Jailbreaking, Part II

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Jailbreaking, Part II

                In my opinion, Jailbreaking should be legal, and the owner of a device should be able to do anything they want with it, as long as it doesn’t break any laws or harm anyone.  This doesn’t have anything to do with piracy, because I am talking only about the act of Jailbreaking.  For this reason, I am glad that the Supreme Court agrees with my view.  However, I believe that the issue of piracy and such has a very fine line, and I think that some things are clearly very illegal, or at least immoral.  For example, getting a game for free after Jailbreaking because you don’t want to buy it from the App Store or anywhere else isn’t right; that is stealing, and stealing is wrong.  However, in the event that one wants to play Pokemon on their iPod and already has the game purchased for Gameboy Advanced, I think they should be able to download it for free, because they have already paid for it, and it really doesn’t even exist on iPod.  Therefore, this person isn’t stealing, because there isn’t even a way to pay for the game on his/her iPod.  Legality aside, I don’t think this is immoral.  Therefore, I wouldn’t look down upon anyone that does it; I think it should be allowed.

                There are several different ‘companies,’ for lack of a better name (they don’t make you pay for it), which offer their own Jailbreaking software which will navigate around Apple’s restrictions and then remove them totally.  Some examples of these groups are Redsn0w, Absinthe from Greenpois0n, Sn0wbreeze, and Jailbreakme.com.  After Jailbreaking, there are two main ‘replacement app stores,’ Cydia and Installer, which allow Apps not approved by the Apple App Store.  Usually, once one group finds a Jailbreak for a certain iOS version, it quickly gets leaked out to the others, and they all start offering it.  These groups don’t really care, because most offer their Jailbreaks free of charge. 

                There are two main types of Jailbreaks: tethered and untethered.  Basically, the difference is that a device Jailbroken with a tethered Jailbreak must be connected to the Jailbreak software every time it is turned on, but with the untethered, the device only needs to be connected to the software one time.  In short, untethered is always preferred over tethered.  There are currently no untethered Jailbreaks discovered for the latest version of iOS, iOS 6.  This means that any device with this most up-to-date version cannot obtain an untethered Jailbreak.  Also, the latest version of Apple devices, including the iPhone 5, doesn’t even have a tethered Jailbreak that has been discovered.  Customers with these devices must simply wait until a group discovers a Jailbreak, and until then, they are out of luck when it comes to Jailbreaking.