A rant at the anti-jailbreak misinformation portrayed in the blogosphere
Being a bit of a techie, I read a lot of tech blogs, listen to tech and phone podcasts and follow some prominent figures in the tech blogosphere.
It seems lately that the vast majority seem to have taken it upon themselves to declare jailbreaking your iphone as being a really bad thing, a massive security risk will make your phone really unstable. I could go on. But it seems to me that anyone making these statements surely hasn’t ever run a jailbroken device. My iphone has spent most of the last 12 months jailbroken and I had one crash which as it happens turned out to be Apples fault (the coma problem in 3.1). So stability is clearly not an issue with a Jailbroken device, its the software which you then add to the device that can cause problems. If you jailbreak, install winterboard (themeing engine) and every other mod you can find then yes you'll probably end up with a crashy device which is no different to installing all those nice freeware programs off the internet onto your computer, they are not verified by microsoft/apple and can potentially crash your computer. If you are sensible with your jailbroken phone you'll be fine. Which brings me to the iPhone virus shenanigans. Yes if your phone isn’t jailbroken, there is no current way you can get infected but as has been said pretty much anywhere, jailbreaking is done at your own risk you should not do it if you haven’t read up on the subject or taken good advice. But the root issue is people who have installed OpenSSH which allows terminal access to your iPhone. Open SSH is not a pre-installed option with any current jailbreak method so anyone installing it would have installed it for a reason and its their own stupid fault if they don’t set a new password. Would you buy a pc and connect it to the internet via a usb modem with no anti-virus or firewall and with no password set? no. So anyone with half a brain shouldn’t be connecting to public wifi connections, with a jailbroken device, with default passwords with openssh installed and enabled! At the end of the day its down to user education, not the iphone being insecure or the jailbreak itself causing problems. If I agree anywhere with the anti-jailbreak mob its maybe that the large majority of users just pile in blindly into something they don’t know enough about. A good step people should be taking before jailbreaking is reading as much as you can on jailbreaking, and then read some more. Just use a little effort. Otherwise get a good eBook like "Not Your Average iPhone Book" from the founder of www.funkyspacemonkey.com. >> http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/book which should give you a fairly good grounding about what you are getting yourself into. In the meantime would high up people in the blogosphere actually try these things out before jumping on the "anti" bandwagon. How about a good balanced view of the facts? If you don’t want to jailbreak your iPhone that’s great for you!, but don’t push people away just because you haven’t taken the time to research the subject in more depth. The developers working on Cydia apps help drive innovation with our handsets and in some cases apple has clearly taken inspiration from them and added features to the main firmware. I just wish they'd do it with SBsettings!
