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Jail-Breaking iPhones at the Apple Store
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in Xconomy, iPhone hacker and author Jonathan Zdziarski was invited to speak at an Apple Store in Cambridge, MA last week where he talked about the history of iPhone hacking, jail-breaking, and limitations of the official SDK. From the article, "Zdziarski was one of the first software engineers to figure out how to hack the iPhone, and he's the author of a forthcoming O'Reilly Media book called iPhone Open Application Development, which gives readers explicit instructions on jail-breaking iPhones. So for Apple to give Zdziarski the podium at an Apple retail location is a little like Steve Ballmer inviting Linus Torvalds to speak at a Windows product launch." Zdziarski reports in his own blog how the open source community was on the iPhone developer scene as early as 2007, long before enterprises got there, and estimates that nearly 40% of all iPhones have been jail-broken to run the third-party community software installer. Finally, this story from Top Tech News suggests that open source software might actually create competition for Apple's "official" developers, because applications using the open source iPhone compiler are not subject to the same limitations as official Apple SDK programs are."
Not jailbroken, an overpriced pretty piece of junk (yes I own one) jail broken and with installer, an awesome tool and I love it.
I get the feeling Apple secretly likes the fact that it's been cracked and made useful, regardless of how ATT feels about it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is not a mistake on Apple's part. Their contract with AT&T probably prevents them from releasing an unlocked phone within the time period of the contract, and if Apple were to release unlocking instructions themselves it would legally be almost the same as releasing an unlocked phone: ie contract violation. Instead, they have been careful to remain neutral about it, in order to respect their contract with AT&T. At the same time, they are very happy that people all over the world use (unlocked) iPhones, and Apple executives have probably spent a lot of time thinking about how they could have played the game differently with AT&T to still get the contract with them (which you'll remember took a major infrastructural investment on AT&T's part to bring the iPhone -- and only the iPhone -- visual voicemail) , while not having to wait on their laurels for third parties to purchase, unlock, and ship their phones to the rest of the world. It must be very painful to have to keep mum, when the whole world wants your product, and you have a contract you've signed in your home country that keeps you from giving it to them. The news that they are inviting a speaker who is active in iPhone unlocking just confirms this suspicion, and of course the biggest confirmation will be seeing if Apple suddenly changes policy upon the expiration of the AT&T contract. We don't know the terms of that contract, but it's safe to guess it's a 12, 18, 24, or 36 month contract. I'm betting it was a 12-month contract, which is a very long time in the mobile phone world, and that upon the anniversary of the release of iPhone you will see an end to the silence on Apple's part regarding unlocking.
You are mistaken. As yesterday's thread clearly demonstrates, Apple and its admirers are firmly on the side of restricting your devices for your own "protection".
This statement is bizarre to me because, according to Shannon, information capacity is directly proportional to bandwidth. So it seems like the scarcity in bandwidth also exists in information capacity. Care to comment?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I wouldn't be surprised if, in the specific case of the iPhone, Apple is perfectly happy to let the hackers hack.
I was at a seminar given by reps from RIM, the Blackberry maker. The guy -- fairly senior -- said there are features that they would love to include on their Blackberrys (blackberries?), which the customers want, but the carriers won't allow them to provide those features because they want to offer their own services and charge customers high rates for them. So, by analogy to RIM, Apple probably needs to provide a veneer of protection to keep its contract with the carrier, but is quite happy when somebody hacks their phone, as it helps them to sell more phones.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Pretend to be more customer friendly than they really are? From some of the anti-Apple stuff I've read on here, it seems that Apple is, in fact, more customer friendly than they appear to be. After all, if this was Microsoft or many other companies, I'm sure DMCA letters would have been sent out by now. I think it just goes to show that Apple are generally only as restricting as they need to be.
Not all of us mind paying for software, you know. That's one thing I have never understood about the OSS movement -- that some people think that everything should be free and that anyone who tries to make a profit from software is somehow "bad". The two worlds can co-exist together.
A post on ZDNet and /. threads from anonymous internet users "clearly demonstrates" Apple's internal corporate policies and intentions? Are you serious? I would say this article "clearly demonstrates" the exact opposite. In other words, no one really knows if Apple is pleased with the situation or not.
Personally, I think they are pleased, yet cautious. If they damage their relationship with AT&T they will not have future relationships with any carriers, and the iPhone will die. Yet the iPhone's popularity appears to be viral partly from unlocking. So they have to walk a fine line for now.
Developers: We can use your help.
I agree with you, and the (grand?)-parent post. Another glaring indicator by what Apple isn't doing is the lack of legal retaliation. Apple has a history of meticulously tracking down and punishing, or at the very least, settleing with NDA violators. If Apple cared about keeping the iPhone in-jail, or locked-down, we'd hear about it in the form of NDA and intellectual property lawsuits. But the Apple legal team is quiet... a little too quiet. The first Beta of the iPhone SDK appeared on torrents and usenet almost immediately after its release... but we haven't heard of any complaints from Apple about it.
The Admin and the Engineer
No, their official statements and the EULA of the iPhone SDK demonstrate their policies and intentions. Have you not been paying attention?
Wishing for something hard enough does not make it come true, and your speculation is just wishful thinking.
At least in Chile, ALL the iPhones are jailbroken to work on our cellphone networks.
Can anyone provide IPA on Zdziarski? Gee, that's seems unpronounceable
Note that "inTheLoo" is one of twitter's sockpuppets, along with "Mactrope", who just happened to also post (or rather, shill) in this thread.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Most Slashdot users are technical people. We find having an ssh client/server on the phone to be enormously useful. We like having access to the BSD underpinnings of the machine. We like being able to use AIM without going through a slow website. We like being able to stream music from our iPhones to computers at the houses that we're at with Firefly Media Server. We even like having MobileScrobbler around.
And no, Apple's apps are not more refined than all the stuff on Installer. MobileScrobbler, Sketches, and MobileChat are examples of how you're wrong, especially when you compare them to something like MobileMail.app which STILL cannot delete multiple emails at once or switch between accounts in any kind of convenient way.
The jailbreakers have, in fact, shown Apple up at every turn.
+++ATH0
Creative's behavior is reprehensible, but the topic is irrelevant. twitter now has a grand total of five Slashdot accounts (that I know of). How would you like to be involved in a thread where you think you're talking to different people that are actually the same person? What possible purpose would having all these accounts possible have other than gaming the moderation system?
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
He's already ground two multi-thousand post accounts into negative karma hell because of things like these. Now he has five accounts he uses to reply to his own posts and pretend he's multiple people arguing about the same thing.
In my book, that kind of behavior is dishonest and unacceptable.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Maybe in the US, but in the UK I can buy an unlocked and jailbroken iphone in the high street - and if what I've seen is anything to go by they're selling far better than the 'official' ones... and I dare say it's similar in the rest of europe too (where you can't even buy a non-jailbroken phone).
These unlocked phones tend to have installer.app out of the box. So the apps are already part of the experience.