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Comment by giberson | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading an article about the Half life 2 leak--I remember a bit about where the person responsible reached out to Gabe newell, and playing it cool Gabe offered him a job.

Newell kept corresponding with Gembe, and Gembe was led into believing that Valve wanted to employ him as an in-house security auditor. He was to be offered a flight to the USA and was to be arrested on arrival by the FBI. --wikipedia excerpt

Luckily for Axel his government intervened before he could make the mistake of actually going to the USA where it's likely events would have turned out much worse for him.

The point, anyway, is this sounds very terribly similar. Comex may already be in the US, regardless I wouldn't be so quick to accept a "job" offer from a company I've been irking for a couple years. Hopefully the offer is on the up and up, for Comex's sake.

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He's already in the USA, and his identity has been known for a while. That makes it sound pretty different to me - no issues with jurisdiction or identifying him. If Apple had a legal case against him, or if the FBI feels that he has committed crimes, there's nothing stopping them going after him.

He hasn't committed a crime and even if they don't like what he's done, I doubt that they have it in for him.

Even if they do, what are they going to do? Sabotage his career by giving him bad references?

Jailbreaking isn't illegal for him now, but I imagine the taint of insider knowledge of Apple's products could make future jailbreak development a very risky proposition indeed!

Yes yes yes. I agree completely that those sorts of shenanigans are exactly what our young friend needs to consider.

How this sort of thing works is you sign an onerous contract that, in a general sense, precludes you from ever jailbreaking again since now that you've worked there you have inside information. Then after a couple months they let you go, or they give you some super boring and tedious job so you have to quit in order to prevent from killing yourself. But you're still legally bound by the contract, and the whole thing cost them 1/100 what it would to bring you to court.

The internship is only scheduled to last a few months, and I'm aware that I'll be precluded from jailbreaking... but I was telling the truth when I said I was getting bored; I'd want to move on to something else anyway.

Any idea what you'll be working on? I'm almost certain they want you to help them fixing security holes, keeping us jailbreakers out, but I can't say I like it much!

Personally, I'll keep my fingers crossed that you'd be assigned to UIKit, or sales! ;-)

Law student here. Still recommend checking your contract extremely carefully. You'd be surprised how restrictive employment contracts can be.

It makes me uncomfortable that you are conflating criminal activities and publishing security research.

Jailbreaking was declared legal. If it hadn't I think things would be going much differently for this fellow.

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