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Toyota Yields To Apple Over Jailbroken Phones
zakkie writes "Toyota has caved to pressure from Apple and pulled custom themes for jailbroken iPhones. According to ModMyi.com founder Kyle Matthews, a representative of Toyota's ad agency said that Toyota gave in to Apple's request in order to 'maintain their good relationship with Apple', and amounted to a direct attack by Apple on jailbroken iPhones."
Let us not forget that Toyota has become pretty hostile to real hot rodders and today's TRD products are a complete joke. Gone are the days of actively supporting the hot rodding and motorcrossing community with real performance parts for hot cars like the MR-2 (mechanicallt supercharged and later turbocharged) and Supra (Sequential twin turbocharged) sportscars.
Their idea of modding today is to sell body cladding and spoilers, and TRD decals. They have wholly embraced the ricer market segment, and actively discourage people from making real performance improvements. Should it really surprise anyone that Toyota would respect Apple's egomaniacal control over already-purchased iPhones?
I own my iPhones. Even if I dump AT&T today, I will maintain ownership of my iPhones. I am not renting nor leasing them, nor are they a work for hire under contract. They are commodity goods sold off the shelf, so therefore the first sale doctrine applies - along with bypassing DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Courts have upheld jailbreaking as a legal activity so why is Apple still fighting it? I am a jailbreaker, and yet I still buy apps from the app store, and even occasionally buy tracks through iTunes rather than dig out certain CDs to re-rip them.
Why do I jailbreak? So I can tweak the GUI. So I can run SBSettings, and so I can ssh to my iPhone and custom-build nagios so I can control servers from anywhere - and ssh into a box on the road when absolutely required. I don't use it for anything nefarious like "stealing"[sic] software or anything like that. So I can tweak settings a lot more than the default settings applet allows. So I can turn off phone or data separately with ease, and so I can have individual apps override screen brightness for individual apps rather than a single global setting Apple seems to think should apply to everyone for all situations - oh, and so I can disable rotation support quickly (for TomTom GPS for example - legally purchased through the app store well after I jailbroke my phone, by the way!) rather than distracting myself drilling down through a bunch of menus to disable it while driving.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Read, at the EFF site, all the docs about Apple trying to get the Library of Congress to not allow jailbreaking. They wanted the full force of law brought down on those who jail broke. That includes prison time.
As someone who has worked on the digital end of a tremendous number of campaigns for some very (very) large clients, please understand that oftentimes the larger company is not aware of what is going on. Campaigns are pulled quite often for even smaller, sillier, brand infringments. The only reason anyone cares about this one is that Apple's walled garden is a hot button topic.