Were you one of the people who bought the first iPhone? Well I was and I loved it. Well that is until the iPhone3g came out, and then of course the iPhone3gs. Well of course i bought the iPhone3g when it came out which left me with an iPhonr2g sitting on my desk. It took me forever to figure out what I was gonna do with that iPhone. I didn’t want to sell it because it is so readily hackable, and no one in my family wanted it because it was either too much gadget or they owned a newer one. So some time around the week of Christmas, I got the crazy idea, with the help of my wife to turn the iPhone2g into a iPod touch for my 2 year old daughter. The idea seemed a bit lavish at first but I soon found myself going at it strong. I ended up re-hacking the iPhone2g so I could both unlock it and make it work without a SIM card. And let me stop there and just show you what I did.

So first things first, we need to brick this sucker so we can make it call proof without a SIM card. So you have 2 options now, you can head over to http://iphone.unlock.no and pay $25 dollars for a universal iPhone hack or you can do a bit of research and you can alternatively do it this way. First we need to get a program called “redsn0w” and you can get it here or here. Now for this article, and instance I personally used redsn0w 0.8 which requires the iphone firmware version 3.0 or 3.0.1. You can find those firmwares plus loads of others from here.

After you have downloaded the firmware and redsn0w its time to move on to the next step. When you run redsn0w and give it the location to the firmware it will ask you for if you want into install cydia, icy, and or unlock. For this because there is no support or demand for childrens applications on the hacked app install database, its not needed here so im going to just unlock the phone.The next screen will prompt you for the boot loaders. Yup because this is a older original iphone you need 2 separate boot loaders. You can aquire those here or here.

So now we get to a tricky part. redsn0w will have directions on the program window that are greyed out and become active on a timer that you can see. Follow the directions verbatim. When the phone hits the rescue mode redsn0w will take over and the magic will start to happen. Once the process is finished (10 minutes or so) its time to start adding some media suitable for a 2 year old onto the device. So I decided to drag out some of my babies favorite DVDs. One of which happens to be Mary Poppins. So in order to continue from here we have to rip the DVD and encode it to a portable format. Now there is no need for me to get into an explanation of how to rip a DVD in this article so, you can find a nice step by step tutorial here that uses free software. The rest as they say is history. I did take the time to move all but a few of the icons on to an auxiliary window on the ipod so they wouldn’t reside on the home screen. Buttons such as the phone, text messages, and so on. In return I replaced the missing buttons with some nice free games from the apple app store such as “bubble wrap”, and “tap tap revenge”.

Do you want to post your email publicly and visible for anyone who reads your blog/website to have the ability to contact you but you do not want to have your private email box spammed with ridiculous amounts of phishing emails and junk you did not ask for? What about making the email address fully click-able with a “mailto:” anchor tag. What about setting the email address automatically in a completely cloaked image, that remains anonymous at the same time? Well I think I have thought up the perfect solution for you.

The concept is really simple. Page crawlers look for mailto:myemailaddress@mydomain.com, or the key factors in there, which are ‘mailto:‘, ‘@‘, and ‘.com,.net,.org, etc’. So if we take these out of the raw HTML code then the page crawler wont see it. Now sure you can just break it up with stuff like myemailaddress -at- mydomain -dot- com, which definately will slow the crawlers down, but lets remember that the people who write these bots are smart and like a challenge.  So because the idea of breaking up or spelling out email addresses has gotten more popular, its also gotten common to include a small dictionary of common words that are releated to email addresses and then to just grab a string and then convert it back to the real email address.

The Idea here is to take the above mention concept and move to the next extreme.  Lets encode our email address when we bust it up and it will quite literally disappear into the website and yet it will also remain in plain site for us humans.  Also because we have made it for all practical purposes invisible to bots and crawlers, we can put back some of the features we removed before, like put the link back in and make the email address clickable once more.

So.. lets have a look at some code.

First thing we need to do when we grab out email address out of a database is to give it a simple encoding like so…

function strToHex($string, $x=0) {
	$hex='';
	for($i=0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) {
		$hex .= dechex(ord($string[$i]));
	}
	echo strtoupper($hex);
}

Next we need to work some javascript magic on it. For this I prefer to use jQuery.

jQuery.fn.hex_mail = function(username, domain_name, domain_ext, link_text) {
    var conusername = DoAsciiHex(username);
    var condomain = DoAsciiHex(domain_name);
    var condomext = DoAsciiHex(domain_ext);
    var link_text;
    var email;
    var useImage = 0;

	if(link_text) {
		if(link_text == " ") {
			useImage = 1;
		} else {
        	link_txt = link_text;
    	}
    } else {
        link_txt = conusername + "@" + condomain + "." + condomext;
    }
    if(useImage == 1) {
    	mail_link = "";
    	jQuery(this).wrap(mail_link);
	} else {
	    mail_link = "" + link_txt +"";
	    jQuery(this).append(mail_link);
    }
};

Now what the javascript is doing is, taking the encoded text, decoding it and then placing the text into a dynamically created anchor tag that is only visible within the DOM. Sure we can just put non-encoded strings of text into the same script and stuff that into the head of the doc, and it will do the same thing, but, the keywords i mentioned earlier are still present. The encoding provides the javascript with a nifty cloaking device if you will.

Next let slap the whole thing into some HTML and have a look.

 < html >
	< head >
		
		
		


	< /head >
        < body >
Example that uses your readable email address.

Example that uses a hidden email.


        < /body >
< /html >

In the above code we are doing both putting the email in plain site, as well as making the email link hidden and only visible via click or mouseover event in the status bar.

Want to take it to the next extreme? how about dynamically embed your email in an image thats encoded, cloaked, and now not even really text??

check this out.

function strToJpeg($string, $size, $fcolor, $bgcolor, $hex){

header('Content-type: image/jpeg');
if($hex == 1) {
	$string = hexToStr($string);
}

$len = (strlen($string)*8.75);

$txtbox = imagecreatetruecolor($len, $size+5);

$fcolor = explode(',',rgbColor($fcolor));
$fcolor = imagecolorallocate($txtbox,$fcolor[0],$fcolor[1],$fcolor[2]);
//$fcolor = imagecolorallocate($txtbox,0,0,0);
$bgcolor = explode(',',rgbColor($bgcolor));
//echo $bgcolor;
$bgcolor = imagecolorallocate($txtbox,$bgcolor[0],$bgcolor[1],$bgcolor[2]);
//$bgcolor = imagecolorallocate($txtbox,255,255,255);

imagefilledrectangle($txtbox,0,0,$len,$size+5,$bgcolor);

$font = 'arial.ttf';

imagettftext($txtbox,$size,0,0,12,$fcolor,$font,$string);
imagejpeg($txtbox);
imagedestroy($txtbox);
}
strToJpeg($_GET['string'],$_GET['size'],$_GET['fcolor'],$_GET['bgcolor'],$_GET['hex']);

If we take the encoded email address parts, and put them all back together and decode them then use the PHP GD libs to create an image out of the text. Then we can use the javascript function from above to "wrap" the image into an anchor. like so

This option is for those of us who are so paranoid that we are afraid to go to rehab.

For now thats a start on the concept. I may revisit this in the future and give some more incite or ideas. For now if you want to look at some real working code, download my example.

||Download|--|Example||

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