Well maybe not. I know everyone is sick of hearing about the Jesus phone, I know I most certainly am. But I wanted to touch on a topic that is driving me insane. I see new articles about it everyday. Its driving me crazy. Now all of you are saying, “What is driving you crazy?”, all the articles about people finally UNLOCKING THE iPhone! I have read hundreds of claims that people have unlocked the iPhone. But the thing is that is all we ever hear are claims. I know some people have actually done it, but to what extent are you prepared to go to unlock that ironclad device. In the end you might find yourself spending more on unlocking it then actually ponying up the cash for AT&T.

I understand the people that don’t want to give into the system, and that’s neat and all. But really why waste your time, energy, and hard earned money on simply unlocking a phone that might or might not work with your carrier. Plus what happens when your phone dies, or has a malfunction. Do you take it back to Apple? I don’t think that will really work. Granted most of the people that are trying to unlock these things are pretty savy with the gadgets, so I assume they would probably be able to fix most issues on their own, and that’s the rub, not everyone is savy with the gadgets. Its a glass half full type of situation.

Now some people are claiming they unlocked the phone monkeying around with the internal hardware, and some claim the TurboSim card unlocks the phone via blocking it from getting any AT&T info, and a recent one I heard today about people doing it via a firmware hack. Once again I reiterate that this is not a bad thing. This is how people discover things about technology and how innovations are created in the marketplace, simply by taking a device apart and seeing how it works. That’s how technology evolves, which is a great thing. But as these shenanigans keep on progressing I really do not see one true process to unlock these devious devices. So I say this once and once only, that the Apple iPhone is the most secure smart-phone to date. If the Apple iPhone was a building it would be Fort Knox, but I think it would be even more secure then Fort Knox. You see Fort Knox is not open to the public, which the iPhone is, and if Fort Knox was open to the public for 2 months people would have already found a way into the safes. But their are many claims of partially unlocked iPhones as well (Thats like partially stealing the gold then getting shot on the way out by the tower guards).

When I say secure, I don’t mean secure software, or secure from software exploits, I mean it is locked down to the mother-ship and the tractor beam is strong. Their are thousands of some of the best PDA/Smart-phone crackers in the world working on this, and no one has came out with a true unlock method for the masses. The funny thing is that whenever if ever their is one Golden Key to unlock the palace, Apple and AT&T will sit and watch as people start unlocking the phones. Now this is the painful part, they will watch, but they wont be upset. They will be sitting over a tech’s pc telling him to deploy the new firmware that will brick every single one. ONE KEYSTROKE. Then the process begins all over again.

My point to all of this is that the masses will not go along. Once they have touched that glassy interface they will not be able to go back to any other smart-phone. So they will eventually cough up the cash for the AT&T service, and it will come with another rush of profits for the two companies.

Like I wrote about last week, these companies thrive off control. They want to control the influx of information, they want to control your hardware and software. Frustrating at best, but what can we do? Except not buy there hardware and software. This is why I have taken a stand. I would love to have that gorgeous phone, but it does not work with my carrier. So I am waiting for the revised version of the HTC Touch.  To me its as close to an iPhone as any other device.

I guess I have not been struck with the Jesus phone syndrome yet?

Here are some examples of the claims I have been talking about:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I think ten example are enough, I could link to different stories all day.

In an attempt to distance itself from a swarm of negative publicity surrounding security integrity problems plaguing its voting machines and servers, Diebold, Inc. announced this morning it is renaming its Election Systems unit to Premier Election Solutions, and restructuring it to give its new board of directors greater independence from the parent company.

While the news from Premier this morning sounded upbeat and hopeful, that message was indeed independent from that of its parent, which glumly announced it had failed to achieve its principal goal of selling the election systems division outright. Diebold blamed two factors: all the bad news, and the recent plunges in the stock market. “Diebold and its financial consultants have been actively engaged with a number of strategic companies and private investors with the intent to divest the Diebold Election Systems subsidiary,” the company stated this morning. “These efforts to sell this company, however, have proven unsuccessful due in part to the rapidly evolving political uncertainties and controversies surrounding state and jurisdiction purchases of electronic voting systems. Given this changing business environment and the recent downturn in the capital markets, Diebold has postponed its efforts to divest the company and instead is realigning the election systems subsidiary to allow it to operate as a more independent entity, with Diebold maintaining a financial interest in the company.”

Those factors, the parent company said, have been compounded by recent federal legislation which, Diebold stated, created “uncertainty amongst the jurisdictions that make purchasing decisions.” Though it didn’t cite bills by name, one introduced last April - HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 - would launch a massive federal reassessment of all devices used in federal elections. The goals of that reassessment would be threefold: 1) to strengthen the reliability of paper trails produced by e-voting machines; 2) to set new federal standards for internal security; and 3) to make such machines more accessible to the handicapped and to non-English speaking residents.

It’s the preparation for such a reassessment, Diebold flatly admitted today, that’s prompting it to cut its own revenue projections for this fiscal year by $120 million - more than half.

In Premier’s independent statement this morning, Dave Byrd - who shall remain the division’s president - said his company will be focused on objective #3 on that list: “We are going to increase communication with our customers and with the election community. Premier offers products and services that let voters cast ballots in English, Spanish and many other languages, and we will also continue to develop products that help people with disabilities vote without assistance, on the same voting equipment and with the same ballots as other voters. Premier has a very strong legacy of innovation and customer service, but our mission is to take our performance to the next level.”

While Byrd and his Premier team are working on that problem, Diebold is ready to move on to something else. As its CEO, Thomas W. Swidarski, stated today, “Establishing the elections business as a separate entity will also allow our senior management team

to fully focus our efforts on Diebold’s core global businesses in financial self-service and security.”

Last October, the Diebold name became the focus of controversy, as years of lawmaker concerns – and later outright disgust – rose to epic proportions, casting its entire gubernatorial election process in doubt. Then just weeks ago, after a University of California, Davis study exposed unresolved dangers in Diebold AccuVote systems’ integrity, the State revoked its certification along with that of three other systems. In the interim, Diebold was the subject of critical examinations in Ohio, Alaska, and Texas.

In just a few years’ time, the name which was originally synonymous with automation became inexorably linked with insecurity. It was finally too much for the parent company. Following today’s news, Diebold stock lost over 6% of its value on the New York Stock Exchange, which was already experiencing a 300+ point drop by early afternoon.