Archive for the ‘iPhone 2.0 Unlocked’ Category
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Emma Linnane in her apartment in Dublin. Its value has declined by $100,000.
The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices swooning from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even parts of northern India.
Multimedia
This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic growth worldwide, affecting not just homes but jobs as well.
In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the last decade are falling back to earth. Property analysts predict that some countries, like this one, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.
To some extent, the world’s problems are a result of American contagion. As home financing and credit tightens in response to the crisis that began in the subprime mortgage market, analysts worry that other countries could suffer the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have afflicted California, Florida and other states.
Citing the reverberations of the American housing bust and credit squeeze, the International Monetary Fund last Wednesday cut its forecast for global economic growth this year and warned that the malaise could extend into 2009.
“The problems in the U.S. are being transmitted to Europe,” said Michael Ball, professor of urban and property economics at the University of Reading in Britain, who studies housing prices. “What’s happening now is an awful lot more grief than we expected.”
For countries like Ireland, where prices were even more inflated than in the United States, it has been a painful education, as homeowners learn the American vocabulary of misery.
“We know we’re already in negative equity,” said Emma Linnane, a 31-year-old university administrator.
She bought a cozy, one-bedroom apartment in the Dublin suburbs with her fiancé, Paul Colgan, in May 2006, at the peak of the market. They paid $575,000 — at least $100,000 more than it would fetch today. “I sometimes get shivers thinking about it,” Ms. Linnane said, “but I’ll let the reality hit me when I go to sell it.”
That reality is spreading. Once-sizzling housing markets in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are cooling rapidly, as nervous Western Europeans stop buying investment properties in Warsaw, Tallinn, Estonia and other real estate Klondikes.
Further east, in India and southern China, prices are no longer surging. With stock markets down sharply after reaching heady levels, people do not have as much cash to buy property. Sales of apartments in Hong Kong, a normally hyperactive market, have slowed recently, with prices for mass-market flats starting to drop.
In New Delhi and other parts of northern India, prices have fallen 20 percent over the last year. Sanjay Dutt, an executive director in the Mumbai office of Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, describes it as an erosion of confidence.
Much of the retrenchment seems to be following the basic law of gravity: what goes up must come down. With low interest rates helping to inflate housing bubbles in many countries, economists said the confluence of falling prices was predictable, if unsettling.
This is not the first housing downturn to cross borders, but its reverberations have been amplified by the integration of financial markets. When faulty American mortgages end up on the books of European banks, the problems of the United States aggravate the world’s problems.
Consider Britain, which had one of Europe’s most robust housing markets, with less of an oversupply than in Ireland or Spain. Then last summer came the subprime crisis across the Atlantic.
Within two months, mortgage approvals dropped 31 percent, compared with the previous year. And by March, average housing prices had fallen 2.5 percent, the largest monthly decline since 1992.
“The boom in house prices was actually much bigger here than in the U.S.,” said Kelvin Davidson, an economist at Capital Economics in London. “If anything, people should be more worried than in the U.S.”
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iPhone 2.0 Unlocked, Runs All Apps
Posted on: March 13, 2008
- In: 2.0 | Apple | iPhone 2.0 | iPhone 2.0 Unlocked | Unlocked
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Update: Video of project Pwonage after the jump. The beta 2.0 firmware that comes with the iPhone SDK has been modified to unlock the iPhone and run any application. Part of the Pwnage Project, the hacked firmware will allow you to do anything you want, including the installation of both official and unofficial apps, and even patches. We got the exclusive details directly from the DevTeam, including the fact that it is going to be extremely hard for Cupertino to close this new hole:
pwned firmware means it’s custom [firmware], you can have it install anything you would ever want 🙂 Pwned works with some magic, it will be hard to close but nothing is impossible (from Apple) with a mindtwist. But first, we will enjoy 🙂
They told us that this is all part of their previous Pwnage project, which instead of trying to hack into the iPhone, directly patches the firmware itself to both unlock it, so you can use the iPhone with any carrier you want, and allow you to install any applications you want. You can see how it works here:
According to the Dev Team, the custom 2.0 firmware (technically, 1.2.0,) is now up and running without problems in many of their iPhones, running unsigned applications without a single problem. However, current Installer.app applications need to be changed: “they changed lots of the API, a lot. We will see how much has to be changed to the Toolchain [the previous development tool for iPhone independent developers] to still work after 2.0.”
The best news, however, is this: “the hacked 1.2 firmware works with anything. AT&T and others, it’s pwned. And Apple will not really be able to patch it this time… somehow :-)”
I’m flabbergasted. As Han Solo would say, “that’s one in a million, kid!” Once again.
The cool thing here is that Dev Team told us that this is 1) a true unlock and 2) Apple will have a very difficult time closing this hole. That’s the news, not just jailbreak—in fact, it’s not even jailbreak in the classic sense. It’s built-in the hacked firmware, which allows for installation of any application, unsigned or “Apple Approved”
In other words, true carrier and applications independence. And for a long time.
Note: as you can see, the Dev Team is still working hard in making the iPhone a completely open, carrier-independent platform. If you want to help them, please send a Paypal donation to iphone.devteam@gmail.com or join them at hackint0sh.org.
Valleywag - valleywag.wordpress.com 
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