If you were sold a house, wouldn't you (the owner, after all) have the ability and full freedom to: replace/reconfigure walls, plumbing, electrical, etc. When you own a car, aren't you free to replace parts (i.e. 'soup' or 'pimp' it up)? Why should people see it that only law enforcement or 'evil' people (and of course the holy @ Apple) should have similar, corresponding freedoms with _our_ property??

We see this, and act like we're witnessing a crime. Should be more the same level of guilt as watching "This Old House" on PBS.

How is this 'forensics' and not 'hacking'?

A lot of computer forensics is hacking commoditized for law enforcement. If there is data you need to analyse that you can't get you need to "hack" it.

See for example - http://www.lostpassword.com/hdd-decryption.htm

Funky, it uses a firewire exploit.

It's based mostly on intent, I believe.

forensics uses hacking to get at data.

I think this is from a book (?) on general iPhone Forensics (which in my experience is a wide and incredibly tedious field :P) so hence the Forensics title I guess.

Bought the eBook version when a friend's iPhone got wedged during an update, and an Apple Store "Genius" recommended proceeding with a reformat, losing hundreds of baby pictures.

Was able to recover 90%+ of the images using the jailbreak/dd/file-carver technique as outlined in the book. So, thanks, "iPhone Forensics"!

Why only 90%? I would naively expect that you'd either be able to get in and recover them all, or not.

Well, if reformatted and updated/reinstalled then it possibly overwrote some of the deleted sectors - rendering some files unrecoverable.

As well as the potential overwriting. File carvers have trouble recovering fragmented files. They might produce corrupted files, or nothing depending upon the details of the file format.

The update that hung (and was forced-to-completion by allowing a reformat) was a major revision. (It might have been IPhone OS 1->2, even... I don't recall) So not only did the reformat touch sectors all over, but the package of standard stuff grew, and I even think Apple's default partitioning scheme may have been adjusted as part of the update.

Having problems viewing this (video blocked at work and won't play on IPhone). Could someone please summarize?

It doesn't seem to be a simple process like a bug that lets you in. You have to have complete control of the device and load software onto the phone. The video is over an hour and moves very slowly, I didn't watch the whole thing but I think that's the gist of it.

There are vastly easier ways to do it.

Example:

http://www.iphoneinsecurity.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wS3AMbXRLs

(there are other intricate little ways to get the same effect. Jailbreaking is easiest but it affects the integrity of any evidence)

Yeah, that's what I got to. Summary: the title on this post is completely misleading.