"Apple Is Not Fighting Jailbreaking": Wait, What?

As Chairman Gruber already replied [ <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/30/holwerda" rel="nofollow">http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/30/holwerda</a> ] Thom is misrepresenting or at least misinterpreting his statement and its context. In order to say that Apple are "fighting" jailbreaking we'd have to see them taking active steps in preventing it - e.g. putting an e-fuse, like the one in some Motorola Droid phones, in the iPhone or at least have something on the device verify the origin and integrity of iOS images before allowing them to be installed or run. Just because Apple are patching the vulnerabilities used in jailbreaking and have stated that they won't support jailbroken iPhones, I would not say they are fighting it - not enabling or encouraging it, certainly, but not fighting it.<p>I also want to take exception to Thom's statement that Apple "fought hard to maintain jailbreaking as an illegal activity". It might not have been "[a] figment of our collective imagination", but without a shred of support provided in the post, it might very well have been. And I don't think Apple care too much about its legality. Yes, we love to poke fun of how litigious Apple are, but I can't remember them picking a fight that they don't have a good chance of winning. Certainly the folks at Apple realize they won't be able to stop the practice of jailbreaking by pulling a RIAA and carpet bombing jailbreakers with lawsuits. As I said, if Apple wanted to prevent jailbreaking, they would have come up with an effective technical measure to do so, not a legal one.

Great example of a false dichotomy. It's not _if_ Apple if fighting jailbreaking but _how_much_ they are.<p>Apple definitely goes for the low hanging fruits: any avenue that is relatively simple to fix gets fixed. And obviously anything that is a serious security flaw gets fixed.<p>And, despite how much the hackers may hate it, Apple has (and has always had) a philosophy where they do not care much for side-effects, or annoying a minor niche of jailbreakers. What I mean is that, if you find a way to hack your way around Apple's system, Apple doesn't care, but at the same time if/when Apple is going to upgrade the system or make changes you can't expect _any_ effort by Apple to not disturb your hack. That means they don't care about downgrading, and they don't care if an upgrade makes the jailbreak not work: that's your problem.<p>How much further than that they go? So far I haven't see much. They could have really pursued it further. And maybe one day they will, but not so far.

Apple is not fighting jailbreaking, at least not with more than token efforts to appease people like AT&#38;T and other carriers. All iPhones revisions out there can be jailbroken and can be unlocked and there is a huge number of iPhones out there in countries that don't even have an official iPhone carrier.<p>Apple collects a nice sum of money for every iPhone sold and does not care whether that was carrier subsidized and whether said carrier now makes a loss due to the fact that the phone was jailbroken and unlocked and used one a different network.