Apple has just released iOS 4.1 Beta 2 for developers. Both the firmware and SDK are available from the iPhone Developer Center for members enrolled in the iPhone Developer Standard or Enterprise Program.

The SDK is build 10M2305a and the firmware is build 8B5091b.

Developers will have to let us know whats new in the comments and we’ll update the post. Below are the changes Apple made for the first beta of iOS 4.1.

Changes in Beta 1:
● Signal Bars fixed and taller
● New Baseband (02.07.01)
● Game Center is back with new look (see screenshot)
● Camera Switch and Flash buttons reposition in landscape mode (see screenshot)
● You can now choose to add Favorite as voice or FaceTime.
● Spell Check can be turned off in Settings
● FaceTime and Game Center Parental Controls
● Full Bluetooth AVRCP Support

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Great news for the jailbreak community!!! The Library of Congress has made a decision that jailbreaking your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch in order to install applications not approved by Apple and/or to unlock is legal under new rules announced today.

Associated Press stated, the decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works. Every three years, the Library of Congress authorizes such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material. Another exemption will allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a press release outlining the three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions made today.

The Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

“Copyright law has long held that making programs interoperable is fair use,” confirmed Corynne McSherry, EFF’s Senior Staff Attorney. “It’s gratifying that the Copyright Office acknowledges this right and agrees that the anticircumvention laws should not interfere with interoperability.”

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Below are full details on the DCMA Legislation;

Section 1201(a)(1) of the copyright law requires that every three years I am to determine whether there are any classes of works that will be subject to exemptions from the statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. I make that determination at the conclusion of a rulemaking proceeding conducted by the Register of Copyrights, who makes a recommendation to me. Based on that proceeding and the Register’s recommendation, I am to determine whether the prohibition on circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works is causing or is likely to cause adverse effects on the ability of users of any particular classes of copyrighted works to make noninfringing uses of those works. The classes of works that I designated in the previous proceeding expire at the end of the current proceeding unless proponents of a class prove their case once again.

This is the fourth time that I have made such a determination. Today I have designated six classes of works. Persons who circumvent access controls in order to engage in noninfringing uses of works in these six classes will not be subject to the statutory prohibition against circumvention.

As I have noted at the conclusion of past proceedings, it is important to understand the purposes of this rulemaking, as stated in the law, and the role I have in it. This is not a broad evaluation of the successes or failures of the DMCA. The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether current technologies
that control access to copyrighted works are diminishing the ability of individuals to use works in lawful, noninfringing ways. The DMCA does not forbid the act of circumventing copy controls, and therefore this rulemaking proceeding is not about technologies that control copying. Nor is this rulemaking about the ability to make or distribute products or services used for purposes of circumventing access controls, which are governed by a different part of section 1201.

In this rulemaking, the Register of Copyrights received 19 initial submissions proposing 25 classes of works, many of them duplicative in subject matter, which the Register organized into 11 groups and published in a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking comments on the proposed classes. Fifty-six comments were submitted. Thirty-seven witnesses appeared during the four days of public hearings in Washington and in Palo Alto, California. Transcripts of the hearings, copies of all of the comments, and copies of other information received by the Register have been posted on the Copyright Office’s website.

The six classes of works are:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications
, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

(4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if:

(i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and
(ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law.

(5) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace; and

(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

All of these classes of works find their origins in classes that I designated at the conclusion of the previous rulemaking proceeding, but some of the classes have changed due to differences in the facts and arguments presented in the current proceeding. For example, in the previous proceeding I designated a class that enable film and media studies professors to engage in the noninfringing activity of making compilations of film clips for classroom instruction. In the current proceeding, the record supported an expansion of that class to enable the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into documentary films and noncommercial videos for the purpose of criticism or comment, when the person engaging in circumvention reasonably believes that it is necessary to fulfill that purpose. I agree with the Register that the record demonstrates that it is sometimes necessary to circumvent access controls on DVDs in order to make these kinds of fair uses of short portions of motion pictures.

