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Comment by FDSGSG | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone at Apple would be all that upset over that. A publicly released exploit is better than one privately sold to intelligence agencies. It's specifically the latter market that Corellium seeks to serve.

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> It's specifically the latter market that Corellium seeks to serve.

Hence why Corellium often provides members of the security and jailbreak community with access to their services.

Lots of companies give lots of things to "the community" for goodwill, but that doesn't mean they don't also sell to governments. Amazon gives AWS away to anyone, but ALSO tried to get the JEDI contract. One doesn't negate the other.

This is starting to veer off track, but I am not overly sympathetic to “but your tool is used by bad people” arguments in cases where there are reasonable, general uses for the tool. Nobody goes after McDonalds because murderers eat there, too.

Ah yeah, McDonalds is totally a reasonable comparison!

Corellium doesn’t charge a few “nice” researchers, but builds their business around the evil researchers willing to pay $1M/yr for a license. Clearly they’re exactly like McDonalds!

I’m not going to argue with you about how comparable it is; I consider Corellium to be usable enough as a general purpose tool that I exempt it from criticism along the lines of “this is a bad product that can only really be used by bad people”. I have no insight into how many of their contracts go to “evil” researchers and how much this is skewed by them providing their services for free to those who are not “evil researchers”; if you can show me that their service is overwhelmingly used only by the people you’re talking about I might be a little bit more willing to entertain your point.

That's not the real licensing cost at all. The cloud and on-premise options are both available for substantially less.

The licensing costs seem to depend on who’s asking. I have no doubt that they might have offered you substantially better rates than that.

People keep making very confident but incorrect statements regarding prices offered by Corellium because they assume everyone gets quoted the same, see this twitter thread for another example https://twitter.com/therealdaneel/status/1193122030687797248

That's just a free cover to make their sales to IC exploit developers seem more palatable.

I believe Corellium also has customers that find it useful that they can test their apps on previous versions of iOS, an entirely legitimate service that is quite difficult to find elsewhere.

I don't believe anyone doubts that.

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