I love jailbreaking (customization) but hate anyone who pirates apps. jeesh, it's $3 for christ sake!
Wait a minute.
Now I can sell my current 3GS and market it as a model that can be jailbroken, mark it up, then buy a new phone, seeing as I dont care about JB. Awesome.
But as long as jailbreaking enables piracy, I think this is a good move on Apple's part. The apps are good, they're incredibly cheap and the DRM is an unobtrusive as I've seen.
Benjamin Franklin said:They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I'm OK with Apple cracking down on pirates and fixing exploits. After all, the whole concept of a jailbreak is to find software holes which are big enough to let you run your own code. Whenever this happens on OS X, everyone gets in a big huff about the whole "Mac viruses/trojans" angle. Yet when this happens on the iPhone, we quietly praise the developers of the exploits (the jailbreak teams).
However, I hope Apple realizes that there are good reasons why people are jailbreaking, and listens to its customers for feedback, so we can have an "authorized" way to customize our iPhones and legitimate stuff like that.
Just because someone's pirated an app doesn't necessarily mean that the developer has lost a sale. If it wasn't pirated the person might not have bought it anyway.
Don't see it as purely sales-based: think of the value it adds to your resume and how you can use apps to promote yourself and your skills. A get rich quick scheme it's not.
The part of the story that bothers me is not that Apple is locking down the bootloader, or that people are hacking the iPhone to jailbreak or unlock it. The part that bothers me is:
Recent data from mobile advertising firm Pinch Media reveals that it has seen nearly four million jailbroken devices on its ad network, with 38% of those using at least one pirated application.
Why does Pinch Media get such a deep look into the devices that it can tell not only that the phone has been jailbroken, but what apps are on the phone and whether they are pirated or not!? This is way beyond reasonable and, in my mind at least, constitutes a serious privacy breach. If they can see the pirated/not pirated status of all the apps on the phone, how do I know they can't see into the apps - like contact lists, email, etc? Even if they can't, how would you feel about a website that gathered information about all the software (and the licensing) on your computer when you visited?
Which is why we should all petition Apple to please reimpose DRM on all of the iTunes music downloads.
Well i'm not happy to lose backgrounder, to lose my calendar on my home screen, to lose VOIP over 3G capability. None of these are available on the App Store. Give me these and i probably won't care about the lack of jailbreaking.
Personally i wouldn't buy an iPhone that can't be jailbreaked to give me these options.
Would you prefer if OSX had the same restrictions, all in the name of "stopping piracy".
I think this quote has meaning here:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If they finally do block it for good, ill move to verizon because AT&T is flat out horrible. Storm 2 doesnt look all that bad.
Anything which stops/hinders app piracy is ok in my book.![]()
Backgrounder, home screen calendars or VOIP over 3G are not "essential liberties." Expecting to be paid for one's work is not "temporary safety". Nice try though..![]()
As I said, I've no problem with anyone hacking their phones to enable extra functionality. In fact I find it a little disappointing that Apple, a company famous for making enabling technologies now seems to be spending more and more effort on restricting functionality.
I can understand why VOIP over 3G might be restricted - if you bought a subsidised phone with a VOIP restriction; but then want to remove that restriction then you should return the subsidy, IMO. The only reason we got cheaper iPhones was because they were subsidised by the networks who intended to recoup that money over the course of the contract.
Obviously you have lived in a cave for the last few years and missed the part where DRM is known to be a huge disaster and was removed because it didn't help stop piracy at all.
Obviously you have lived in a cave for the last few years and missed the part where DRM is known to be a huge disaster and was removed because it didn't help stop piracy at all.