Ubuntu, USB and iPhone OS 3.0
Well, it looks like folks at Apple Corp broke it all with the new iPhone OS 3. They changed the iTunes DB format to an encrypted sqlite based one and maimed the USB protocol. This means no more Amarok for music management and no more iTunnel for synching over USB. SSH access via the WiFi still works thanks to the DevTeam and their pwnage tools, but USB link is no more, at least not until the iFuse guys fix it. In a desperate attempt to stay with Linux I gave several multimedia players from Cydia (pwnplayer, dtunes, vlc4phone) a try. Alas, they all suck in functionality and are ad ridden. Looks like Apple’s proprietary platform can not nourish open and free development like Linux does. One more example is iKeePass password management utility for the iPhohe that’s been in the AppStore approval mess for close to a year now. Seems that if Apple keeps shoving open source community aside for much longer, Android will take the lead and be the future (no it is not going to be Palm’s webOS, I lost faith in that company right after Handspring happened)
Unfortunately, the vast majority of iPhone users simply don’t care about anything you have written about, so Apple will continue to reap its crop. With that said, I still agree that Android, or some other open source based and open source friendly OS is the future. It just needs some sexy hardware (the ugly G1 doesn’t count).
The USB protocol has not been broken nor did libiphone stop working using it at any time.
This was misinformation by the DevTeam because their tools broke which had all been dependent on the MobileDevice header which itself obviously broke once Apple updated the stubs in their .dll provided by iTunes 8.2.
As libiphone implements the protocol natively and does never use any DLLs, it still works absolutely fine (and even worked on the first released out-of-the-box unjailbroken iPhone 3GS devices…).
iTunnel is really outdated and obsolete, one should use usbmuxd’s iproxy tool to create any kind of tcp/ip tunnel to the iphone (creating a ssh tunnel is trivial).
The music DBVersion change trick however does not work anylonger, but as a glimpse of hope I can tell you the new music database format has been understood by the right people already.
Unfortunately new libraries/software is required to implement the needed functionality (thus it’s rather a matter of work hours than to reverse engineer some format).