The iOS 7 Jailbreak Fiasco

Bismillah writes "Evad3rs' new iOS 7 jailbreak featured a Chinese app store that sold pirated software, and which was pulled from Evasi0n7 soon after launch. Latest rumors say that the exploit used for Evasi0n7 was stolen by a certain person, offered up for sale, so the Evad3rs did a deal with TaiG instead. Jay 'Saurik' Freeman of Cydia meanwhile isn't happy about the whole thing, saying he was given no time to test Evasi0n7."

Comments

Jailbreakingg

[TyFoN]

It's funny. In any other operating evironment you would call these root exploits.
However in the Apple camp it's simply jailbreaking. One does not dear imply that the iphone is insecure :)

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Kell Bengal]

It's more a case of regaining entry after being locked out of your own house, rather than someone else breaking in.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more a case of regaining entry after being locked out of your own house, rather than someone else breaking in.

Except that the burglar could use the same route.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Anonymous Coward]

...and then having the power to fill your house to the brim with free clones of paid stuff, should you so choose.

Jailbreaking to work around OS/carrier lameness, sure. Trying to justify the pirated/infringing apps you warezed and put on your device for free, essentially ripping off developers for their 99c, supremely lame.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[JaredOfEuropa]

ripping off developers for their 99c, supremely lame

I never really understood this. You go and get a really expensive phone, then begrudge someone their 99 cents. Or seriously spend more than a few seconds thought on whether or not to buy that "really expensive" $1.99 app. And subsequently get suckered into dropping tens of dollars on in-app purchases in in some freemium game. People are weird...

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Noughmad]

At big part of it is the feeling that you're special, and that you "beat the system".

Re:Jailbreakingg

[93 Escort Wagon]

You're right - you really don't get it.

Most of us who jailbreak aren't interested in stealing apps. Heck, by default those repositories aren't even available to a jailbreaker. Instead, it's about adding functionality. Frankly, look at some of the new iOS 7 features... We jail breakers had those in iOS 5 and 6.

Prior to iOS 7, iPhone apps running on a non-retina iPad were displayed in low res, even though there was a high res "retina" version of the app's images readily available. The fix? A jailbreak App called RetinaPad (which, incidentally, I paid for). A free app, SBSettings, added some quick access toggles to the notification pull down - another useful feature that iOS 7 borrowed.

Want to ssh into your iPhone? Gotta jailbreak it first. Want a decent wifi scanner for troubleshooting? Again, you need to jailbreak. Want to be able to use gestures to replace the home button? Again, you need to jailbreak.

There are lots of reasons for jail breaking that have absolutely nothing to do with theft. They're probably of interest only to a minority of iOS users, but they exist. As iOS matures, those reasons gradually dwindle... but I can't see them ever going away completely.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you've ever bought a iPhone in certain Asian countries - such as MKB in Bangkok, the phones from small dealers are sold pre-jailbroken and loaded up with pirated Apps, movies and other content, as a "service" to the customer. As phones are frequently sold outright and off plan, this kind of distribution channel is a much higher fraction of the market, than it is in the US , where subsidised phones dominate. This likely represents millions of devices. Given jailbreak downloads are typically 10 million , its at least a very significant fraction, and it wouldn't be unreasonably be a majority.

I strongly suspect the motivation for, and the rate of jailbreaking varies wildly by country.

I'd also hazard a guess, the whilst there are people with pretty reasonable motivations such as the Wi-fi scanner example, they represent a tiny fraction of the jailbroken device owners - most have it done for them for commercial reasons - either explicitly to pirate Apps, or out of ignorance when its done for them because the offer of "free extras" is too good.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Nerdfest]

The problem is that you're rewarding a company (known for making extremely high profit on their devices) for locking you out of your hardware. Their attitude towards letting you install the software you want is not going to improve in the future with people doing that.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Anonymous Coward]

Complain as much as you want: I can copy bits from you, and it won't take anything away from you. I shall continue, and it's highly unlikely you'll be able to stop me. DItto for the other million+ people.

I'm sure you'll feel the same when someone gets their paws on your Bitcoin wallet. It is just a string of 0s and 1s.

