As of now I am publishing the updated code of the standalone version, which has partially been re-written in two ways: for one it now comprises of the same functionality as the online version, and for another the coding structure has been reorganized so I can keep the two versions in unison easier. This means that any update or change made to the software will be applied to both versions: the online version will make use of the update whereas the standalone version will be published open source under the same license with the updated code.

You can download the updated code here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Let me quickly list the options which the new standalone version offers (i.e. the differences to the original publication), which are about user customizations:

• $OUTFILE_TYPE = “TXT”
  defines whether the type of the output should be in text (TXT) or comma-separated values (CSV). Please note that the file extension you define for $OUTFILE as part of the filename is not taken into consideration; so e.g. if you want to output a CSV file, setting the outfile name to “outfile.csv” is not enough, you need to specifically set $OUTFILE_TYPE to CSV.
• $NEWLINE = “\n”
  defines the format of the system dependent newline. Use \r\n on Windows and \n on Unix/Linux and Mac.
• default file opening mode is now “overwrite” ( $f_handle = fopen( $OUTFILE, “w” ); ). If you would like to append extracted text message to the output file rather than overwrite the file use “a” instead of “w“. Note that the line now moved towards the end of the file.
• Change format of output of single text messages
  In case of TXT you need to change $OUTSTRING .= “$time$senderror$NEWLINE$address$NEWLINE$text$NEWLINE$NEWLINE$NEWLINE”; to your liking and in case of CSV change $OUTSTRING .= “$address,$time,\”" . str_replace( “\”", “\”\”", $text) . “\”$NEWLINE”;.
  Make sure you only change the format string and leave the .= intact .

If you are a new user to this and don’t know what to do about the user specific CONFIGURATION section or how to run the script, please refer to the original blog post, which explains in detail how the standalone version works.

As always you can contact me with any remarks you would like to bring to my attention.

This year’s trip to Miami shouldn’t be any different: (re-)activate phone (=get a new number), top-up, fire away (=get to know ppl and write lots of texts).
However, this time it turned out to be sort of a chore, which I’ll be trying to document here.

Like I said, the first step would be to activate my phone and get a number. The last time I did this I was using the dial programming code ##847446# (which works on every VM phone), following the steps and getting a text with the new number. However this time the process couldn’t be completed and I got a note to call customer service (1-888-322-1122). Trying to do so failed with an announcement “Sorry, your phone has not been activated, yet. Please call customer service“. Great, so I can’t call customer service to activate this phone using the phone; furthermore the hotel would charge $1/min for toll-free numbers (very logical I have to admit). Luckily I also brought my home iPhone and the hotel offered free WiFi, plus I have an American VoIP account.
Using my iPhone and VoIP I finally called customer service and went through the steps of activating the phone: get a new VM account (unlike the last time, when I could just re-use the old one) with a new number, program the phone with the new MSN and MSID and getting an activation notice. However, in order to top up I again had to link my PayPal account to VM (would have been too easy if I could have just reused the old VM account where that step had already been done last year -_-).

Getting off the phone with support I went onto the website, logged into my new account and started out to connect my PayPal account. Having done that I wanted top-up – right away just like last time. However, for two reasons I was unable to complete the process: it took me a long while to figure out what the exact amount for topping-up was (would be so easy if you American guys could include VAT before labeling the total – just like the rest of the world -_-) and second the form field didn’t let me put in cent values.

Means, I would call the service line again. This time with the newly activated phone .

I described my problem and the woman said it would be no problem to issue the PayPal payment over the phone. Her telling me the final total and me giving her confirmation to hit “go”, it didn’t go through. Also following tries returned an error and she put me on hold in order to find out what the problem was. After a few minutes she got back to me and told me that this was a very rare issue and I should wait 4 hours and try it again. Apparently sometimes there is a grace period that needs to pass until the PayPal connection can be used.

It being in the middle of the night already I decided to get some rest and give this a rest until morning.

Before I’d call their number again I wanted to give it a last shot. But on their website I couldn’t use the PayPal option anymore. Great. Instead I then tried to use my credit card – however they require a US address and entering my hotel address didn’t work (even though it was just an electronic billing address).

So there I was dialing customer support again. Explaining the situation didn’t really help, but this time it even got worse. The woman blamed PayPal and something being wrong with that account – yeah right, as I had also just used it for something else and it aas working just fine. Nevertheless she didn’t give into giving the PayPal option another try, but instead she insisted on giving me the support number offered by PayPal. So much for that.

Honestly I didn’t even bother calling PayPal because I knew there was nothing wrong with the account. I basically gave up on “just pay as much as needed for exactly one month use” and went to a local store buying a top-up card, which – of course – wasn’t available with the amount I needed.
Therefore I ended up paying more than I actually needed plus wanted, but maybe that money is staying in my account without expiring and I can use it next time I get back.

