Alert Ringtones

I know we don’t have many wallpaper blog entries here, so thought it was time to talk some more about cell phone wallpapers. The majority of wallpapers used today are downloaded and not edited to suit your own tastes. That is, you can have a cool soccer wallpaper on your cell phone, but the majority of users don’t go any further than just downloading these wallpapers.

Have you ever considered manipulating the image to suit both your phone’s colour and your own interests in life? There is a cool little website over at Red Dodo which allows you to do just that. Best of all you can download these wallpapers for free. Catch though is that it will have RedDodo.com as a water image on your wallpaper. You can see a demo below.

Wallpaper Sizes
Red Dodo support the following animated wallpaper sizes: 240×320, 176×220, 176×144, 128×160, 128×128.

And so it seems in Colombia, the kidnapping capital of the world, the mobile is being used for bogus kidnappings.

The game plan is simple.
Bogus kidnappers pose as phone operators instructing mobile phone users to turn off their handsets for 2 hours whilst they test the network connections. During this time, the criminals contact family members of the victim, claiming they have been held hostage and will be handed back in return for a ransom. Families have no way of contacting the users whilst their mobiles are turned off, and so are directed where to leave the money before the 2 hours is up.

Scams Galore
A lot of scam artists work by claiming they are an authority from somewhere. So unless you are shown an ID card or can verify who it is you are talking to, BEWARE!

And with this, time to sign off for the week. Enjoy the weekend!

It seems Alert Ringtones is increasingly talking about the iPhone. Whilst we are not an iPhones blog, it’s just that it’s been a huge shift in the mobile phone industry, hence we find ourselves commenting a lot on the iPhone. Hope no-one minds.

Anyway, the good news is out for iPhone users. The blog I made at “how to hack an iPhone has been patched by Apple. Updates are now available on the iTunes website. Users no longer have to be worried about others hacking into their phone at doctored websites or insecure Wi-Fi hotspot areas.

Apple made this quite a priority hack just two days before the full details were going to be released at the Black Hat USA hacker conference on August 2nd.

The iPhone hack was only theoretical, and there had been no reports of anyone using it.

There seems no letting up on the hacking attempts of the iPhone. Next on the casualty list was Australia. Steve Jobs, c’mon… it’s time to release patches if you don’t wanna lose too many millions.

The iPhone, not yet released in Australia, can now be used to make phone calls on the national telephone network Telstra. However the hack hasn’t yet allowed Australian users to receive calls, use the iPod features or internet access. All they can do is make calls on it. It’s the furthest anyone has come to hacking the iPhone outside of the US. The user, who goes by the name “ozbimmer”, uploaded a “how-to” on YouTube, but has since removed it. We don’t know if it was removed due to threats by Apple or AT&T. He first posted his announcement on a hack forum.

The hack is not simple. It involves modifying the SIM card that comes with the phone to also hold data from a Telstra SIM card. You will need a SIM card reader and writer and some software applications.

Also see a recent blog post at How to Hack an iPhone.