Most of the tech world knows that Verizon is having a press conference today to announce they would be offering the iPhone. What I didn’t expect was that AT&T would try their best to push me away just minutes before the event started.
Tag: iphone
About 10 years ago, when I was wearing the very unique hat of “Mac gaming journalist”, I got to meet a lot of remarkable people. One such person was Corey Tamas, who I met just as he was taking over Mike Dixon’s much beloved Mac Gamer’s Ledge and transitioning it into MacGamer.com, which recently relaunched after a few years of hiatus. Corey is a family man with a huge heart, a big Doctor Who fan (like bow ties, Doctor Who fans are cool), and one of the people that I will forever consider part and parcel of “Mac gaming”. He’s good people.
That said, sometimes he writes things I just can’t agree with, which brings us to today’s “10 Reasons Gamers Should Choose a Mac Over an iPhone/iPad“. Besides being a weird apples vs. oranges comparison – why not have both? – the ten reasons range from shaky to silly to flat-out wrong. Corey has authorized me to do my worst, so as a general survey of what’s going on with iOS gaming, here’s 10 Reasons Corey Tamas Is Wrong.
Categories
Enabling Data Protection in iOS 4
For all of my friends and readers with existing iPhone/iPod Touch hardware, today is an exciting day: iOS 4 is now available via iTunes. But before you go rushing to update your phone, let me give you one small piece of advice:
Apple has done a great job bringing some of the enterprise security features (complex passcodes, wipe on 10 failures, etc) to regular users as part of the upgrade. One of the new features in iOS 4 that has been underreported on is called “Data Protection“. From my understanding, Data Protection is meant to correct some of the issues with the original hardware encryption method introduced last year on the 3GS and 3rd Gen iPod Touch. It also provides developers with better APIs for encrypting your data, so that if you’re carrying around your financial data or health information, you can get an additional level of security. Additionally, there’s no discernible performance hit.
Sounds great, right? There’s a tiny catch: if you’re upgrading from iOS 3, the filesystem needs to be rebuilt from scratch to enable this feature. So if you have an iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch 3rd Gen, you need to do a backup-factory restore-data restore installation of iOS 4. To break this into discrete steps:
- Plug in your iPhone.
- Let it backup through iTunes.
- Rather than clicking “Upgrade”, click “Restore”.
- Let iTunes download the installer and do a complete restore.
- When the installation is done, iTunes will prompt you about restoring from the backup you just took. Do so.
- Wait the somewhat lengthy amount of time as all your data is put back onto your phone.
You can confirm this has been done by going to Preferences -> General -> Passcode Lock and scrolling to the very bottom, where you should see “Data Protection is enabled.”
That’s it. You will need to set a passcode to get the benefit of this (but you should have that anyhow); iPhone 4 users will automatically have this out of the box. You are certainly allowed to just do a regular upgrade, but you won’t get data protection (and if you’re in an enterprise, know that configuration profiles can check against this as a pre-requisite.) And for those on earlier hardware – sorry, you lack the hardware chip to do the encryption.
Developers who are interested in the technical details or in leveraging Data Protection should check out Session 209, “Securing Application Data”, in the WWDC 10 videos.
Enjoy the upgrade.