iPhone update: facts and fiction at Engadget.

If you haven't already bitten the bullet and taken your unlocked iPhone down that scariest of paths, the 1.1.1 update, we're here to sort out a bit of the hearsay from the actual and fairly inconvenient truth. Even if you have already updated, or never even unlocked or jailbroke your iPhone to begin with, there's still a lot to learn, so let's dive in, shall we?

Most people with a jailbroken iPhone will end up with a "factory-fresh" iPhone after the 1.1.1 firmware update. Your mileage may vary, and isolated incidents of bricking have occurred, but most people are just going to have a 3rd party-free, AT&T-only iPhone in their pocket when the day is through, and bricking seems to be just as common for a virgin iPhones as for jailbroken ones. As for when we'll have full use of the iPhone again is unclear, but TUAW's Erica Sadun says "don't expect a jailbreak anytime soon," which doesn't seem promising. Apparently the security is going to be a whole lot harder to crack this time around...

Gizmodo asks and answers my question:

Could Apple have been able to upgrade iPhones without the likely possibility of bricking the iPhone? (According to Apple, their firmware will likely and "permanently" make the device "inoperable.") Yes, it could have been done. As someone in the Dev Team core puts it:

Apple has multiple ways of upgrading the [firmware of the] baseband [radio chip] without committing a 500,000-phone massacre...

(Geeky explanation follows)

Great. A company at war with its most savvy customers.

But wait...

Will the iPhone Dev Team revert the iPhone to its original state?

Yes, they have said before they are working on this and they have code already written to do so.

This code, however, won't unlock the iPhone again, it'll just revert it to factory state. New unlocking software may come soon thereafter. There's more information on this, but we can't use it in this article yet.

Escalation. Stay tuned.

Unveiling men in the Arab world. Asia Times Online. This commentary is an un-Western read.

...Most men in our societies are more veiled than any of these women. A man's veil is an abstract one, created by him at will and not imposed by God. It is a veil against freedom and education. It is a veil against new ideas and dialogue. It is this man-veil that makes him walk up to the Danish Embassy and set it ablaze, thinking that this will lead him directly to heaven.

It is this man-veil that accounts today for so much ignorance in the Arab and Muslim world... It is this man-veil that produces men who cannot accept women as equals, or lets them debate whether a woman's toes should be revealed in public, while other people around the world are studying astronomy, genetics, and informatics.

Gutter art. Click the photo to see the pipes.

Message to the People of Burma from the Dalai Lama.