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AppleTV Runs iOS, Already Jailbroken
Wired has noted that "Soon, thanks to the tireless efforts of the iPhone Dev Team, you will be able to install apps on your AppleTV. An upcoming Jailbreak tool, called SHAtter, has already been used to unlock the new Apple TV's firmware." The units are supposedly now shipping. I have a lot of questions about the device (like how will it handle the photo screen saver if your local machines are offline) but hacking it might make the thing more usable (divx please, and how about letting my screen share my desktop to my TV?).
Tragic, of course, that people would buy something so crippled and locked down they must "jailbreak" it to make it more useful.
Certainly this is effort better spent improving solutions that are more open from the get-go?
Apache is popular, but IIS gets hacked earlier.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
Frankly, the "security" standpoint is the only one that bothers me.
I suppose jailbreakers who buy Apple stuff fall into three categories
1. People who think that the jailbroken device meets their needs better than alternatives, even though those don't require jailbreaking
2. People who jailbreak because they enjoy a challenge, want to "stick it to the Man", or are just curious
3. People who didn't do their research, bought the product, and only afterward realized that the product didn't meet their needs without jailbreaking
On Slashdot, posters generally assume that everyone falls into category 3. I suspect that are a fairly small populations in reality.
I suspect a larger population feels that the product as delivered meets their needs just fine, and an even larger population just doesn't buy the product in the first place.
Sort of like installing Tomato on Linksys routers? Oh, wait, we like that.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC. I've said this before: Apple doesn't implement features unless it can make them easy to use and understand and nicely designed. They don't start with a feature list and then make crappy implementations of them so they can add a bullet point to the list. They also look forward not backward and simplify where possible (eg. mandating use of h.264 instead of divx and hundreds of other formats.) If you find this approach philosophically abhorrent then use something else please and accept there are those of us that like it that way.
I don't think that's the reason people hack them anyway, they hack them because they can and for bragging rights.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The whole reason Apple locks down their products is because they are security doofuses that know they are incapable of protecting their delicate OS in an open environment. The fact that they are so quickly and easily jail-broken is proof of their incompetence at security. Just look at the results of every Pwn2Own contest...Apple products are always the first to fall.
This logic falls down when you consider the PS3 is/was fairly popular and yet took 4 years to hack.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Actually, it bothers me from both standpoints.
It bothers me that the device has to be hacked to do what people want, and it bothers me that they're insecure enough that they can be jailbroken and forced to run arbitrary code with as little as a webpage view (ala jailbreakme.com).
Because people want to use these devices to do whatever they want, enormous effort is spent on jailbreaking them. This means that people with potential malicious intent could start exploiting the holes to do very bad things.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If you really want full control and open source, why not just get a cheap NetTop ? I just got a barebones dual core Atom 330 (looks like 4 threads) with NVidia ION GPU for $159 at NewEgg. It have DVI out, HDMI out, SATA, expandable memory, USB2.0, 802.11n (miniPCIe), etc. Fully configurable and very compact. If you get an AppleTV, you aren't going to get storage or tune / record capability (which you can do with a cheap USB tuner on a nettop).
Technically there's tradeoff between meeting more obscure customer demand vs. safety issues. If a business refuses to serve the steak bloody rare, then they piss off the steak geeks and lose potential revenue. Yet if the business allows undercooked meat, they lose the safety net of well-done meat that protects their customers from e-coli and the resulting bad press and lawsuits.
The food safety engineer understands food and also understands there's no right answer to the question of allowing bloody rare steak; the company gives up one thing to get another thing. What it really boils down to is what side of the tradeoff he's on and what balancing of the food equation best serves the needs of the target audience.
The food geek only understand food; he doesn't understand the concept of tradeoff. He screams and howls that the steak is unfairly being crippled and that he's not getting it his way and his freedoms are getting infringed upon by "the man" because it's easier to understand the concept of the "man" than an equation that must be balanced on both sides to produce the best results for the target audience, which in the case of Burger King and their lawyers doesn't happen to be him.
Why would I want to hack on a platform specifically designed not to be hacked?
Because it's specifically designed not to be hacked. Duh. "Hacking" a device that's designed to be "hacked" isn't hacking. Adding a second hard drive or a new video card to your PC isn't hacking. Putting together a HeathKit isn't hacking. Installing Linux on a Windows box isn't hacking.
Turning a $10 transistor radio into a guitar fuzzbox is hacking. Using a Lunar lander for a return trip to earth, or putting a square peg in a round hole to keep people alive in it on the way, now THAT'S hacking at its finest.
Free Martian Whores!
Sure, but that doesn't mean I can't be critical of what I see as a growing trend.
I posted one comment, and this thread has exploded. Outside of it I've posted maybe two.
Except that Apple's pushing this exact same behavior with all of their other iOS devices while pushing ones like the iPad as a general purpose computing device. And at the same time, so many other manufacturers and OS vendors are happily following along behind them. And yeah, I can opt to not buy it. But that doesn't mean I should be forced to sit quiet while the market is flooded by locked down devices that displace and shrink the market for open hardware.