If you follow Apple as closely as I do, you’d know that they’ve been keeping us pretty busy over the past couple of weeks. If it was the iPhone 4 launch one week, it was the ‘Antennagate’ press con the next, and this past week, a slew of products and news kept the Apple-sphere agog about the latest from Cupertino.
And no sooner had this news gotten out did we hear of the infamous iPhone Dev Team releasing an idiot-proof web-based jailbreak for the iPhone 4 called JailbreakMe. Designed to work right from your iPhone’s browser, JailbreakMe reminds you that iPhone jailbreaking is now legal and also fully reversible by plugging in your device and hitting Restore in iTunes, before it proceeds to jailbreak your device. You need only visit the JailbreakMe.com site with your iOS device and activate the cheeky “Slide to Jailbreak” slide-switch to open up your device. And to demonstrate
But possibly the biggest news to concern Apple’s mobile devices was the reports that the U.S. government has defined new rules that will permit users to “jailbreak” their iPhone and skirt Apple’s App Store ecosystem to add unapproved third-party applications, while staying safe from being charged, in the US at least, with a violation of the DMCA for jailbreaking their iOS devices. I suspect Apple Legal is still analyzing the impact of such a ruling, for Apple’s response thus far has been rather cautious and guarded – thatjailbreaking will void warranties and lead to a severely degraded experience. Now I for one have known many folks using jailbroken devices for a while now without the instability that Apple alludes to, but to be fair to Apple, the classic FUD is the best recourse while they formulate a more articulated response.
f Apple’s stores! I’m sure the Geniuses at the Apple Store didn’t find it half as funny as it sounds!
Legalities and jokes aside, it does bring up a serious issue about security, which really shouldn’t go down well with you if you are on an iOS device. Unlike previous jailbreaks, this one happens without any user intervention because of a security hole in iOS that allows a website to write data to your iPhone. This flaw allows the browser’s PDF viewer to execute code, bypassing all security mechanisms. While we wait for Apple to release an emergency 4.0.2 iOS update, we’d suggest readers be rather careful of what sites they visit on their iPad/iPhones.
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