy to imagine a great film adaptation, some fans just couldn’t wait for the big studios to figure that out. Fan films can be quaint and ultimately embarrassing at times, but such is not the case with Portal: No Escape. The short film is fun and the production is great; it even had my girlfriend fooled into thinking it was a Hollywood trailer at first. And while YouTube views aren’t always the best metric for production quality, Portal: No Escape was uploaded less than 24 hours ago and has already raked in over a half million views- not bad for a videogame fan film.

So you’re thinking of jailbreaking your iOS device are you? The process of hacking your iDevice is simpler than ever but with so many different hardware, firmware, and software combinations out there, choosing the right jailbreak tool for your configuration for you can be a bit daunting if it’s your first time. Here’s a guide to picking the right tool for you.

Determine your hardware

If you’re not sure what hardware model you have, read this guide for iPhone, or this one for iPod Touch. If you have an iPad, the iPad 2 has a front-facing camera, while the original iPad does not. Apple TV can also be jailbroken.

Rumors of system-wide voice recognition in iOS have been floating around since Apple acquired speech technology companies Siri and Nuance last year. Voice recognition has been heavily integrated into Android for some time now and it appears Apple will finally follow suit with iOS 5’s new Assistant feature.

9to5Mac posted a couple new screenshots from the latest iOS 5 beta, including one of the Assistant settings (direct link to screenshot), giving some insight into how it will integrate with device info such as contacts and location. Additionally, it appears speech data will be crowd-sourced to improve the performance of speech recognition results over time (it appears you can opt out of this feature).