You know why Apple doesn’t promote jailbreaking? Because they consider it as a threat to every other mobile user or worse, can take down a cellphone tower. Jailbreaking alters iPhone’s baseband processor (BBP) that allows a user to connect to cellphone towers and if it happens to be one of those smart users, the cellphone towers could be in jeopardy. Before you laugh your heart out loud and take it as BS, let me tell you, this is all real. Apple has in fact, filed this as a response to EFF’s request to make jailbreaking legal.
“A local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data. Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.”
Needless to say, Fred von Lohmann, EFF’s attorney is amused and says such “claims are preposterous”. Not that I have high hopes for Apple with this one but it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
[Via Wired]
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