On Jailbreaking and JailbreakMe.com
As you’re probably aware (because if you’re reading this, you probably follow me on Twitter, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’re either delusional and think I’m funny or you’re interested in Apple stuff), jailbreaking the iPhone has been ruled legal and a new vulnerability in iOS’ PDF reader has been exploited for the second web-based iDevice jailbreak so far (and the easiest jailbreak, certainly).
These two major events in the iPhone hacking community have stirred up some resentment towards Apple that I feel compelled to address because it’s starting to annoy me.
Firstly: Stop yelling at the iPhone hackers for discussing the details of their exploits. Apple are Apple, and they’re going to find these vulnerabilities and patch them with or without help from the Dev Team. However, jailbreaking an iPhone always requires complete access to the filesystem (how else are you going to install Cydia?). This is a major issue, because it means unverified and potentially malicious code can run with absolutely no restrictions on your device. This is not good. You want Apple to fix these holes. Even after you’re jailbroken, there are lots of ways to have the security of your phone compromised (for example, not changing the root password is a great way to lose your personal information), and the majority of jailbreakers probably aren’t careful about these things. This is why Apple restricts access to the iPhone’s internal workings, and while we may not agree 100% with how they do so, we have to respect the fact that it works for the majority of people who don’t know/care about protecting their phone from malicious attacks.
Secondly: Stop picking on Apple for not “opening” up their phone. Yes, we’d like it to be more open to developers and users, but we can’t simply ignore what Apple’s done for us so far. A few years ago, we didn’t even have an SDK. With each major iOS release, Apple’s opening up more and more of the phone, and more and more private frameworks are becoming public. Look at document interaction in iOS4. It’s certainly not perfect, but at least we have some form of file sharing between apps, don’t we? And multitasking might not be “real” multitasking, but it works for the majority of people, and that’s the thing that matters the most. Don’t care for it? Switch to Android. Really. Android’s a good competitor, and if its openness appeals to you, nobody’s stopping you. Or switch to any other smartphone; if you don’t like Apple products, don’t buy them.
I’d like to think Apple cares more about the security of their products and providing a good user experience rather than destroying the hacking community because Steve Jobs is a control freak. If you disagree, then you probably shouldn’t be using Apple products anyway.
