Cell phone tower infrastructure has always been a walled garden, with the presumption that the carriers will always control the software and hardware used to communicate with the network. This might arguably have been a valid assumption when the cell system was engineered. It is certainly not a valid assumption now.<p>Jailbreaking is a fact of life. What are they going to do? Make it illegal? Let's assume they do. Does that make the network more secure? Did outlawing SPAM decrease the amount of SPAM? Did criminalizing cyber-attacks even decrease the number of said attacks?<p>To beg a legal remedy to circumvent the threat of cellular attacks in itself means that Apple, or rather AT&T (who is, of course, behind this claim), has a security methodology that is utterly broken, and absolutely <i>begging</i> to be exploited.<p>They might as well have hung a sign on the towers which said, "Hack Me. I'm Easy".
So, fix the damn cellphone towers. If a jailbroken cellphone can crash them, then surely a malicious person with a laptop and an antenna of the appropriate type could also crash them.
So preventing the legalization of one activity will prevent already-possible illegal activity? If I want to jailbreak my iPhone for illegal purposes, what does it matter whether that process is legal?
The idea that anyone would take Apple's argument seriously illustrates the growing gap between people who understand what computers are and people who don't.<p>It's easy for us to say "well, obviously that makes no sense, because you could do the same thing with an Android phone or a laptop" because we understand a computer to be a universal machine, but the people making the law usually understand computers as no more than a glorified wrench or hammer, capable of doing some particular subset of Useful Things.
<i>a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data</i><p>Far be it for me to comment (as I have no experience in the software) but does that not seem like something of a MAJOR flaw in the tower software?
It's official: jailbreaking aids terrorists and drug dealers. But I was surprised not to hear about it also aiding child-pornographers. Were Apple's lawyers having a slow day?
Apple's claims are fake.
Here is what you should know
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