Upside is, I’ve used the phone a lot during my stay and it’s just absolutely necessary to stay in contact with local people (or folks that are currently around the same area).

The online version continued development including security checks and the likes. Until I have more than 24h a day at my disposal, I will continue development on the online version only. The source code for the online version is not yet publicly available (it will be once I merge the two branches), but please do contact me if you’re interested.

The current blog post is about a small update that basically fixed the CSV format. Even though there is no “CSV standard” and a few different formats in common usage, I am refering to RFC 4180: enclosing text with double quotes and escaping double quotes with themselves.

Bottom line, feel free to use the updated online version of the free SMS extractor:

Click: SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

Yet again this isn’t really gibberish but also a continuity goof.

Check out the following two pictures and pay close attention to the blood type. While on David Webb’s dog tag blood type 0 negative is engraved, the later induction report will state blood group A positive.

I can’t think of a reason why this might as a matter of fact be intentional – why would they want to hide a person’s (even a CIA cover agent’s) blood type. Let alone I don’t know why they wouldn’t just match the reports to the military ID tags…

I have to admit, the people responsible for The Bourne Ultimatum have done a pretty good job, both with the movie in general and as far as IT authenticity is concerned. (As a small side-note: sorry, idealists, but I have not read the book)
However, there are a few things (to be followed), where they did sloppy work – remember when Nicky says “it’s being blocked by the firewall”?

To get to the point, throughout the movie we are presented with glimpses of CIA files on the big screen in the operations room. One of them is Nicky Parson’s file, some time later both hers and Jason’s are shown side by side.

Check out the category where it says “Short Summary” (e.g. including the weapons training) and compare the two images:

Note that they just copied Nicky’s information over to Jason and filled Nicky’s file with new stuff? I can’t really find a reasonable explanation why they didn’t just fill the category in Jason’s file with new values …

Oh well, they are forgiven, but stay tuned for another continuity goof in the movie (UPDATE (15/09/2011): this one)

While you’re still trying to figure out whether you should join or stay away, let me just quickly give short instructions on how to give away or receive invites for GooglePlus:

1. Create something on your stream. That’s on the main window in the middle – it doesn’t matter whether you’re posting a note or link or video and the likes
2. Share your post with the person you’d like to invite by clicking +Add circles or people to share with… and enter their email address. (At this point in time I do not know whether that email needs to be already associated with a Google account)
3. The person will receive an email with a button Learn more about Google+, which practically is their invite link

In order to get an invite, you will need a person already on Google+ (e.g. me ) to do the above.

Now, go have fun on Google+ and remember two things:

• Don’t do evil!
• Thoughts are free, but just so much …

Please also keep in mind, that the instructions (as well as the labels) might just apply to this early stage and may change in the future. I will not update this blog post but keep it a reminder of how things were in the beginning .

UPDATE (01/07/2011): Looks like Google closed that way of inviting new people, sorry folks.

Because I’m currently having more fun to do some programming in PHP than to rewrite the original script in Java (most people will have a JVM and/or JRE installed), I created a new webpage that uses the original script.

Click: SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

The usage is simple: select the SQLite database file, make customizations if desired (otherwise default values will be used) and click “Extract”. You might have to wait a little while depending on the size of your storage file. After the file has been (automatically) uploaded and messages have been extracted, you will be offered a download prompt for the result file.
See the above page for further details.

Compared to other online solutions out there, this version (as well as the original script) has more ways of tailoring the output to your own needs and the usage is utterly free. However, so far you cannot yet change the arrangement of phone number, date and message in the new online version; if you want to do that, you will still have to use the original work (which was released under CC BY 3.0).

Please leave comments about the usage into this blog post, so I can improve the page and script if necessary.

Cheers

UPDATE (21/11/2011): Correct CSV export was added.

UPDATE (05/01/2012): Now supports iOS 5 container.

Following part 1, where they just punched in random keys and numbers, we can see a higher level of “gibberish” in The Girl who played with Fire, because they bothered to put “real” text:

However, I can’t quite grasp why they put a lot of effort in contents which the viewer can see in documents and digital data (on the screen that is), but had to put a Lorem ipsum on that sheet.
Maybe it was an intern or someone having a lazy day .

Stay tuned for part 3 (which is not in the making just yet, so it might still be a while).

For a while I’ve been checking out various programs for extracting and converting text messages from the iPhone SMS storage SQLite database. For some reason they seem to be either for purchase or not doing their job well.
When I found out that all they are doing is pretty much just some simple SQL query and putting the result into various output formats, I decided to quickly write this myself, while keeping it simple and open.

