Comment by JackC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JackC | Hacker News Reader

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> I would argue that if you are not safe you are not free. The vast majority of App Store users are non-technical and therefore open to scams, viruses and malware.

That would make great sense, if there was a way for technical users to opt out of the walled garden. But it's the very opposite -- Apple spends a lot of time and money making it harder to jailbreak the phone, in ways that have nothing to do with defending against malware. If they do their best to make it impossible to opt out, then it's not about protecting your safety. It's about protecting the business model.

There's an argument for protecting the business model, of course -- making jailbreaking more difficult also makes piracy more difficult. The App Store has funneled a ton of money to developers, which in turn makes for better apps for everyone. But the notion that Apple has gone to absurd lengths to prevent jailbreaking because ... "We [developers] gave these freedoms away by using our talents to cheat and scam our customers"? No. That's not how freedom works. This is about money, plain and simple.

To play devil's advocate, do you think in an alternative universe where Apple products have built-in easy to use native support for jailbreaking with the push of a button that some large malware outbreak that only affects those devices jailbroken devices won't be blamed on them anyway?

Apple has other motivations to maintain their walled garden, but their goals of controlling the whole experience also extend to things like that. They want there to be no question that any Apple device is "safe", regardless of legitimate user configuration.

And as long as users at large aren't demanding general purpose computers who can really blame them?

Well, we have millions and millions of people using Windows, and in my experience when viruses and malware affect them, they usually blame themselves more than Microsoft. So, no, I don't think they'd put the blame in Apple.

And if that would have been the case, remember the Antennagate? First they told their customers to hold the phone differently, then they said it was a software problem, and finally they said the problem was the antenna, but that all smartphones had a similar problem (which was a lie). So, in that case I would have expected Steve Jobs' reality distortion field in full power blaming everyone except Apple.

    > they usually blame themselves more than Microsoft.

Did you not see how back with the Mac/PC ads Apple very much played on the whole aspect of Windows PCs being vulnerable to viruses? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Z386vXrt4

    > remember the Antennagate

I'm not saying Apple isn't capable of PR bullshit. I'm just saying that I can see why they don't see the benefit of allowing any kind of fragmentation on their platform.

I would feel more safe buying second hand iPhone than I would feel when buying an Android. Sure, the iPhone can also be compromised, but it is less likely.

In any case, it's not Apple's responsibility to make open hardware, since there already are open alternatives. It's not economically viable for a company to support non-inteded purposes of use.

> Apple spends a lot of time and money making it harder to jailbreak the phone, in ways that have nothing to do with defending against malware.

I doubt the point matters much, but for the specific case of preventing iOS jailbreaking (as opposed to, say, the iPodhash crap), Apple seems to be pretty lax when malware isn't being enabled. For example, after a jailbreak is released, Apple often doesn't patch the vulnerabilities until an update is rolled out for some separate reason - with the exception of the jailbreaks that remotely exploited the device via Safari (as opposed to requiring physical access to the device), which were patched quickly.

Of course, I would prefer if it were not necessary to use a vulnerability in the first place.

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