Free Republic

For several years, it was common practice among iOS enthusiasts to ‘jailbreak’ their iPhones so they could enable additional functionality like screen recording and widget support. Once fueled by an active worldwide community with numerous crafty programmers who figured out how to bypass Apple’s device protections. And with the closing of two major repositories on the Cydia alternative app store this month, the death knell for jailbreaking is ringing clear.While the company has largely negated the need for jailbreaking by continually adding useful features and flexibility to iOS over several updates in recent years, it’s also become increasingly more...

AN ARGUMENT regularly advanced by opponents of the death penalty is that incapacitation doesn't require execution. Life imprisonment without parole is sufficient, they say: Put the most dangerous murderers behind bars and keep them there forever. But "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is a delusion. Life without parole is no replacement for the death penalty when it comes to protecting innocent lives. Understandably, many find it reassuring to believe that there is a way to protect the public from the worst killers without requiring the state to kill.National surveys find a preference for locking up murderers for...

On January 26, 2013, the Librarian of Congress issued a ruling that made it illegal to unlock new phones. Unlocking is a technique to alter the settings on your phone to use your phone on a different carrier. Doing so could place you in legal liability for up to 5 years in jail and a $500,000 fine (specifically the Librarian of Congress allowed the existing exception to lapse). This prohibition is a violation of our property rights, and it makes you wonder, if you can’t alter the settings on your phone, do you even own your own phone? The ruling...

After staying notably silent on the subject of jailbreaking for the first year and a half of the iPhone's existence, Apple has now submitted a document to the Library of Congress claiming that reverse engineering the iPhone's operating system is copyright infringemnt. Their claim is in response to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's submission for the annual DMCA exemption review. Under the DMCA, the Library of Congress is allowed to allow selected activities which would normally be forbidden by the DMCA. Due to encryption used for various bits of software in it, the reverse engineering require to jailbreak the iPhone OS...