Calling Cat & Mouse

There was a pleasant surprise at the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual summit in Berlin this past December. Several iPhone hackers came out of the closet in front of a packed audience at the Congress Center at Alexanderplatz and unveiled their latest breakthroughs.

The Chaos Computer Club, a global collective of hackers based in the German capital, meets annually to show off the year’s accomplishments in breaking codes, hacking into systems, and other nefarious deeds.

Walking into the Congress Center on Dec. 27, the hallways around the central conference room were abuzz with blinking lights, chipboards, soldering irons and a busy mess of young and old gadget freaks who look forward to this event all year long.

The iPhone has a particular place in the hearts of technical wizards, due to its limitations. When the product first appeared at the end of Jun. 2007, thousands of users became obsessed with two goals: making the phone work on networks other than AT&T, and running their own programs on Apple’s mobile operating system.

This is where the iPhone Dev-Team came in. That’s “dev,” for developers, for those unfamiliar with the terminology. A group of roughly 30 hackers have contributed to the efforts of this team. Connected only by the Internet, they met up online and brainstormed ideas trying to find new exploits in Apple’s constantly evolving device architecture.

At the Berlin conference a few of the core team members took the stage, namely MuscleNerd, planetbeing, bushing and pytey. They were happy to announce that more of them were hiding out in the audience, show us the first 3G iPhone software unlock (known as yellowsn0w) and the Linux operating system partially functional and running on the iPhone. They explained how they had done it.

With the release of the 3G handset last summer, Apple attempted to eliminate the demand for hacks by offering the iPhone in roughly 70 countries, and by launching its own way for people to install additional applications through an online platform known as the AppStore.

The AppStore is Apple’s answer to the Installer application for the original hacked iPhone. Accessible on the device and from the computer, the AppStore is a place where iPhone developers can publish software written according to Apple’s specifications. So far, this has resulted in some 10,000 free and affordable applications ranging from a simulated glass of beer to translators, complex games and software that turns the phone into a real musical instrument, the ocarina flute.

Unfortunately, so far Apple alone decides which games and productivity applications belong in their store and which don’t. For example, the company rejects some that are intended to add functions to the device, such as copy and paste or video capture.

As more and more developers received rejection letters from Apple’s AppStore, they turned to the Dev-Team for an open platform permitting applications that take full advantage of the phone. Many of them also turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) because they were concerned that deploying applications for a hacked Apple iPhone was an illegal activity.

“We have been hearing from frustrated app developers for some time,” explained Fred von Lohmann, in an email to The Vienna Review, “so our exemption proposal arose from those discussions.” The EFF filed the proposal last December, and a comment to the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

As the document explains, “In filing these comments, EFF represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of citizens who have ‘jailbroken’ their cellular phone handsets, or would like to do so, in order to use lawfully obtained software of their own choosing.”

Jay Freeman (saurik), technology consultant and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created a program called Cydia, installed by the Dev-Team’s iPhone hacking tool Pwnage (pronounced pownage). Using Cydia, Freeman allows developers to distribute their applications to over two million hacked devices.

“Without jailbreaking my phone, I can’t capture video, do live broadcasts, or copy & paste text messages,” Internet user ToddJG explained at the Berlin conference. “The Pwnage Tool does the ‘jailbreaking,’ which basically means it modifies Apple’s system files and allows apps to launch simultaneously.”

In the past few weeks, jailbreaking has opened the door for a new boom in the pirating of commercial software on the AppStore. “I simply use Crackulous to strip Apple’s copy-protection, upload the cracked app to Rapidshare, and then publish the link on http://appulo.us,” a user explained in a conversation with the The Vienna Review.

While Apple has been happy with the plethora of productivity apps and games, they have declined to comment on the Dev-Team’s efforts until recently. Now, however, the company is beginning to wonder about the loss in revenue from the AppStore.

It has reacted by filing a 27-page objection to the U.S. Copyright Office in response to the comment filed by the EFF. Apple’s objection states clearly that jailbreaking violates copyright law and that no exception should be granted.

According to the law, Apple would be able to claim statutory damages up to $2,500 every time you jailbreak a phone.

“I think Apple’s invocation of cracked apps is a cover for other anticompetitive motives,” Fred von Lohmann exclaims. “Certainly there are ways to provide app security other than limiting the platform.”

In response, Russian iPhone developers Ripdev have launched such security measures for AppStore applications to Apple’s own specifications and are providing their security wrapper as a service called Kali Anti-Piracy.

Cydia developer, Jay Freeman, wrote his own response to the Library of Congress defending Cydia and the developer community it represents. Freeman said, “There is nothing intrinsically restricted about these devices, and nothing that requires them to have restrictions: nothing except the controlling attitudes of the people who are releasing them.”

Fred von Lohmann was quick to add, “No one would accept this rationale from Microsoft: ‘We had to lock down Windows to run only Microsoft approved apps, to prevent piracy.’ Who would believe that?”

The iPhone hackers themselves have been a bit stumped by Apple’s recent actions and while refraining to comment, they have continued to focus on their current hack, fully jailbreaking Apple’s new iPod Touch.

As Apple continues to secure its devices, it has become clear that the hackers will continue to break the barriers and keep broadcasting their progress via live video-streaming, jailbroken iPhones.