Apple and iPhone Jailbreak Community Continue to Battle
George Hotz, I’m sure you’ve all heard of him, he was the first guy to unlock the iPhone and thus opened the iPhone to international networks and gained virtually instant internet fame; that was back when Hotz was 17 and now at 20 he makes a living breaking differing gadgets.
In an interview Hotz says he didn’t think unlocking the iPhone was hard to accomplish, although it took 500 hours, but compared to the stuff he does now the first iPhone was incredibly easy. What was easy for Hotz has been a constant pain in Apple’s side, and one Apple has been trying to cure for 2 years reports wired.
Apple push out a new OS and an army of hackers immediately begin trying to break it. Back in 2007 Apple chief Steve Jobs stated Apple was in a cat-and-mouse game to disable unlocked iPhone handsets, and Apple regularly push out updates to disable hacked and unlocked iPhones, but a couple of weeks on the iPhone gets hacked again.
It appears Apple will undoubted never fully catch the mouse and the reason is Apple isn’t just chasing a single mouse but a whole pack as their iconic handset and App store gave birth to a whole underground ecosystem known as the jailbreak community.
The jailbreak community continues to push out new hacks as Apple updates the iPhone, but Apple continues the fight with their latest attempt by looking for an iPhone OS security manager with the hope that this will put a halt to jalibreaking.
According to Hotz though, he doubts a security expert could block his efforts, and has already apparently discovered a brand new exploit which will jailbreak and unlock Apple’s 4-gen iPhone even though he has never laid hand on it.
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2 thoughts on “Apple and iPhone Jailbreak Community Continue to Battle”
I completely fail to understand Apple’s attitude to unlocking the iPhone.
No other manufacture gives a hoot if their phones are unlocked (in fact most sell their phones unlocked).
If you buy an iPhone on pay as you go, you own it and can do what you like with it. Why do Apple feel they have the right to dictate what you can do with your own property ?
In 2008. the European Commission fined Microsoft for defying sanctions previously imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour, and failing to comply with a 2004 ruling that it abused its dominant market position.
Amount to pay: 899m euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m)
This was on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros in March 2004.
The ruling said that Microsoft was guilty of not providing key code (i.e. API data) to rival software makers (i.e. so they had full access to Operating System functionality whilst writing competing applications).
The 2004 investigation concluded that MS was guilty of freezing out rivals in products such as media players, while unfairly linking its Internet Explorer browser to its Windows operating system at the expense of rivals.
(Source of the above – BBC, Reuters, and others)
People, please remember that MS did not block people from installing third party applications. It merely took advantage of user inertia by pre-installing its own versions, plus it wasn’t as forthcoming as it could be regarding interfacing with its Operating System.
In the light of the above, and considering iPhone dominance, the Apps store commercial positioning and the Apple Corp attitude to Jailbreaking, I can see a seriously BIG issue hitting the courts at some point.