The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
P.S. There's another reason why jailbreaks are few and far in between. There is close to no trust between the people who create the jailbreaks...I had several good exploits that became public without my permission.
On IRC, we generally knew who did or did not have vulns and trusted not to BS. That implicit trust did make things difficult.
Although not super consequential, it seemed petty to not do it.
It is possible that each instance was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely.
Also, the new iOS notification system on iOS 4/5 was directly nabbed from a jailbreak tweak, though it was because they hired the developer so I am assuming it was not "copied" in that case.
Similarly, with Notification Center I've never previously heard that credited to the jailbreak community because it was always mentioned as an area where iOS caught up to Android, which also seems likely as the inspiration for a jailbreak as well.
Customers saying "I really want X" is generally just empty words with poor correlation about how much X is wanted, and you should take that with a grain of salt instead of assume that there's a demand for X; but on the other hand if there's a price attached (either a literal payment, or price of inconvenience as in this case) then seeing if customers really want this is very useful data.
2. How much did Android, etc. influence both? I don't know which specific code you're referring to but in discussions I saw the most common way these things were described was as adapting an Android feature and by default it seems a lot more reasonable to assume the influence came from a the project with orders of magnitude greater exposure and UI development funding.
I remember not using my iPhone for a year or so (switched to Android).
Next time I booted up that phone I had to click through -every- modal notification dialog in every app for that year (calendar events, emails, others). One by one.
It took hours to dismiss them all, before I could actually use the phone.
That's not a matter of taste. That just plain sucks.
I had a jail broken keyboard with two dimensional sliding which is better than force touch imo
I run an ASO company, and received an offer from one of the keyboard companies for the purchase of the data of what people type into search.
Reported them to Apple as a potential security risk. Apple didn't care.
On the other hand, for low level development on a lab device, jail-breaking is invaluable.
There's a lot to jailbreaking still, I think, and the business of "for pay" tweaks seems pretty stable at the moment.
The iPhone still feels totally crippled without this functionality, and there's not even any way to side load the app.
If anyone has any solutions for this..
The wifi to wifi ability is fantastic when you are in hotels, etc that charge per device.
It's the one jailbreak all that I miss sorely, that is obviously built into android by default.
And McDonald's is an instrument of oppression because you can't order pancakes after 10:30am. Either the customer controls the restaurant or the restaurant controls the customer!
If you want root on a device, buy a device that allows root. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones. Meanwhile people who want a reliable device with billions of dollars worth of investment in industry leading security and standout features like first class accessibility can have them. And yes, it turns out there's a trade off between platform security and user system access. We're all better off because there are a range of platforms available to us that provide different choices between those trade offs.
Nobody is stopping the FOSS community break by my out first class phones with industry leading features. The fact that it hasn't isn't a failing of Apple and smashing Apple wouldn't make it happen anyway.
I'm an iPhone user for security reasons but this arument rubs me the wrong way. You can allow users system access at their own risk, if you design it correctly. The problem with Android is that "Install from unknown sources" is merely a checkbox away and opens the gateways to hell.
I understand that a non jailbroken device is more secure but it also restricts what I can do on my own device which I bought with my money and I can't abide that.
But yeah, much better if the cat and mouse game weren’t necessary to start with.
You made a lot of difference in a lot of people's lives, rock on.
[1] http://www.iphone-tips-and-advice.com/image-files/sbsettings...
[2] http://cydia.saurik.com/package/sbsettings/
[3] https://tinyapps.org/blog/misc/201307210700_iphone_text_auto...
Thank you to the Jailbreakers and Unlockers..
Today I can see no reason to Jailbreak. There is no kill application I care about that anymore.
Given the state of security and the stance of some governments I am happy Apple is locking things down!
With a jailbreak / root you can get around carrier restrictions on tethering, which in some areas without high speed wired internet options this is very important.
jailbreaking gives you root access to your mobile computer, which means you actually own and control it, not some corporation.
one thing you can do after jailbreaking is install a real firewall on the device so you can control what information passes into and out of it. that's a real boon to privacy (it's not perfect secrecy of course).
From installing apps before the App Store existed , to attachments in mail, to download managers in safari, to a fully featured files app, the ingenuity of the early jailbreakers and coders was incredible.