Due to few issues with some of the native iPhone 4 Apps such as “FaceTime” the new SPIRIT Jailbreak is delayed until further notice…

Some people thought the new Jailbreak will be released today… (Why? – We didn’t hear anything like that)… anyways… MuscleNerd has confirmedthat the new jailbreak wont be released today once again because they are still trying to work out some bugs that cause problems after the Jailbreak.

Not to make it a daily thing, but since somehow people thought it would be today: the new JB+unlock won’t be out today

(there are issues with important apps like Facetime that need to be figured out…no sense releasing a half-broken JB)

Some of the other issues were talked about in recent interview by Make It Work with Saurik – Jay Freeman and you can watch this interview here

Saurik discusses The History of Jailbreaking in an exclusive interview for Make It Work Radio, which aired Saturday July 24, 2010.

He also talks about the upcoming @comex jailbreak. You can watch two videos of the interview below…

Part One

Part Two

Jay Freeman, also better known as Saurik, was interviewed by “Make it Work” where he talked about the iPhone 4 jailbreak and Cydia

See video below

Comex has announced through Twitter that he is not waiting for iOS 4.1 to release his new Spirit jailbreak.

I’m not waiting for 4.1 so I hope everyone has SHSH blobs saved. :p

SHSH blobs for 4.0.1 or 4.0 are fine; AFAIK there are no substantive differences except the bars

It is imperative that you save your SHSH blobs using the Firmware Umbrealla

Once the jailbreak is out you will be able to unlock your phones using UltraSn0w. The iPhone Dev-Team has announced that they will be adding the iPhone 4 unlock to ultrasn0w as well.

Right after the iPhone 4 Conference this afternoon Apple had posted a webpage on their site which talks about antennas and also how every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way.

To demonstrate this, Apple people have tested iPhone 4 alongside other smartphones which include the BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, Samsung Omnia II, iPhone 3GS.

The opposite of amplification, attenuation happens whenever a signal is obstructed. All antennas — including television, radio, GPS, and cellular antennas — can experience attenuation. And with most antennas, the density and composition of the human hand can cause attenuation to a greater degree than some other materials. On a mobile phone, signal loss typically occurs when your hand attenuates the most sensitive part of the antenna. In the photos and videos below, we demonstrate how different grips cause attenuation on many popular smartphones — including iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS

BlackBerry Bold 9700
In our tests, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 dropped from 5 bars to 1 bar when held in a way that attenuated the signal.

HTC Droid Eris
In our tests, the HTC Droid Eris dropped from 4 bars to 0 bars when held in a way that attenuated the signal.

Samsung Omnia II
In our tests, the Samsung Omnia II dropped from 4 bars to 1 bar when held in a way that attenuated the signal.

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Not many of us could make it to the Apple Conference on July 16 2010 event, so if you want to relive and watch the entire Conference you can do so here.

Apple has uploaded the entire iPhone 4 Conference on both their official website, and on their YouTube channel so that you don’t miss some of the most important announcements by Apple in recent times.

Click Here to watch the stream

You can also read the entire Conference here

10:50AM Gdgt:
Q: Is there anything you could have said in the launch keynote to lower expectations?
Steve: I’ve thought about that a LOT. We didn’t fully understand if there were problems at that point. We might have set the expectation that smartphones have weak spots… but the fact is, most smartphones seem to have the same characteristic as the iPhone 4. If you grip them in a certain way they lose signal strength dramatically, especially in a low signal strength area. And one of the things we’ve learned is that as a leader in the smartphone world now, we need to educate. So what we need was data. And now we’ve got some and we’re sharing it now.

10:48AM Gdgt:
Q: Do Apple customers have to choose between form and function?
A Steve: No. The Retina Display in the iPhone 4 is being widely hailed as the best display ever created. … We try to have our cake and eat it too, we try to have great design and great performance. If you look at our products, that’s what we deliver.

