Keeping secrets

One of the most entertaining things about the recent launch of Apple's iPhone has been watching what the hackers have been making of it. My personal favourite so far has involved a jeweller's loupe, used to turn the iPhone's camera into a rudimentary microscope.

There's no doubt the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, but the least attractive thing about it, as with the purchase of the most shiny and expensive new mobiles, is the contract. The handset might be free (or in the case of more fancy phones, hundreds of pounds) but the call plan you have to buy with the phone will recoup the price of the handset and more.

Quite naturally, people want to be able to use the other bits of the iPhone without paying the phone company - in the case of the US, Cingular. Apple and Cingular/AT&T have locked the iPhone to the network - you can't go t a different provider and sign up to their network. This is something the US Copyright Office and regulators over on this side of the pond think is a bad thing. Even better, it's not illegal to unlock phones.

As a result, there have already been two cracks of the iPhone this week. One
by Jon Lech Johansen, the man who broke the DVD codes, and another,
what appears to be more significant break - if you're curious, use IRC
to get to it by going to:'#iphone on irc.osx86.hu - the site's
operators are worried about being slashdotted off the internet.

The thing with all of this is (and thanks to those of you that have
stuck around long enough for me to get to the point) that the
information is now out there, indexed and preserved by search engines.
It can't be put back in the box.

There's two things to bear in mind here; firstly, security through
obscurity no longer exists; customers will find out how to make
something they've bought truly their own if it doesn't meet their
initial expectations. The second point is less obvious; companies don't
like this information being shared, and some are willing to be quite
aggressive over its sharing; take a look at the reaction
to a break in the encryption used in HD-DVD - and the fallout for both
the companies behind HD-DVD and the publishers of the key. Try a search
for the key yourself and see how impossible it's been for the
supporters of HD-DVD to suppress what is, in effect, a hydra. There's
no way to keep a secret for long online, and search has helped make it
even harder.