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Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

blog.trailofbits.com

71–80 of 122 posts

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#71
post #59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't own, they use payment plans

And if a person loses the phone one month into their payment plan they still have to pay for the entire price of the phone. So you take ownership the moment you make an agreement with the company to make payments.

Payment plans seem like absolute insanity to me. Everyone I know on one is paying $100+ AUD per month perpetually since as soon as they have paid it off they get a new phone.

I have found that it is insanely cheap to just buy last years phone second hand. I picked up a pixel 2 recently for $300 AUD when it was about $1000 the year before.

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#72
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it appears Apple are really working towards user privacy as their main sell where android is locked in with Google Play services so though I do not personally have a preference I do know why some people choose Apple devices.

Apple is marketing privacy while storing encryption keys in China and becoming a services business. The more their revenue shifts away from hardware the more they'll be compelled to collect data to improve their services. There's no way around this.

I don't even know where to start with this comment.

"Storing encryption keys in china" could mean anything, it could mean having edge services with private TLS keys for instance. Which means semantically you're correct, but it doesn't mean anything.

In fact I'd argue it's no different than hosting in the US or UK.

The UK for example has laws that forbid you from withholding encryption keys or passwords. And there is an equivalent of the NSL (National Security Letter) which forbids you from even telling anyone that you have complied with a government or law enforcement request.

So how is this relevant?

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#73
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>library to help developers detect their app running on jailbroken devices How does this work? I thought iOS apps are sandboxed to an extent where it shouldn't be possible to snoop around to determine which processes are running and such.

A jailbroken device allows apps to do things that a non-jailbroken device does not. I maintain my company's in-house mobile app crash reporting system and I had to remove jailbreak checks from our iOS SDK. It turned out that some of the checks were causing crashes themselves due to buggy anti-jailbreak-detection code some jailbroken devices had in place. e.g. checking whether a file could be accessed that normally iO…

Out of interest, why do you care if your users run your application on a jailbroken device? It’s been a question I’ve had for a while..

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hardly see any compelling reason to stick to Apple hardware.

Well it appears Apple are really working towards user privacy as their main sell where android is locked in with Google Play services so though I do not personally have a preference I do know why some people choose Apple devices.

That would be an argument for apple software. The question above was, if you don't care about the software why would you buy apple hardware?

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#75
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>library to help developers detect their app running on jailbroken devices How does this work? I thought iOS apps are sandboxed to an extent where it shouldn't be possible to snoop around to determine which processes are running and such.

A jailbroken device allows apps to do things that a non-jailbroken device does not. I maintain my company's in-house mobile app crash reporting system and I had to remove jailbreak checks from our iOS SDK. It turned out that some of the checks were causing crashes themselves due to buggy anti-jailbreak-detection code some jailbroken devices had in place. e.g. checking whether a file could be accessed that normally iO…

They also get tripped up by Apple internal devices, which as an Apple employee is quite annoying when I get locked out of a financial app.

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point now that we have Android?

Android appears to be about to lose the ability to run downloaded executables (see Termux), but this also has nothing to do with the discussion.

Are you talking about this?

https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/655

Or is there some new development I [1] should be concerned about?

1. Just a regular user of Termux.

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if a person loses the phone one month into their payment plan they still have to pay for the entire price of the phone. So you take ownership the moment you make an agreement with the company to make payments.

Payment plans seem like absolute insanity to me. Everyone I know on one is paying $100+ AUD per month perpetually since as soon as they have paid it off they get a new phone. I have found that it is insanely cheap to just buy last years phone second hand. I picked up a pixel 2 recently for $300 AUD when it was about $1000 the year before.

To everyone their own. I very much respect your approach. But when I'm upgrading I don't want last year's model. My phone is the single most used "possession" in my life and after using one for two years, I like to treat myself.

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#78

Yay! I have fond memories of my friends (and eventually me, on the family iPad) jailbreaking our devices and doing stuff with them. A lot of the things I saw from jailbreaks were incorporated into later iOS updates- I'm curious (and excited!) to see what develops out of this wave.

What's the point now that we have Android?

Lower latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#79
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it appears Apple are really working towards user privacy as their main sell where android is locked in with Google Play services so though I do not personally have a preference I do know why some people choose Apple devices.

You can disable Google Play Services on a rooted Android. Besides I'm pretty sure all baseband CPUs have backdoors the carriers can tap into at any time.

On an iPhone (and probably a good number of Androids) the baseband is just a USB peripheral.

Re: Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point now that we have Android?

GarageBand. iMovie. Both of which can have their projects opened in Logic Pro or Final Cut, an irreplaceable workflow for which there is no Android equivalent. Audio Bus. Not Google. For me, ARkit is huge for some hobby projects.

If Apple would sell me one of their dev phones that gives me root, I'd switch from Android in a second.

I don't understand why this is such a big deal for them. They could even charge more for it, or make it so tech support is excluded from those phones, or whatever they need to do make money.

They'd bring all the hackers back to their platform. Do you realize how much effort is spent on Android mods? Can you imagine if those people were busy making iPhones do more thing? Because that's what'd happen if they'd sell me a rooted phone.

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