Prankster Jailbreaks Apple Store Display iPhone

Stoobalou writes "A prankster has snuck into his local Apple temple of consumerism and footled with one of the display models." Is it wrong of me to think that it would be awesome if everybody did this to every phone? I mean, it's legal now!

Re:"it's legal now!"

[theNetImp]

Yeah that was totally NOT legal. That was destruction of property

Ethically wrong, but probably not legally...

[Shoeler]

This is certainly ethically wrong. It'd be like me going into your house and installing stuff on your home PC that I want there, without ever asking and without your knowledge.

Nevermind the fact that you should have protected it with a password, at the least.

Of course the password thing doesn't work as well when you're trying to sell iPhones.

It's not like you have an agreement you have to approve or anything to use their iPhone

Re:"it's legal now!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that was totally NOT legal. That was destruction of property

I doubt it. Display devices are there for customers to experiment with. Otherwise it would be equally illegal to switch channels on a display TV while you are taking a closer look.

Poor User Experience, the bane of open source.

[jessecurry]

I had my first experience with jailbreaking yesterday. It looks like jailbreakme.com is just a vehicle to force people into installing Cydia. Further, with the exception of the few apps that unlock some functionality on your phone it looks like most of the Apps on the Cydia store are just too low quality to have been approved by Apple. I'm thankful that I was able to SIM unlock my old phone so my girlfriend could use it with her carrier, but the experience was very poor. Every hack that I installed seemed to break something, then I needed to install another hack to fix the previous one... makes me glad to have my phone in Apple's walled garden, I just couldn't afford some much downtime on a communications device.

Re:Wrong?

[archangel9]

Congressman, is that you?

Vandalism requires physical harm. The hardware is not damaged.

No, vandalism requires changing physical properties of something, but not necessarily harm. Spray painting my fence with gang signs isn't "harm", but it requires me to fork out $X to have it repainted, thus costing money to remedy.

Someone will no doubt say "oh, but they image those phones every night, so it doesn't matter." Well, even if I paint my fence yearly, why should it be defaced between paintings?

Dangit, I should have made a car reference.

Re:"it's legal now!"

[Gadzeus]

Apple user bashing is insightful?

How about considering that the press has been portraying the Android/iPhone competition as Open vs Closed platform and, thus, is spinning this exploit as a good thing? I have seen the anti-Apple rhetoric rise to such dizzy heights as to suggest that this mirrors the Windows/Mac competition of the 90s... conveniently forgetting that both platforms were proprietary and that Microsoft was the arch proponent of domination through proprietary technology, working diligently to pervert open standards with proprietary code and even going as far as cramming the ISO with customers to railroad through the new, proprietary code dependent, Word doc format as an 'open' standard.

Here's a well respected Apple blogger commenting more accurately on the misrepresentation of this exploit:

"Yikes. It’s odd how the press is mostly covering this as “jailbreaking now more convenient” rather than “remote code exploit now in the wild”.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball.