Tuesday, July 27, 2010

U.S. Government: You Can Jailbreak Your iPhone

capt.photo_1280161819295-1-0[1] I love it when the government doesn’t coddle up to big business. According to an AP report, Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally unlock their devices so they can run software applications that haven't been approved by the Apple cartel. If bad news comes in threes, Steve Jobs is ripe for good news to come his way. Between the anti-climax of the iPad, antennae problems with the newest generation of iPhones, and now the government siding with hackers, Jobs needs a win.

Here is a list of what else the government is letting happen:

  • To bypass video game protections in order to investigate or correct security flaws
  • For college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break the copy-protect measures on DVDs for embedding clips for educational purposes, criticism or in noncommercial videos
  • To bypass the use of external dongles if the dongle no longer works
  • For used cellphone owners to unlock phones so that they can be switched to another wireless carrier (this was a renewal of a 2006 exemption)
Can somebody tell me what a dongle is? No locker room humor pleeeeease.

HT: Mashable

1 comment:

mike macon said...

A "dongle" is a hardware security key for software. Usually either a parallel port or USB port device, the key for the software is stored on a chip on the dongle rather than in a file on the computer.