"Geohot" Jailbreaks the iPhone 3GS

George Hotz, AKA Geohot, who came up with the first unlock for the original iPhone, has beaten the iPhone Dev Team to the punch. He's released a jailbreaking app for the iPhone 3GS code-named purplera1n.

However, if you troll through the comments on the blog post he write announcing the jailbreak, it seems clear that the break isn't bulletproof. At the same time, however, Hotz throws down the gauntlet to the iPhone Dev Team.

Normally I don't make tools for the general public, and rather wait for the dev team to do it. But guys, whats up with waiting until 3.1? That isn't how the game is played. We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes. It isn't worth waiting because you might have the "last" hole in the iPhone. What last hole...this isn't golf. I'll find a new one next week. Also your purplera1nyday files ensure that you can always get back to a jailbroken state, so if you have it it's just a matter of tools.

The Dev Team has said they were waiting for the iPhone 3.1 release to release their own jailbreaking app. Meanwhile, they showed that they already have an unlock using ultrasn0w ready to go.

Watch their video below.

Virtual Embezzlement Used to Pay for Real World Debts

Virtual goods are big business nowadays, in online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, so much so there is discussion over taxing profits made from such goods. Real as the virtual reality is, someone in the online game EVE Online stole virtual money from the virtual bank he ran and exchanged it for real cash.

Think of it as virtual embezzlement. Not only that, once word of the theft spread, a run was made on the bank, EBank, making things worse.

The CEO of EBank, was a 27-year-old Australian tech worker with the handle Ricdic. Only his first name has been revealed (Richard); he embezzled about 200 billion interstellar kredits (ISK), the game's virtual currency.

He exchanged the ISK for $5,100 with players who prefer to buy funds rather than earn it playing the game. Not unusual for players to do so; it's the reason there is a market for virtual goods in these types of games.

Ned Coker, of Icelandic company CCP which runs Eve, told Reuters:

"Basically this character was one of the people who had been running EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money."

Meanwhile, Ricdic told Reuters:

"I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it. But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path based on the same situation."

Ricdic apparently used the resulting cash to put down a deposit on a house and to pay medical bills. The medical bills I could probably forgive; the deposit? Not so much.

Eve Online has about 300,000 players inhabiting an online universe. The game centers around interstellar trade, mining asteroids and player-controlled corporations. Interestingly, in 2006 the EVE Interstellar Bank had a similar theft, with the proprietor of the EIB, known as "Cally," stole around 790 billion ISK.

iPhone 3GS Generates Best Retail Day for AT&T Ever

A leaked AT&T memo notes that the launch day for the iPhone 3GS generated their "best-ever sales day in our retail stores." Note, this is for AT&T stores, not Apple stores. Unfortunately, while the memo had some numbers regarding text messages on the day Michael Jackson died, it had nothing numbers-wise about the iPhone 3GS, but lots of superlatives.

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year's Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text."

2. "iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here's a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year's launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008's iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008's launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

While AT&T didn't leak any numbers, CNNMoney did some calculations, based on history, and came up with numbers (which seemed to hold across more than one "event") of 35% of Apple's sales also being AT&T's.

Given that Apple sold, by its own calculations, more than 1 million iPhones in the space of the first three days, CNNMoney stated:

Assuming the 35% ratio holds up, it’s not unlikely that AT&T will eventually activate about 350,000 of the new iPhones sold the weekend of June 19 — many of them Apple Stores — and that actually unit sales at AT&T outlets that weekend could easily exceed 300,000.

Anyone continuing to wonder why AT&T wants to extend its exclusivity for the iPhone in the U.S.?

Evidence Emerges of Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack

When Windows 7 pricing was announced, the half-price promotions they announced for upgrades to Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional were applauded, while at the same time the question emerged: what, no Family Pack? While there's still no official announcement, there is evidence that such a pack may exist.

Those with decent memories will recall that just before Vista launched Microsoft announced a "Family Pack" deal for those who bought Ultimate: two additional copies of Home Premium for a lower price.

Here's what Ed Bott found embedded in the the license folder in the latest leaked builds of Windows 7:

b) Family Pack. If you are a "Qualified Family Pack User", you may install one copy of the software marked as "Family Pack" on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there. These computers are the "licensed computers" and are subject to these license terms.

This would be a nice deal, but speaking of nice deals, how about a deal for Windows Vista Ultimate owners, who were suckered, er, convinced to buy an OS with promises of all these Extras which turned out to be largely worthless.

While you can buy a Windows 7 Professional version for your PC, you'd have to do a fresh install and basically "downgrade" your PC. Personally, I'm not interested in spending the full amount for an Ultimate upgrade, and will deal with a downgrade.