BTW, why don't you spend your time creating something useful. Anything at all. And then let everyone come along and copy it for free. We're waiting. And don't give me the "What about Linux?" shit. You're a taker, not a giver. The people who have donated their time and efforts to Linux, some of whom have dedicated their lives to it, are givers and you have not earned the right to compare yourselves to them.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[noh8rz10]

You're a taker, not a giver.

+1. some people create things, so they have empathy with other people who create things. others are just takers and add no value to society, so they cannot comprehend how their actions hut those that create. like arguing with a rock. good news is, they rooted their own phones and gave them to chinese hackers, in exchange for free angry birds (yes, I bet they download cracked versions of free apps too lol).

Re:Jailbreakingg

[noh8rz10]

why don't you just not buy the phone? if you don't want to reward the company that makes the phone? or steal the phone? pro tip: if you paid for the phone you've already rewarded them.

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Nyder]

It's more a case of regaining entry after being locked out of your own house, rather than someone else breaking in.

Except that the burglar could use the same route.

Or the police, or the NSA or the FBI, etc....

Re:Jailbreakingg

[Nyder]

You're a taker, not a giver.

+1. some people create things, so they have empathy with other people who create things. others are just takers and add no value to society, so they cannot comprehend how their actions hut those that create. like arguing with a rock. good news is, they rooted their own phones and gave them to chinese hackers, in exchange for free angry birds (yes, I bet they download cracked versions of free apps too lol).

Takers & givers. Pitchers & Catchers, Tops & Bottoms. Good & Evil. Left & right. 1's & 0's.

You do realize that most of life is a binary system and you can't generally have one without the other?

In other words, some people give, some people take. It's part of life. If you feel superior because you are one and not the other, then you are missing out on how life really works.

Does that person downloading a pirated app really hurt the developer? No it doesn't. That person most likely doesn't pay for software, so the developer would never get money from him. But oddly enough, there is enough people who have no problem paying for stuff, and that is why developers & producers make money because there is enough people buying to turn profit. It has always been this way. Thinking your superior because you pay for stuff is deluding yourself. Thinking your smarter because you don't pay for stuff is also deluding yourself. We are just all playing our parts in life.

Good software/music/movies sell and make money. Crappy software/music/movies don't sell and they blame it on people pirating the stuff then the fact they made some crappy software/music/movies.

Confusing summary

[wonkey_monkey]

Evad3rs' new iOS 7 jailbreak featured a Chinese app store that sold pirated software, and which was pulled from Evasi0n7 soon after launch.

Evasi0n7 is the name of the jailbreak?

Latest rumors say that the exploit used for Evasi0n7 was stolen by a certain person, offered up for sale, so the Evad3rs did a deal with TaiG instead.

TaiG is the name of the Chinese app store? Who's the "certain person," and why does them stealing it lead ("...so...") to the jail break creators doing this deal with TaiG?

Jay 'Saurik' Freeman of Cydia meanwhile isn't happy about the whole thing, saying he was given no time to test Evasi0n7."

What's Cydia, and why is it important that they have time to test the jailbreak?

Re:Confusing summary

[lhunath]

Evasi0n7 is the name of the method used to apply a tethered jailbreak to the phone. The 7 is for iOS 7. The jailbreak is what disables the security features that lock people out of their own device.

TaiG is the name of a "store" the distributes Chinese applications, similar to Cydia, the store that is currently considered to be the "default" for distributing applications on jailbroken devices. Aside from using Cydia or TaiG, you can also put apps on the device manually or use other stores / distributions.

The deal with TaiG was not a result of any stealing. Evasi0n (the team that made the Evasi0n7 method) had been approached by TaiG with an offer of bundling their store instead of Cydia (which doesn't have a lot of Chinese content) for Chinese users only. Terms of the deal included that TaiG would not be allowed to distribute any "pirated" applications. Evasi0n's rational was that without TaiG on the device, most Chinese users would proceed to install an app store that did provide "pirated" apps and this way they would be condoning a "non-pirating" app store to the huge Chinese jailbreak audience. In exchange for bundling TaiG and therefore giving TaiG a huge userbase in China, Evasi0n was offered a lump of money.

Unfortunately, it turns out after the fact that some pirated apps were spotted on TaiG. Evasi0n reported these to TaiG ASAP and they were removed. You can imagine the trolling that ensued especially from competing jailbreak teams.

