I am very grateful to all those who contribute without compensation, many hours of work to provide us the ability to jailbreak our iPhones with the latest firmware/hardware. Without much consideration, I have defaulted to the idea that this is really a cat and mouse game where these good folks find vulnerabilities, then Apple plugs them up.
I know longer think this is the case. Let me esplain…
With the release of the new 3.0 software came numerous bugs. Knowing that Apple will be releasing 3.1 with fixes and features, the iPhone Dev Team was averse to releasing a jailbreak solution for fear that they would be handing the exploit to Apple on a silver platter leaving them stuck when it comes to jailbreaking future firmware releases.
Made sense to me…
This evening, I stumbled across the blog of George Hotz who was a part of the team who first unlocked the original iPhone (I believe he was 17 at the time). In somewhat of an arrogant fashion, George let the cat out of the bag and released purplerra1n. In doing this, the exploit(s) used to jailbreak the 3GS/3.0 firmware is now visible to Apple.
In his cockyness, he made me think on a couple of things:
- Software is never perfect, perhaps he is right in suggesting that there will always be an exploit. It might start requiring more work on the hack side but we should be able to continue to jailbreak.
- The exploit that enables the iPhone to be jailbroken has been out for some time now. Many Apple updates later, still not plugged.
Considering the latter, does Apple really want to *fix* our ability to jailbreak our phones?
Some reasons to plug the hole:
- Lost revenue from unauthorized apps?
- IP infringement?
- Prevent unauthorized carrier use (unlocking)?
- Other…
Some reasons to not plug the hole:
- How many more people are buying the iPhone because it can be hacked? Hacked or not, people
a. still have to buy an iPhone
b. still could provide revenue to an authorized carrier
c. still would purchase from iTunes and AppStore
- Free advertising (of the best kind – word of mouth)?
- Other revenue generating reasons…
The world may never know but from this camp, I am leaning towards the latter.
-boogybren
Tags: 3.0 jailbreak, 3gs jailbreak, cat and mouse, does apple really want to prevent jailbreak, geohot, iphone dev team, iphone jailbreak
I agree, it’s hard to know exactly what Apple is thinking, but it sure seems like it’s in their best interest to look the other way when it comes to jailbreaking. And it seems like they’re aware of this.