Download

The choice of a programming language wasn’t easy taking into account that most iPhone users will be on Windows and the extractor should not require major alterations to the system (and doing that without the solution itself being bloated).
Even though the task can be easily done in various languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, C/C++ or Java, I decided to use PHP, because the program can stay very simple and can run with a minimal version of PHP. In addition many users with a Unix/Linux machine available will have PHP installed anyway and can also easily use the program.
That being said we can move on to the program details. The PHP script needs the iPhone SMS storage SQLite database file as input and will then convert all text messages and append them to a file in a certain format.
So far the script is configurable to a certain extent. Naturally the name of the input and output file can be modified. Furthermore you can decide whether you want to extract just incoming or outgoing texts or all of them. Last but not least a date range can be given, from which to extract the messages. See further down (or code) for details about customization.
At this point in time, it is not (yet) possible to limit extraction to a single contact. Even though it might be a common use case for many users, however the format of recipient/sender may vary (at least in my storage file), so it might be hard to determine which number formats are from the same contact.

The usage of the extractor is as follows:

1. First you will need the SMS storage container file (it is usually named 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 and can be found in the iTunes backup folder, which can be found e.g. on Windows7 in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[hexstring] or get it directly from your iPhone: /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db )
2. If you’re on Unix/Linux, make sure you have PHP5 (along with libs for sqlite) installed. If you’re on Windows, you can either use the official PHP installer [alternative: http://windows.php.net/download/] (just run the installer) or use my minimized packaged version of PHP (just unpack to a location of your desire)
3. Download the SMS Extractor for iPhone (extract_sms.php_.txt), rename it to extract_sms.php and use a text editor of your desire to make configuration changes (see below and/or follow the instructions and explanations in the code)
4. If you used the PHP installer, navigate to the folder containing extract_sms.php and double-click on it (make sure you placed the SMS storage container file in the same directory and modified the input configuration)
5. If you used my minimized version, place extract_sms.php in the same folder you unpacked the PHP archive; use Start, Run…, “cmd.exe” and navigate to the correct folder / if you’re on Unix/Linux, navigate to the folder you downloaded extract_sms.php)
6. (make sure you placed the SMS storage container file in the same directory and modified the input configuration) then run the script typing “php extract_sms.php”
7. Unless you changed the output file, you will find a file “sms.txt” in the same folder

Possible customization can be done in the following ways (look for “user specific CONFIGURATION” in extract_sms.php ):

• $DATABASE = “sms.db”
  change this to the appropriate filename if your SMS storage container file is named differently
• $TIME_FORMAT = “d.m.Y H:i:s”
  the internal text message timestamp is the number of seconds since Unix Epoch, so in order to make this human readable, provide the time format of your desire (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php for details)
• $FILTER = “ALL”
  set here whether you would like to limit extraction to only incoming text messages (“IN“), or only outgoing messages (“OUT“) or no limit (“ALL“)
• $OUTFILE = “./sms.txt”
  name for the output file, you can change this to any name with or without file extension
• date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/Berlin’)
  if you want to use a time range (see next item), you need to specify your timezone (which supposedly equals the timezone your text messages got timestamped). See http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php for available timezones
• $RANGE_BEGIN = mktime( 22, 45, 00, 11, 9, 2009 ) and/or $RANGE_END = mktime( 22, 55, 00, 11, 9, 2009 )
  if you want to use a time range, you can configure either a start or an end of range or even both. The order of comma separated digits in parentheses is: hour, min, sec, mon, day, year. Also, you need to uncomment (i.e. remove the leading //) the line of the variable(s) you want to use
• Replace file instead of appending ( $f_handle = fopen( $OUTFILE, “a” ); )
  the default behavior is to open the output file in append mode in order to avoid accidental overwrite. If you would like replace the output file instead of appending the extracted text messages, put “w” instead of “a“
• Change output format ( fwrite( $f_handle, “$time$senderror\n$address\n$text\n\n\n” ); )
  if you would like to change the format in which the script is putting your extracted text message information, you will need to change this line appropriately. However, I cannot provide a manual how to change it to your liking at this moment; you will either know what you’re doing or have to google and trial ‘n error

Please feel free to comment about the usage or drop me an email at blog {at} haraldkraft(.)de. It’s fine with me to continue development and add new (simple) features, and definitely fix bugs I might have there in PHP; just let me know .

Also, please do use my script for your adaptions; I am releasing this under CC.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Recently, when I watched the (quite brutal) movie “Unthinkable” I saw a real killer:

We see some technician punching gibberish into a spreadsheet already filled with a lot more gibberish, haha.
And it gets even better if you consider what the guy typing is actually doing. See the following spoiler to find out:

Well – so much for today and a real funny idea for a computer screen.
And as a side note: Carrie-Anne Moss also plays the main actress in The Unthinkable .