Other teams working on a jailbreak method in parallel to Evasi0n were also given this offer from TaiG. In fact, another team was getting a jailbreak release ready with a similar, stolen or different method, I don't know, but since they were getting close to a release, Evasi0n decided to fast-track their working method and release a jailbreak early. The up-side of an early release was that they'd get TaiG's money and they'd get the credit for the jailbreak. The down-side is that the huge volume of apps written for jailbroken devices hadn't been tested and fixed to work on iOS 7 yet, including "Cydia". iOS compatibility is even more crucial for jailbroken apps than for standard iOS apps since they often use undocumented API which is obviously very volatile across iOS versions.

As a result of Evasi0n's early release, a bunch of people jailbroke their device only to find that almost all of the apps written for jailbroken devices that they were installing crashed or cashed their phones to break - since, as I said, they weren't updated for iOS 7.

TL;DR - Evasi0n worked really hard to find a method for jailbreaking, figured they deserved some money for their effort, figured in the mean time they'd condone a safe store to the Chinese, saw their chance at success slip away as other teams were gearing up to steal the glory and released before the developer community was ready, causing breakage and mayhem, never mind the trolling about the sudden appearance of a Chinese app store instead of Cydia.

For Evasi0n's side of the story, read http://evasi0n.com/l.html

Evasi0ns response

[dave1102]

I actually made an account just to post this -- evasi0n's response to all the criticism/speculation: http://evasi0n.com/l.html

Re:Jailbreak vs Rooting

[GrammarPoliceChief]

Apple treats you as a criminal? I'm sorry but you are simply trolling. iOS is designed for the masses. They do not want problematic user problems, they do not want many ways to do the same task, they should not have to care about the OS. I'm pretty happy with Apples way that they created their ecosystem, it is fair for both the consumer and the developer. Android is difficult if not impossible to root on many devices. Some even come with a fuse on the main SOC package that detects if the phone has been rooted.

I'm not Trolling I'm Rolling

[tuppe666]

Apple treats you as a criminal? I'm sorry but you are simply trolling.

http://www.legalzoom.com/intellectual-property-rights/copyrights/apple-responds-eff-jailbreaking FRom the article because I am lazy.

"Apple has responded to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)'s request to the US Copyright Office to declare hacking a smartphone legal; not surprisingly, Apple believes jailbreaking is copyright violation and, therefore, illegal."

Someone needs there mod points removed :)

Re:I'm not Trolling I'm Rolling

[plover]

The line isn't that simple. iOS already knows when it's been jailbroken. There's even an API for that so that programs that deal with security can refuse to operate if they don't trust the environment. Square Payments won't let you read credit cards on a jailbroken device; AirWatch reports jailbreaking back to corporate servers (I keep an un-jailbroken device around just for reading company email); and even Skype pops up a warning dialog that says "this app is unsupported on a jailbroken device."

Since Apple can detect a jailbroken phone, they could obviously take harsher actions themselves. They could shut the phone down, or make it rapidly eat batteries, or delete your accounts, or do any of a hundred different nasty things to the phone. But they don't. They have arrived at a somewhat unstable cease-fire with the jailbreakers. So Apple, in this weird way, actually has OS level "support" for being jailbroken. They don't treat us as criminals.

And they need to. I own many different iDevices, but I wouldn't have even bought the second if I hadn't been able to jailbreak it. I won't upgrade iOS until there's an untethered jailbreak for it. I seriously never consider buying an iDevice unless I have high confidence that I can jailbreak it the day I buy it. It's all a part of making a deal with the devil: if Apple wants my money, they have to tolerate my jailbreaking their device. And I've heard that somewhere around 30% of iPhones are jailbroken -- that's just way too much money for them to walk away from.

$650 and you still don't own it

[lophophore]

Apple makes nice stuff, but I won't touch any more of it. $650 for an unlocked iPhone 5s and you cannot do what you want with it without a "jailbreak". Contrast with a modern Nexus phone that you can install your own software (e.g. Cyanogenmod) on with a PC and a USB cable.

The same is true for Apple's tablets -- in fact, it is even worse, because "jailbreaking" your iPad is a federal crime under the DMCA.

Apple makes nice stuff, no doubt, but if you cannot change what's inside, you really don't own it.