I have fond memories of my wife and I spending hours playing iZoo, a pre App Store candy crush-like game.
I think freedom will be fine as long as low-cost open devices like the Pi exist. If they go under and Android continues on its trajectory of becoming more closed, then I'll be more concerned.
My hope is that the severe lack of jailbreaks this year lulls Apple into a sense of complacency opens up new opportunities for jailbreaking iOS 11.
Unlikely. The demand for pirated material (games) has not diminished. Also its hard to explain why the iPhone suddenly lacks demand for jailbreak when the Android modding community still thrives.
>These days, I think most users are generally happy with the status quo
Jailbreaking was not a thing for most users.
Your point still stands of course: Jailbreak is not at all needed for privacy.
I personally have held my iPad back on iOS 9 for the reason that maybe some day I could jailbreak and install another OS, home brew apps etc. but I made a generalization about piracy I guess because I did see a bunch of demand for that in 2010-2012 which shows you how out of date my iOS knowledge is (since I have not jailbroken any devices between then and now). By the way, thanks for Cydia :) its synonymous in my mind for any discussion about jailbreaking and iOS.
I just think there is some demand for jailbreaking, and lack of public demand isn't a significant explanation for lack of jailbreaking progress on iOS 10/11. I mean, there is no clear argument I've seen yet which establishes a link between public demand and frequency of jailbreaks; after all it only takes a single determined developer/hacker to craft an exploit and deploy it for reasons not connected to public demand.
For the most part, I agree with this, and I was making this argument somewhere else in this thread: the primary reasons that we haven't seen many or, when they happen, "pleasant" jailbreaks for recent versions of iOS is that Apple has continued to be good about not having severe regressions in their attempts to secure the device, they have added really interesting mitigations ahead of the competition, they have changed their prioritization for plugging holes (they used to let jailbreaks sit around for months), and they've hired many of the more "mercenary" people who would work on jailbreaks away from The Resistance to work for The Empire.
That said, there is at least some connection with demand, and that's something worth examining in more detail here.
> ...after all it only takes a single determined developer/hacker to craft an exploit and deploy it for reasons not connected to public demand...
The way you word this sentence makes it sound like the work involved here is comparable--not just in quantity but in concept--to building a real-time chat application or some other slightly-complex web application. This isn't just "work": it is a combination of luck and skill that relies on winning a game that you are playing against an opponent (Apple) who had to make a mistake; if anything, it has more in common with panning for gold than building a bridge. One does not just "craft an exploit", no matter how determined.
The reason people are willing to burn tons of time into the possibility of finding a vulnerability in this platform is because there's a ton of PR and excitement to come from it, which is largely tied to the amount of interest that exists. There are tons of less secure devices out there that never get anyone bothering to "jailbreak" them due to lack of interest; people even take up bounties to try to get these devices hacked. This is made much worse as there really aren't that many people who can even pull this off when given an end-to-end explanation of a vulnerability.
What ends up happening, thereby, when there isn't much of a public interest in jailbreaking, is that these people spend their time working on hacking other devices or they hoard their exploits (as why bother burning your magic trick on people who don't even care for the performance?), whether for personal use (it makes a great parlor trick while also letting you do a lot of great research into the workings of Apple's software) or to sell for a profit (which might be to Apple through their bug bounty program or to a third party; the latter brings up interesting ethical questions, but people definitely do it: these exploits are then used either to do more research or are turned into weapons).
We can then ask "why has demand in jailbreaking decreased? as in, why does this matter?", and I see a few reasons: one is that Apple has started "throwing in the kitchen sink" (seemingly after waiting for Steve Jobs' body to be cold in the ground...), another is that the extremely killer and pressing needs have started to go away as Apple fleshes out the operating system as well as allows more things into their App Store, and another big one is a kind of "death spiral" that comes from there being less to do, leading to fewer people bothering to do it, leading to less reason for developers to develop cool stuff, which is why there's less to do... this collapsing market is a really tough sell.