10:46AM Engadget:
Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors?
Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we’re doing a lot to help them with any issues they’re seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5… I don’t think I owe them an apology.

10:44AM Engadget:
Q: Were you told about the design before the phone was released?
Steve: Are you talking about the Bloomberg article? That’s a crock, and we’ve challenged them to show proof that that. If anyone had said this thing has problems, we would have dispatched people to deal with that issue.

10:43AM MacWorld:
Q: Ryan from GDGT. You can cause the signal drop with one finger, not a whole grip. A from
Mansfield: On any phone, your body is a signal absorber. And none of us has a walkie-talkie style antenna anymore….

10:41AM MacWorld:
Q: Is this a PR problem? Should Apple have had more iPhones in more hands, earlier? A: Well we did, and we do now, and most people aren’t seeing it. If we did this all over again, we’d try to come up with some mitigation, but so far nobody in the industry has been able to do it.

10:41AM Engadget:
Q: I can’t get my Bold to drop right now, maybe you can show me how to do it?
Steve: You may not see it in certain areas.

10:40AM Engadget:
Q: Are you doing anything else to address the issue? Perhaps changing hardware?
Steve: You know, the 3GS has the same problem. We’re getting reports from customers that this is better than the 3GS. So I don’t know changing the antenna design would help — I don’t know what our next antenna design will look like.

10:38AM Macworld:
Q: How’s your health?
Jobs: I’m fine. I was better earlier this week, on vacation in Hawaii. But I thought it was important to come back for this. I’m fine. Thanks.

10:38AM:
Q&A with Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Bob Mansfield

10:37AM MacWorld:
The problem here is, Smartphones are limited, we made ours very visible, some people chose to demonstrate it, we screwed up with the display of the bars. So we are giving everyone a case and if you still have a problem, we’ll give you a full refund. But the data supports the fact that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone in the world, and there is no “antennagate,” there is a challenge for the entire smartphone industry someday to improve so there are no weak spots on any phone. We love our customers. And we’re going to try to take care of every single one.

10:35AM Engadget:
So we love our users. We also connect users with great apps and developers, and great content through iTunes, and really bring content creation and our users together. We love our users so much that we built 300 Apple retails stores for them to give them the best buying experience in the world… with Genius bars, and seminars. We had 60m people through our doors last quarter. We do this because we love our users, and if we screw up, we pick ourselves up and we try harder. And when we succeed, they reward us by staying our users. We take this really personally. Maybe we should have a wall of PR people keeping us away from this stuff, but we don’t, we take it really personally. So we’ve worked the last 22 days on this trying to solve the problem. And we think we’ve gotten to the heart of the problem.”

10:32AM Gdgt:
“On July 30th we’re going to bring the iPhone to 17 more countries — these are the same we announced before. In ending, I’d like to just give you a feel of what we care about, how we operate, and how we make decisions.”

“We love our users. We try very hard to surprise and delight them. We work our asses off. And it’s great, and we have a blast doing it. And we make some pretty interesting products for them — Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, the Apple TV… we make some pretty great products.”

10:31AM Engadget:
“And if you’re not happy, you can bring the phone back. We’ll give you a full refund within 30 days. No restocking fee. We want to make everyone happy, and if we can’t make you happy we’ll give you a full refund. So I have some other updates. We’re tracking some problems with the proximity sensor and we’re working on it. White iPhone, we’re going to start shipping at the end of the month.”

10:30AM MobileCrunch:
We can’t make enough bumpers, so we will offer a choice of cases. You can apply on our website late next week. Pick a case, zoom, we’ll send it off to you.

10:29AM gdgt:
“Secondly: a lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem. Okay. Great. Let’s give everyone a case. We want to give everyone is going to get a free case.”

