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Ethical Hacking : The History Of Jailbreaking Ios

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Ethical Hacking: The History of Jailbreaking iOS

What is iOS jailbreaking and why is it even a thing that people want to do? Jay Freemen, also known by his twitter handle @saurik, best described jailbreaking as:
“[Allowing] users to take control of their devices. There’s an old saying about Ford motorcars, that you can have any color you want as long as its black, and that very much applies to Apple. And, until very recently, you can have any wallpaper you want as long as it’s black” (Freeman).
What Freemen was referring to was how, up until iOS 4, you could not set a wallpaper on your iPhone, leaving you with only a mundane black background. So, people in pre-iOS 4 days, would be able to jailbreak their iOS device and gain the …show more content…

So instead of returning the device or reselling it get his money back the young hacker decided he was going to use his technical prowess to solve his problem. So Hotz dismantled his phone, found the phones baseband processor, scrambled its code using a soldering tool and managed to reprogram it to work with T-Mobiles cellular network (Heath) (Freeman). As Jay Freemen noted in his interview with Make It Work on YouTube, this technically is not jailbreaking, the correct term is [carrier] unlocking. However, this is one of the first times that an iPhone has ever been hacked to do something that Apple did not intend it to do.
Around the same time that Hotz figured out how to unlock the original iPhone another group of hackers figured out how to gain access to the iOS kernel and install custom ringtones on their device (Heath). As interest in jailbreaking began to grow a few groups of hackers began to post iOS jailbreak tools on the internet for anyone to use. These early tools were very rudimentary and some were unstable by current standards. Eventually the jailbreak community organized shortly after Jay Freeman jumped on the jailbreaking bandwagon.
A year or so before Apple implemented the App Store on all iOS devices Jay Freemen created a repository aptly named Cydia after the moth who is known for destroying fruit crops as a larva. The Cydia repository, or more commonly known as the Cydia Store, became a central place for third party app

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