A big thing to understand is that the jailbreaks have also become "more complex to use and maintain for the user" in addition to "less likely to be found" for the developers: the jailbreaks available for iOS 9.3 and later versions are brutal... they take the form of an app that you had to install using a tool I wrote called Cydia Impactor, which pretends to be Xcode and do all of the signing for a "free developer account". Every time you reboot your device, it is no longer jailbroken, and you have to run this app, which sometimes doesn't work (on iOS 10 I'd even say it "only" sometimes works ;P); and the app itself expires every 7 days (Apple restriction on free developer accounts), and so you have to keep reinstalling it using Impactor. Finally, if you break anything at all that causes SpringBoard to not be able to pop up (as you need to get all the way to "I can see this app and click it" for the jailbreak to work), you have to format your device (losing all your data) and restore to fix it... older jailbreaks were much more forgiving, as you could still log in via SSH if the device even sort of was able to start.
I'll also say that the general issue you bring up was also true for iOS 7 and 8, but there were tons of people who jailbroke even with iOS 9. When jailbreaks are available and easy to use, developers do cool things that are able to tempt users to do it; it is like: why does anyone install an app when I bet they don't really need it? Well, spending $3 for some random app that only slightly affects what you do is worth it: the cost is low to match the low benefit; so it doesn't really matter that much if the benefit isn't "insane killer thing that everyone has to do or the phone is worthless": it only has to be greater than the cost, and the cost went up so high and so fast during the past year and a half that even I have been "living without" a feature I used every single day numerous times and am constantly sad to not have right now, because "damn it, I just don't want to have to spend ten minutes rebooting my phone over and over again in the hope that this broken jailbreak works".
In the last year or so I wanted to take an old iPhone 5s, a handmedown from a relative, to learn CyScript and the other one from the NowSecure engineer that exposes a JS interface (I forget).
How can and how will security students learn to reverse engineer at runtime and assess modern iOS apps in the current state and no official emulator to boot?
The problem is that I use three languages daily: Finnish, English and Japanese. Besides that, I use The Dvorak keyboard layout. There is no commonly used Dvorak layout for Finnish and Japanese, but it's jarring to have to change the key arrangement when changing language, so on my Mac, I customized myself a layout that contains the English alphabet, the Finnish extra characters ä and ö, and type also Japanese with that.
On iPad, I couldn't find a keyboard that allowed that. The 3rd party keyboards are a step into a right direction, and I think that the JB community has played their part at that.
Needless to say, I'm not willing to switch away from Dvorak after 10 years of muscle memory and a generally more pleasant typing experience.
I'm still hopeful for the future of my currently read-only device.
To begin with, Apple's privacy settings are pretty good, but things like PMP and AppAdmin (downgrade apps to previous versions) rock! especially when you lose functionality or you get a revamp you never asked.
I hope JB will continue as long as Apple does, and PLEASE update the Firewall IP :)
I haven't rooted my device since ancient times, but this might make me reconsider.
Not sure how many people would choose to make a publicly released jailbreak instead of taking the $1 million.
GuizmoDNS - OpenDNS+DNSCrypt
TetherMe - free tethering
Pandora Downloader
Pandora Skips
Unrestrictor 3G - Remove IAS and other limits by fooling apps into thinking they are on Wi-Fi.
Bytafont2 with Futurama font
iTransmission - torrent client
Also nice were bandwidth meter in the status bar, Fake Carrier, Five Icon Dock and Freeman's work porting aptitude, yum and deb packaging to iOS to make installing tweaks and apps easy.
It's a shame that Apple doesn't provide more app/os integration, customization and middleware hooks.
The analogy of apartment is interesting, as today people may have equal or more to lose on a cellphone breach comparing to apartment, while managing the security is much more difficult on cellphone for common users. That fact certainly contributes to the prospers of walled garden (apartment management company) like Apple.
btw thanks for all the great work, saurik. //hatoff
With the 9.3.3 JB, I am basically set. I'm an extremely light mobile user and I'm going to hold onto this 5S for as long as possible.
I might be completely wrong about this, but has Apple brought out any significant feature that wasn't first available through Cydia?
It wasn't them who were sloppy programmers, it was the teenagers who were writing NSA-grade exploits... SMH Apple employees need a reality check...
There's been plenty of "NSA-grade" exploits recently leaked, and they didn't seem significantly more complex than what jailbreakers use.
EDIT: It's an honest question. If you're not going to answer or don't know, shove the downvotes up your ass, OK?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673840 and marked it off-topic.