So, there I am enjoying a nice Gilmore Girls episode after a long day's work, and Engadget's iPhone application brings the good news: the US Library of Congress has added a DMCA exemption for jailbreaking or rooting mobile phones! This is a major blow to Apple, who actively tried to keep jailbreaking a criminal offence, and a major win for everyone who believes that the phone you buy is actually yours, and not the manufacturer's.
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Member since:2009-08-15
I too was going to give Thom a little good natured ribbing for this being his first post in a while but you beat me to the punch.
It's no surprise that Thom jumped at the opportunity to "blast" Apple for their desire to control the hardware that runs their software and celebrate the Library of Congress' ruling.
Like others here, I don't think the Library of Congress' decision will make much difference in the real world.
I don't know of a single case where Apple ever "broke down the doors" of a hacker who hacked their phone and its certainly within Apple's right to continue to make the process difficult, something the LOC didn't say Apple or another company couldn't continue to do.
But despite the impression others have regarding Apple's "evil intentions" I've always thought the license agreements, the efforts to make it difficult to hack their phones, hardware, operating system, etc. had more to do with product liability.
For example if they didn't have these EULAs and systems in place what's to stop a hacker from seeking compensation for "bricking" their netbook for example, or a company who installed OS X on non-Apple hardware and as a result lost millions of dollars in valuable data, or a techie claiming "lost productivity" because he'd hacked his iPhone and lost a big contract. Or imagine a hacker bringing AT&T's network to a halt due to a poorly written application or hack.
With all that said, I'm actually pleased with the LOC's ruling as it always feels a little "dirty" when bending the rules of an EULA and I've done so, self admittedly. At least hackers now can risk "bricking" their iPhone legally!
But be careful my fellow hackers...if you bring down the "network", brick your phone, lose data, or cause irreparable harm to your hardware, software, data or your body or that of someone else's, YOU will be held liable, criminally or civilly, not our friends at Apple or our other favorite technology companies.
Member since:1997-10-01
I agree that although this is big news, cause for celebration, and a blow to Apple's hegemony, it's not going to have much real-world impact, because the geniuses who are out these figuring out the jailbreaks would do it whether it was illegal in the US or not. This doesn't compel Apple to make jaibreaking easy, nor does it particularly clarify the awkward instance where you take your jailbroken and broken iPhone into the Apple store to be fixed under warranty.
Really the main thing that this does is give people in the US with jailbroken iPhones a little more moral high ground because they're not actually taking part in a semi-legal activity anymore.
Member since:2009-07-25
What about companies that do jail-breaking for profit, would this new law affect them. Would a company like Pystar be able to start again due the jail-breaking exemption?
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-08-26
Member since:2010-03-19
Yeah, great he's got out to make another anti Apple story.
When I saw this news on the web, my first thought was: great, I will be able to crack DRM from video / music / DVD / video games now legally, it's so great.
When Thom read this one he's first thought was: aha, let's make a new that f**k Apple ...
A neutral news should be the whole story and a section about Apple. Not a whole thing against Apple then a sentence about DVD and music ...
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2007-09-22
Thank you Thom for getting out of your "OSNews hibernation". :-)
And obviously thanks go to the EFF, but maybe people shouldn't buy phones that need this (N900 anyone ?). :-)
Edited 2010-07-26 18:14 UTC