10:27AM gdgt:
“When our engineers and scientists look at this data, it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that there is a problem — but it’s affecting a very small percentage of our users. I myself have gotten over 5000 emails from users telling me their iPhone works fine, and they can’t figure out what this is about. Having said this, we care about EVERY user. And we’re not going to stop until every one is happy. But it’s important to understand the scope of the issue — the data says the issue has been blown so far out of proportion, it’s incredible. It’s fun to have a story, but it’s less fun to be on the other end of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. Yesterday we released iOS 4.0.1 that fixes some of these bugs with our algorithm. We recommend every iPhone owner update to it.”

10:26AM Engadget:
When the 3GS came out, we didn’t change the design from the 3G. So there were already lots of cases out there for the phone. And more than 80% of new buyers left the store with a case. Now the new phone doesn’t fit those cases, and we can’t make these bumpers fast enough, so only 20% leave the store with a case… but we’re going to figure it out.

10:26AM MobileCrunch:
“Even that’s too much for us. I have my own pet theory on this: when the iPhone 3GS came out, we didn’t change the design. There were a number of cases available, on day one. The iPhone 4 has a radically new design, so none of the cases fit, and we can’t make enough of our bumper cases.”

10:23AM Gdgt:
“One more data point. AT&T has given us the early call drop rate just a couple days ago. They log call drops, it helps them improve their network. AT&T won’t give out the absolute call drop data for competitive reasons, but they’ll let us release the delta. But how do the call drops on iPhone 4 compare to 3GS a year ago per 100 calls? we believe the iPhone’s antenna is superior, the data says the iPhone 4 drops more calls than the 3GS. But how many more calls per hundred does it drop? Again, listening to ‘Antennagate’ on the web, it must be dropping many more calls! The iPhone 4 drops less than ONE call per hundred than the 3GS. Less than one.

10:21AM Engadget:
“Let’s keep going. So smartphones have weaknesses, and AppleCare data shows only 0.55% have called in about reception issues. The third, return rates… AT&T has a ‘buyer’s remorse’ clause, you can return a phone no questions asked. Apple has the same thing. So what are our return rates? Well we’re going to compare it to the iPhone 3GS… In the early days of the iPhone 3GS return rates were 6%… below the average, we were happy with that… so for the iPhone 4? You think half the people must be returning their phones with what you read online… well it’s 1.7% — less than a third of the 3GS returns.”

10:18AM MacWorld:
We have learned: Smartphones have weak spots. You will drop reception. Next, we have gotten some very interesting information from AppleCare. Whenever anyone calls in with a problem, it’s logged and we have the statistics. And we asked, what’s the percent of iPhone 4 users who have called AppleCare with any issues about antenna or reception, or anything near. 0.55% of all iPhone customers have called AppleCare with an antenna issue. So this doesn’t really jive with what you read about this problem.

10:17AM MobileCrunch:
We do a lot of testing. “We’ve invest over 100 million dollars in these rooms”. “The iPhone 4 went through all of these tests. We KNEW that if you held it in a certain way, the bars would go down.”

“We didn’t think it’d be a big problem. Phones aren’t perfect. It’s a challenge for the entire industry.”

10:16 Gdgt:
“X marks the spot. You know exactly where to [not] hold it! … we screwed up on our algorithm. Again, all smartphones seem to do this — we haven’t figured out our way around the laws of physics. Yet.”

10:14AM Gdgt:
“This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren’t perfect. It’s a challenge for the whole industry, and we’re doing the best we can. But every phone has week spots. Now, we’re not perfect: we made it very visible (with a little help from some of our friends from certain websites).”

10:13AM: Engadget:
“Samsung Omnia II — it’s got 4 bars to start… we grip it in a not unusual way… this one has a long hysteresis in their algorithm… None of this is standardized… and so again, you’ll see it go back up. They go back up faster than they go down.”

10:11AM Engadget:
“There’s the Bold, 5 bars to 1 bar.” “Next, the Droid Eris.” “Starts off with 4 bars… and the time it takes for the bars to go down has to do with the algorithm… so it goes down to zero bars, and then it goes back up.”

