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Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking Could Hurt Cell Towers
AHuxley writes "Apple suggests that the nation's cellphone networks could be open to 'potentially catastrophic' cyberattacks by iPhone-using hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their wireless devices. The Copyright Office is currently considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking. Apple has responded to the request by saying that if the 'baseband processor' software — which enables a connection to cell phone towers — is exposed, then a user could crash the tower software, or use the Exclusive Chip Identification number to make calls anonymously. Apple also thinks its closed business model is what made the iPhone a success. The Vodafone scandal from a few years back showed how a network could be compromised, but that was from within. So, what do you think? Is Apple playing the 'evil genius' hacker card or can 'anyone' with a smartphone and a genius friend pop a US cell tower?"
The Exclusive Chip Identifier? Aka the ECID?
That thing was added solely to make it harder to unlock the phone for other carriers!
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
No, you're not able to access or change the baseband software. Also, jailbreaking the iPhone doesn't change the baseband AFAIK. Only the SIM-lock does require changing the baseband, which is a completely separate issue.
I'd imagine that the software is locked down well enough for the current environment. Playing devil's advocate, you could see how somebody who had found an exploit in the iPhone OS could make anonymous calls. Or potentially launch a DoS on a tower is they had a large army of compromised iPhones. And, while I don't know jack about cell-phone-tower-handshaking-protocol, perhaps you could initiate some kind of DoS by doing the equivalent of a SYN flood with a smaller group of phones.
Apart from those possibilities, I don't see much danger.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The hackers have already been granted an exception to unlock the phone, and ACTUALLY screw with the baseband, jailbreaking just takes away Apples control of the OS running on the main processor, and they don't like that. They are full of shit if this is their excuse, because as i said, unlocking is already legal.
As always, they're playing upon the ignorance of their userbase. I give it, say, 35 minutes before someone here posts why Apple is full of balderdash for saying this. I give it 5 minutes before some iTard rushes to their defense.
Well, this is not exactly a technical explanation, but here we go... I live in Vietnam, where basically you can buy the latest and greatest of any brand (I own a HTC Touch HD), but the majority of cellphones are local brands (for example Bavapen) or clones of popular phones (mostly blackberries). I've just read a report on how they are done. Basically parts are imported from China, and assembled in mom & pop shops (Bavapen is a major brand, but you have dozens of smaller brands), loaded with whatever baseband processor software is available.
Now the thing is, it's incredibly easy to set up shop and assemble your own phones. This part of the market seems to be completely unregulated. And yet, in this 85+ million market I never heard anything about dangers to cell towers. We have basically 3 major and 5-6 minor carriers, 99,99% of all phones are not locked to any of these, and a good chunk of the phones are loaded with software from who knows what sources. I would assume that the situation is very similar in the rest of SE Asia and China.
Now I know this is not proof in itself, and I don't know for sure about the rest of Asia, but it is safe to assume that we have hundreds of millions of phones on the market with hundreds of different baseband processor software coming from shady sources, yet to my knowledge, there hasn't been in single attack on cell towers via software loaded on the phones themselves. And although this region is relatively stable, cyberattacks, just like elsewhere, are pretty common. I believe that if this could be done, it would have been done or tried already.
Having worked with cell switches in the past, I have 2 words for Apple. BULL SHIT!!!
A phone is the piece of tech that you can never really own. Many people accept this and take the "free" phone, and pay the high monthly rental.
If people want a basic phone, and don't care about the fancy smartphone features, then why shouldn't they be able to pay less for a cheaper model? I do think they should give you a discount if you didn't have them subsidize the phone (use your own device, or pay full retail for the phone), as it does seem unfair that the person who got a $200 dollar subsidy, and is paying it off over two years, pays the same as someone who doesn't owe them that money.
Also, you can easily "own" a phone. Many online retailers, even official manufacturer's websites (Motorola.com for example), as well as physical retail stores, let you buy a phone at full price, without having to sign a contract. When you do sign up for a plan, there's no term commitment or ETF, because you've already payed full price for the phone.
In the US, the common plan for a mobile phone comes as a two-year contract. After that, you can cancel your service at any time, and they won't bug you to send the phone back or pay them back for it by paying the ETF.
The built in obsolescence has got to be one of the worst in the industry.
Are you expecting them to let you upgrade the RAM or something? Throw in some PCI slots?
MP3 player, calendar, organiser, GPS, ebook reader, camera, bomb, those can all converge as much as they like. Just not with anything that needs a SIM card.
My current smart phone (an HTC device) can do all that with the SIM card removed, no monthly fees or anything. Well, I haven't tried using it as a bomb, but I'd imagine that wouldn't need a SIM card either.
Except AT&T and the iPhone are GSM not CDMA.
The original iPhone supports GSM, considered a 2G standard. The iPhone 3G supports GSM and a 3G standard called UMTS, which is designed to be used alongside GSM networks. UMTS uses a CDMA air interface.
There's a difference between jailbreaking and unlocking. Jailbreaking doesn't touch the baseband software and it's what the EFF is trying to affirm the legality of.