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!

yes, its wrong

[bsDaemon]

Hey, Taco... I think there might be kind of a difference between jailbreaking a phone you've paid for, and jailbreaking the display model at the store which is still Apple's property in a fairly straight forward way. I'm no fancy, big city lawyer, but it seems to me that might have some bearing on just how legal it is to do it.

Re:Ethically wrong, but probably not legally...

[Barny]

We have display PCs where I work, it takes us about 20min to wipe them and reload our image for display, I would guess apple have a similar thing in place.

We don't give net access to them, but neither do we count them as safe from virus' since anyone off the street can come in and toss a USB stick into them while a sales staff is busy.

Re:cute

[dirk]

I'm sure Apple and AT&T are horribly upset that you have given them your money for products you find are inferior.

I just don't understand why everyone keeps buying iPhones and iPads if they don't do what they want. By purchasing them, you are basically telling Apple and AT&T that you are happy with their products and service. If they don't do what you want, don't purchase them and purchase something that does. I don't like how Apple handles the app store, so instead of giving them money and rewarding them for their bad job, I purchased an Android phone.

Re:I, for one

[BarryJacobsen]

are happy that I can buy a new iPhone directly from Apple almost without any ties to any phonecompany and with all features enabled.

Although they have forgotten to remove the 20 megabyte at&t download limitation from itunes. Can jailbreak solve that? I'd like to download podcasts from 3g and I actually have free (national) calls and unlimited data for tethering or whatever. (the benefit of working for a big company that can make proper deals with the data carriers)

There is indeed a jailbreak app that can make apps think they're on wifi - My3G (and there are probably others).

Re:yes, its wrong

[a.deity]

Back in the old days of 2.x jailbreaking (another one where a visit to a website would do it), there would always be a few display models running Cydia every morning. It was just a pain in the ass, and no one at the retail level was greatly angered or even cared too much; we'd just restore them when we saw them. To anyone on their way to an Apple Store to do this: you're not making a subversive statement, you're just taking 5 minutes out of a Specialist's day, one who probably jailbroke their phone a long time ago.

Re:"it's legal now!"

[joeyblades]

Of course Apple just keeps telling their users they are secure.

I'm pretty sure Apple never made this claim. In fact, if Apple were trying to make this claim, they wouldn't feel the need to issue regular security updates.

BTW, it's too early to point a finger at Apple. The exploit may, in fact, be in Adobe's code. And before you flame me to tell me that Apple writes all their own PDF code, I caution you against making assumptions about who writes what. It is likely that Apple uses Adobe's Open Source Media Framework to develop their plugins.

-1 Redundant

[singingjim1]

As soon as the story broke about the online jailbreak I saw numerous Facebook posts about heading out to the Apple/AT&T stores to jailbreak the demos. This is going on all over the country as we type.

Re:"it's legal now!"

[ciroknight]

It is likely that Apple uses Adobe's Open Source Media Framework to develop their plugins.

In this case, you're completely wrong. Apple has its own complete PDF stack which is used from its display server (Quartz, which is itself derived from Display PDF) up; the advantage is that you can dump a PDF from basically anywhere (what's on screen if it isn't 3D, offscreen widgets, etc) and print that exactly to your documentation, etc. It would make less than no sense for Apple to license Adobe's code, since it would be a complete duplication of something already in their software stack.

Re:"it's legal now!"

[Osty]

Look for GV Mobile and MyWi. There are free and for-pay versions of GV Mobile, and while MyWi is for-pay it has a weird distribution scheme where it looks like it's free in Cydia but then you have to do a couple of other funky things, get a license, and then it works.

Cydia doesn't really have popular lists like in iTunes, so if you're used to seeing "Most Downloaded" apps you're not going to find it there. Really, I've found the best way to find what I want is to search the web for the concept ("iphone jailbreak wifi tether" for example) and find out what apps people are using to do what I want, and which ones they think are good. Then I search for that app in Cydia and download it. Note that Cydia's search seems to be based off of title and description and not any sort of metadata or semantics, so searching for "tether" does not return MyWi. But if you know that MyWi is what you want, searching for "MyWi" will find it quickly.

Re:"it's legal now!"

[agrif]

For the record (because nobody seems to know this), this particular exploit, while jailbreaking your phone, also patches the security hole it rode in on. As of today, a freshly-jailbroken phone with a secure root password is more secure than the vanilla-OS versions.

Yes, this is an exploit. But it is an incredibly handy one.

(Also, on a historical note, there was a nearly identical version of this website (at the same address!) right after the first-gen iPhones and iPod Touches came out. I remember jailbreaking mine the day I got it, right from the device. That version also patched the exploit it used. If I recall correctly, it was an old bug in zlib or libpng.)