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In Defense of Jailbreaking
Keith found a nice manifesto saying "There's a trend that's been disturbing me lately. When the topic of modding or jailbreaking comes up — say, in the wake of the iPad announcement, or Sony's restrictive PS3 update — there is an outcry. Who am I to tell Apple what's best for their devices?"
Certainly a worthy moral argument, but thanks to the WIPO copyright Treaty (which everyone, except for a few of us crazies who were warning about it, completely ignored back when it was being debated), such circumvention of technology (specifically if it's designed to access protect copyrighted content) is nonetheless illegal in many WIPO countries, including the U.S.
From the anti-circumvention section of the DMCA: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
And notice the language there. It doesn't say "no company may do this for profit" or "no one can do this for anyone else" (as many mistakenly believe), it says "No person." That means you sitting at home jailbreaking your own cellphone. Now, maybe you could make the case that an iPhone and its OS is not a "work protected under this title" but I think that would be a hard sell.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
that means it's YOURS now. end of story.
...it becomes YOUR device.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Who am I to tell Apple what's best for their devices?
The user who paid for the lovemaking device without having to first agree to anything.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Who am I to tell Apple what's best for their devices?"
Assuming that you haven't been shoplifting, they are not their devices. They are your (our) devices.
Having said that, if Apple says that doing such-and-such may wreck the machines, you've been warned.
"Who am I to tell Apple what's best for their devices?" The current OWNER of said device.
That money only buys a window into the walled garden experience.
Putting aside the whole "You should", "You shouldn't" be able to Jailbreak the thing, I think it's interesting that we finally have a whitelisted platform. For years and years, whenever we have a security discussion on Slashdot, someone inevitablely says
"You can never succeed trying to filter out all the bad stuff. You need a whitelist of the good stuff."
But then someone else always says
"But who creates the whitelist?"
And both get modded +5 insightful. In this case, Apple created the Whitelist that all the security people say we need. And applied it to a whole platform. They apparently do code reviews, and enforce proper usage of the API.
Personally, if I had an iPhone, I'd jailbreak it. But I like the idea that I can give one to my Mom, let her get apps off the app store, and not have to de-gunk the malware every 3 months like I do with her PC.
I have not seen the outcry you're talking about. I think this post is just another angle for people to rail against Apple's policies.
Which is fine, BTW! People are certainly welcome to do so, and to an extent I agree with the outcry. But I object to the implied victimhood here--of a person beset upon by the horde.
Jailbreaking is very likely legal due to the first sale doctrine. But it hasn't been tested mainly because Apple has yet to go after a single customer for jailbreaking a product they own. They won't honor the warranty, but they're not bothering them either. It's the right place for a tech company to be IMO. If I install a new engine management chip in my Civic, Honda won't honor that warranty either.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I call shenanigans. No one's telling you what to run.
As a developer, you are free to upload any app you write to your phone. If you want to sell your app through their store, they have a right to decide what they sell and what they don't. I you can't live with that, move on and develop for a platform that meets your needs.
As a consumer, if you choose to buy a device whose store does not sell the apps you want or need, the choice to buy was yours and yours alone.
Get off your high horse, put your money where your mouth is, and get your damned Ideapad already. Enough of your disingenuous "I'll be buying" BS and let's have more of that "I've already bough this other thing instead and, having used it, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and hopeful for the future because ...".
A couple of my coworkers were talking recently about Kindles and iPads. I told them about the DRM. Neither of them knew what DRM stood for, so I had to explain. Neither of them had heard of the infamous incident involving Orwell's 1984. Neither of them knew about the history of DRM'd media becoming unplayable within 5 years after people buy it, because the company running the DRM dies or abandons the project.
Once people are educated about the issues, then it's up to them. If they buy a locked-down device, that's their decision. They know what they're getting into. We all buy coffee pots and wristwatches without any expectation that we'll be allowed to load arbitrary software into their CPUs. Everybody just has to draw their own individual line between the devices where they care about lockdown and the devices where they don't.
The crunchgear article has some major logical flaws. The author states, "Lastly, I would like to humbly thank Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and all the others, for creating wonderful devices which I plan to enjoy to the fullest extent." In other words, he's bought these locked-down devices, and now he has to find some way to justify buying them, even though he's unhappy with the EULAs. "A popular objection is that one doesn't have to buy the devices that happen to be wrapped up in restrictive systems or deliberately limited. Vote with your wallet, right? [***] Sure, and even when you jailbreak or mod, you are doing just that. You bought the device most suited to your needs." At the point where I inserted the [***] there is a major gap in his logic. He's paid money to these companies. He has voted with his wallet. He's cast his vote in favor of locked-down devices. He didn't buy the device most suited to his needs. He bought a device that was unsuited to his needs, and then modified it in order to suit his needs. He also ignores the very real practical consequences of modding and jailbreaking. The manufacturer is almost certainly never going to give him warranty service, and some of them may actually intentionally or unintentionally brick his device when it phones home for software updates.
Here are a couple of proposals that I'd consider more realistic. Both of these really do involve voting with your wallet. (1) If there are no options that avoid DRM and lockdowns, don't buy. This is my current attitude about the Kindle and iPod. I'll buy one when there is a non-DRM'd library of books available for it that is roughly the same size as Amazon's current catalog. (2) Buy the lesser of two evils. E.g., I believe Android is significantly less locked down than iPhone, so if I were choosing between the two, I'd buy an Android.
Find free books.
Who are you to even be using an iPhone in the first place?
Probably someone who bought a smartphone before Android OS phones became common.
As a developer, you are free to upload any app you write to your phone.
As a developer, there is an annual fee. This fee over the estimated 5-year useful life of a device often exceeds the retail price of the device itself. Do you understand the complaints about XNA and iPhone OS now?
They can write whatever they want in the document. However, anything written in the EULA that is contradictory to the Law is not enforceable, and thus can be ignored by the user. Getting the company to acknowledge this is another matter.
Isn't any repository a whitelist?
In Apple's case, jailbreaking is to open up a closed device. Of course, anyone buying an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad just because you can jailbreak it and do what you want is pretty stupid - there are millions of other devices out there that are perfectly open. Jailbreaking is a bonus to make a nice device even better. But one should not be under any pretenses that it's sanctioned nor available everywhere (e.g., the second run iPhone 3GS require re-jailbreaking every time you reboot it).
In Sony's case, they're removing an advertised feature. In which case, "jailbreaking" is to get back what Sony sold me.
Apple never sold me anything on the basis that it can be jailbroken - the features and restrictions thereof have been known at the time of purchase. I still use them because they're pretty nice devices, and all are jailbroken because I might as well do it and enjoy the nice bonus.
Sony sold me a PS3 on the belief it has a certain set of features, namely, OtherOS. Now they're taking away that feature, so I am entitled to do whatever it takes to get back the same featureset that Sony offered when it sold it to me.
In one case, jailbreaking gets you more stuff. In the other, jailbreaking is to get back stuff you bought. Hell, Apple's rolled out more features for my iPhone than came with it when I bought it. Sony's pretty much ensured launch unit PS3s still command original selling prices on the used market by removing stuff every hardware revision. Heck, even the Xbox360 gained features on newer revisions (HDMI output...).
And yes, while I believe you can do anything you want with hardware, I also don't buy hardware just because someone's already hacked it, but whether or not that device without hacking would be useful to me. If I have two similar devices then the availability of a hack might sway me one way or another, but it's never a checklist item.
I'll never get this obsession with buying Apple products - supposedly it's because they "just work", but when you have to void the warranty to get it to do what you want it to do, you're obviously admitting that it doesn't "just work". Why buy it when you can get something that is designed to be open and hackable?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hacking and modding and sticking it to the man, but since when is forking over your hard earned cash (to the man, no less) for a device that is hack-hostile "sticking it to the man"? Why not instead encourage companies that are encouraging you to be more than a consumer?
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Ya gotta love the sensitivity of the slashdot children when you criticize anything about their firefox blankey.
..when you go out of your way to criticize firefox on a topic that has nothing to do with firefox. Yeah, I know, like petulant little children, all modding that off topic flamebaiting as off topic, the nerve! They're almost as bad as [insert group here] when I go into one of their [rallies/forums/other place of gathering or discussion] and talk trash on [insert unrelated subject that happens to be viewed favorably by a good number of said partisans].
Who are you to even be using a Droid in the first place? The thing is a piece of shit. It can't even show animated GIFs, and is stuck on Verizon. Just get a fucking iPhone already and be done with it. I am so sick and tired of hearing about these worthless motorola products. If you write apps for it and it is still worthless, have you really accomplished anything? This would be like making plugins for IE to make it suck less when you could just switch to Firefox or Chrome.
There are much better phones out there. Move on.
/. system not working correctly today...
First, there is no "bait and switch". The deal is clear and in the open from the beginning.
Actually, the alternative OS removal with the PS3 happened quite some time after the units were put of for sale. I think many in the EU will succeed in getting some sort of compensation for their purchases because of it as mentioned here on /. last week.
The seller decides what they are offering to a customer, and what they charge the customer for this offering. A different offering would cost different amounts of money. You are basically saying that you don't want to allow any contracts where contracts are used to establish what you get for your money.
Actually, I never said anything of the sort. I read the fine print and decided caveat emptor. The way the agreement went with the iphone said essentially that I am paying for a device that I wouldn't technically own, just use, and it actually belongs to AT&T and Apple. So, no thanks.
As an example, let's say a car manufacturer sells two variations of the same car, one with 100 horse powers, and the other with 200 horse powers, for different prices. Which is Ok, you get different things, you pay different amounts. Now the manufacturer finds a way to change the horse power of its engine using software. They can still offer the same two car variants, but you are saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that. What justification do you have for that except your own personal greed?
I see your point but I disagree; its a terrible analogy. If a person buys the 200 hp car and discovers the 100 hp purchaser got the same deal for the software upgrade then they are entitled to some form of compensation. Afterall, they bought the 200 hp model. If the upgrade makes their car a 100 hp lemon then same thing applies.
If I buy a car I don't have to go to the dealer if I decide on a better stereo, rims, seats, shocks, tires and add tint to the windows. If I lease a car I cannot do any of those things unless I can restore the vehicle to 100% of its original condition when i return it minus the usage i put it through.
As for the 'own personal greed' jab; I honestly don't think its greedy to expect to get what you pay for. If you purchase something and its to your liking then you got what you wanted because the product is what it is. If you purchase something and later the manufacturer of the product decides to remove functionality, for whatever reason, and makes the product useless to you then that's just not right.
How would you like it if in your car analogy the manufacturer decided that in order to be more 'green' and cut emissions by 14% (cool new trendy feature added) the car shouldn't be operable one day a week?
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
It can't even show animated GIFs,
Yes, it can. You just need to use the Movie api instead of ImageView. Next Android version will add it to the default browser, but by the time that is released, Flash will be out of beta.