10:09AM Gdgt:
So we want to find out what the real problem is before starting to work on solutions. So we’ve been working our butts off to come up with real solutions. “‘Antennagate’ — it doesn’t seem like a good idea if you touch your phone in a certain way and the bars go down. But one of the first things we learned: it’s certainly not unique to the iPhone.” “We did our own testing — let me show you an example of some other smartphones. First, BB Bold 9700, perhaps the most popular business smartphone.” Video showing the bars — they drop from four or five to one. “Pretty much identical to the videos on the web about the iPhone 4.”

10:07AM MacWorld:
But before we go into that, I want to talk about the problems and about the data we’ve got” that informs us and helps us make our users happy. “We have sold well over 3 million since we launched it 3 weeks ago”. PC World namechecked as listing iPhone as #1 phone. Highest customer satisfaction of any iPhone or smartphone ever. owever, we started getting some reports of people having some issues with the antenna system, which is very advanced…

We heard about this 22 days ago and have been working our butts off. It’s not like we’ve had our heads in the sand for 3 months; it’s been 22 days. And Apple is an engineering driven company. We have some of the finest engineers here in the world, in the areas that help us create our products. So we want to find out what the real problem is before starting to work on solutions. So we’ve been working our butts off to come up with real solutions

10:06AM Gdgt:
Steve: “Good morning, thank you for joining us! We saw that on YouTube today and we wanted to share it. We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We know that, you know that. But we want to make all our users happy. If you don’t know that, you don’t know Apple. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to do that.”

10:04AM Engadget:
Oh my. “The iPhone 4 antenna song” just came on!

“There’s an awful lot of hoopla… about the iPhone antenna… Oh sure I can make it happen, but in terms of daily usage… I have yet to drop a call… Hey let’s all sing this song: if you don’t want an iPhone 4 don’t buy it, if you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back. Bring it back to the Apple store… but you know you won’t.”

10:02AM MobileCrunch:
We’re still waiting for the event to start. Some elevatory smooth jazz is playin’. The event is reaaally small.

9:59AM Gdgt:
We’re in and seated! This is definitely the smallest Apple event I’ve ever seen.

9:57AM Engadget:
Okay we’re in our seats… and some smooth, smooth jazz is playing. The room is not completely full — not surprising given the short notice.

Long needed iOS 3.2.1 update for iPad (WiFi and 3G) has just been released by Apple to fix and improve the WiFi connectivity issue.

iPad WiFi and 3G users who currently love their Jailbroken iPad MUST STAY THE HELL AWAY from this update (iOS 3.2.1) until the new Jailbreak is available from Dev-Team or Comex.

Updating to iOS 3.2.1 WILL result in update of the existing 3.2 Firmware / OS, which will patch the exploit on your iPad, so you WILL lose your jailbreak.

You wont be able to Jailbreak it until a new exploit is found and/or Jailbreak Tool is released. At this point the new jailbreak is not ready so you will be out of luck for a little bit. Here is what Comex said on his twitter account.

Comex: 3.2.1 and 4.0.1 out. if you want an unlock, DO NOT UPDATE. No, the jailbreak is not ready yet.

Apple iOS 3.2.1 for iPad contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

● Improved Wi-Fi connectivity
● Fixed an issue that could prevent copy and paste of single-page PDF attachments in Mail
● Addressed an issue that could cause video playback to freeze
● Improved reliability of video-out when using iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter
● Added Bing as an option for Safari’s search field

If you don’t care about Jailbreaking your iPad then to update to iOS 3.2.1 for iPad, all you need to do is to connect your iPad with your computer via USB and start iTunes.

You should now see a message window stating that there is an update available for your iPad and asking you if you would like to upgrade to it (iOS 3.2.1).

Simply click on “Download and Install” button to get on to the new iOS 3.2.1 firmware