Developer and hacker, James Whelton has managed to “Jailbreak” the iPod nano, getting past its cache comparison and installing a rather simple tweak that can remove default apps and replace them with ‘blank spaces’ on the nano’s springboard. This can open up the iPod Nano to more hacks and mods from other hackers, including the ability to potentially view Movies or TV Shows, set Calendar Events and set a passcode lock.

Whelton pointed out some hidden strings that he discovered in the iPod nano OS as well.

Next is the discovery in some of the device’s plists of reference to support of Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, vCards, Calender events and so on, with a few other cool things like a passcode lock. With the bypass I figured out, I hope to enable these pretty soon. It seems like the OS is a rehashed version of the previous nano’s OS.

Details on how to jailbreak the iPod nano are said to be released in a few days. It’ll be interesting to see what Team Jailbreak will do with the newly hacked Nano. Would you want Movies and TV Shows on such a small screen? Are there any particular mods you would like on the sixth-gen nano?

Check below for a video of the hack in action.

[MacStories] [Nanohack.me]

Lately all has been quiet in regards to Apple’s MobileMe service and shady activities. In the past we’ve told you about a few separate cases of phishing scams going around. Well today we’ve heard that Oscar nominated actress, Salma Hayek’s account has been hacked.

Honestly, this is something that is really not that difficult to do, especially depending on how much information you have about a person. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account was famously hacked last year using information from Wikipedia, as have several other celebrities.

In this particular case, all that was needed was Salma’s birthday and the answer to her security question which just happened to be “What is my favorite character?”. Just in case you were wondering what the answer was, it was “Frida” which was Hayek’s most popular role in a movie. (And yes, I’m sure it is now something a bit tougher to figure out so don’t bother trying.) In the end, that is all of the information that was needed to gain access to all of her emails, calendar information, etc…

Moral of this story, choose your security questions and answers wisely… And if you’re well known, make up a fake set of answers, memorize them thoroughly, and don’t tell anyone else.

[Via Macworld]