

Apple claims jailbroken phones can crash transmission towers - TallGuyShort
http://www.macworld.com/article/141965/2009/07/jailbreak.html?lsrc=rss_main

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jzdziarski
This is the same old trick that AT&T used back in the 60s and 70s to somehow
pass legislation making it illegal to plug anything non-AT&T into your phone
jack: the stability of the network. Yet any GSM expert would tell you that
what Apple has to say is complete bollocks.

If you've been following Apple's ongoing battle with the EFF, you can see what
the real motivation for Apple's propaganda is: Apple has a series of tightly
controlled revenue streams flowing through the iPhone, and they don't want
that closed ecosystem threatened by the open source community. Movies, music,
videos, applications, and other digital content connects the device directly
in with their iTunes revenue streams and helps create a complete "suite" of
products from Apple that users will be locked into purchasing.

Since the iPhone's release in 2007, developers have threatened that chain ...
not with illegal pirating (although that's going to happen regardless), but
rather with something Apple fears more than piracy: competition. The developer
community has put together a complete community environment for the iPhone
including Unix world, software repository, and even their own compiler and
tool chain... and they did it long before Apple ever concocted their own. And
developers distributing their own software are creating applications that can
do more than AppStore apps, lending themselves to many times the number of
sales that they'd otherwise get in the AppStore. That is at the heart of what
threatens Apple, just as competing telco equipment was at the heart of what
threatened AT&T back before they were broken up.

In reality, a jailbroken iPhone is no more unsafe than a laptop running an
AT&T air card. In fact, a jailbroken iPhone runs more like a regular computer
than one fresh out of the box. This all comes down to revenue for Apple and
their bending over for AT&T. Apple will do anything, and say anything
apparently, to protect that revenue stream from ever having to face real
competition.

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pedalpete
And if an jailbroken iphone is such a threat to the towers, at what point do
we point the finger at apple saying it is there responsibility to ensure their
device can't crash the towers.

Anti-competitive practices are not even related to the case/issue of what they
allow/disallow in the app store.

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Seiwynd
I feel must add the obligatory thought - "Yeah, because making jailbreaking
illegal will definitely discourage those who want to crash transmission
towers."

