It's mathematically impossible to make a device completely safe from someone who has complete physical control over it. You can encrypt this and that all you like, but it's literally only a matter of time before someone applies enough computing power and breaks said rights-management. Boot loaders can be heavily obfuscated against reverse engineering, but since the device has to actually boot and work at some point, there's a key to the proverbial lock in that haystack somewhere. I hope I'm making sense, coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

And as for jailbreakme.com, yes, that was a genuine surf-and-get-pwned situation that utilized a "one-two punch" of two exploits, one that caused MobileSafari to execute arbitrary code, and the other that allowed the Unix user that MobileSafari runs as to execute a second payload of code as root. THIS "jailbreak" method was a prime example of sloppy coding and a lack of security mindfulness. Apple could have actually taken a page from Microsoft's recent secure coding initiative by renting some computing power and fuzzing files fed to their world-facing services to try to flesh out exploits. The Unix security model offers fantastic security if you a] implement it correctly and b] don't code sloppily. I get that Apple engineers are probably under an insane time-crunch, but still.

These bootloader jailbreaks however are just cat-and-mouse/whackamole between Apple who has to secure a device but yet make the damn thing actually boot, and an indefinite number of hackers with nothing but time. Hope I've cleared up any confusion anyone feels.

He's probably thinking of Fifth Element, in which Tiny Lister plays the president of Earth. Essentially, some unnamed evil force, in the form of an asteroid that can make phone calls, is bent on destroying all life.

I made that sound really silly but it's actually one of my favorite movies of all time.

Looks as though this exploit is patched in iOS 4.1 (current release is 4.0.1) which is already in beta and should see release soon... likely in the fall which would coincide with a simultaneous release for the iPad.

I consider myself to have pretty good eye-sight, if not 20/20 (no glasses/lenses) and I really can't see a pixel on my iPhone 3G from a measured foot away either. I can from about 3" though. If Apple's going to increase the pixel count by four-fold, I don't think I'll ever see a pixel again...

Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend.

Really, dude? Really?

Wow, that segway was about as awkward as some kind of two-parallel-wheeled auto-balancing minute-muscle-movement-controlled vehicle. Of some sort.

Everyone's putting words in my mouth. Of course it's scary, I don't agree with it, I was just answering the question how one thing could be illegal but another thing wasn't. The DMCA is an affront to free speech and fair use.

Oh certainly, no argument there. I didn't say this guy could use the fair use defense, I was just saying that the DMCA itself, on paper, shuts down a lot of fair-use avenues.

Good point, modern cars do have DRM-protected ECUs. My old Grand National had no such protection though :)

I was more responding to modifying for reason xyz vs. modifying for reason of circumventing copyright measure, and why modifying the consoles was different from making a general modification to a car, even one that might lead to you breaking other laws (like speeding.)

It's illegal because the law, in this case the DMCA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act) specifically criminalizes the circumvention of a copyright measure. Sure this flies in the face of hypothetical fair use, for example, making backups of original games to protect the originals from damage. But he intentionally modified hardware put in place to enforce copyright, and therefore broke the law.

Modifying a car doesn't run afoul of the DMCA. The car is still legal to own and drive, is usable on the road if kept inside the legal speed limit and passes whatever vehicle inspections your local municipality imposes, and is usable on closed tracks and in legal racing situations and the like. Modifying a console so that it no longer handshakes with content to ensure the media is the original factory media; circumventing the console's ability to control access to copyrighted works (to quote the DMCA) breaks the law.

That's pretty funny, I used to hate on WD as well, until last month when we upgraded all the drives in our SAN to 1.5TB drives and pulled all 18 old WD 250GB drives. In three years, with about a grand total of 40min powered-off time, with constant reads and writes through nights, weekends and holidays, none failed.

Not exactly a real-world scenario relevant to desktop use or even a file server, but I thought it was interesting.

Many iPhone "2G"/first gen. hardware contracts are more than the approximately (maybe it's exactly?) 18 months it takes for your contract to be upgrade-eligible. The issue here is more the people who bought the iPhone first gen very late in it's life cycle, or bought into the 3G at all (since it's only been available for about 11 months.)

Seems people just feel confused and betrayed by Apple, because those who purchased iPhone 3G phones (myself included) adopted early, and also were first gen. customers as well. Many of the people in my situation feel screwed that they have to pay an upgrade fee while new adopters get in on the iPhone 3G-S goodness for free while we've been loyal customers all along. That said, I realize it doesn't really work that way.

I understand how subsidies work, and I realized that the iPhone 3G was released approximately 1 year after the iPhone "2G"/first gen., but maybe if I knew the iPhone would be updated again after only a year, I might not have purchased the iPhone 3G. Nevertheless, the iPhone 3G does suit my needs completely and will continue to do so until approximately January 2010 when I can upgrade to the iPhone 3G-S, or at that point, I could also just wait and see if the iPhone 4th gen is coming down the line at the one-year mark just like this one. And if so, I'll evaluate then if it's worth the additional 5 month wait.

I'm smack in the middle of the Philly metro area, and apparently, AT&T isn't offering coverage enough to suit the features of this phone to me either. Or NYC metro. Or anywhere in America, for that matter, at least for a while. MMS and tethering have been around for years and years, but one won't be ready at launch, and the other was totally glanced over and for now appears delayed without mention of availability time-frame.