In late March a handful of the western world’s best-known iPhone hackers were flown business class to Beijing. They were put up in the five-star Park Hyatt and given a tour of the sites; the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. “They kept referring to us as ‘great gods’. I’m guessing it just translates to ‘famous person’, but we couldn’t contain our giggles every time the translators said it,” says Joshua Hill, a 30-year-old from Atlanta who was one of the chosen few.
It was a bizarre trip hosted by an equally bizarre and secretive entity called TaiG (pronounced “tie-gee”), which flew the hackers to China to share techniques and tricks to slice through the defences of Apple’s mobile operating system in front of an eager conference-hall crowd. Why such interest and why such aggrandisement of iOS researchers? In the last two years, jailbreaking an iPhone – the act of removing iOS’ restrictions against installing unauthorized apps, app stores and other features by exploiting Apple security – has become serious business in China. From Alibaba to Baidu, China’s biggest companies are supporting and even funding the practice, unfazed at the prospect of peeving Apple, which has sought to stamp out jailbreaking ever since it became a craze in the late 2000s.
I had no idea jailbreaking iOS was this popular in China.
All the easier for the Chinese government to watch over their subjects…
You know, as paranoid as it sounds at a glance, I’d bet you’re right. And I often wonder what the Chinese government learns from the myriad non-Chinese who use these tools. None of us have any way to verify what, exactly, this jailbreak is putting in there when we use it save perhaps a full hex dump of all affected files, and even that won’t necessarily tell us much. I’m glad my days of needing to jailbreak just to change my default web browser are behind me.
I don’t think that jailbreak itself would bundle spyware because it would be too obvious and easy to check simple by sniffing data from your router. No need even to look at code. The cries of Westerners using these things would be so great that would backfire on Chinese gov’t.
It could in theory bundle a silent backdoor, but you would still need a way to identify and target a specific user without the backdoor itself sending identification data, staying passive until remotely activated.
But i’m pretty sure that it enable plenty of people to voluntarily infect itself with official Chinese gov’t spyware made by their own internet services companies by using their online stores, after all, their are all legally obliged to spy their users and hand-off data. If someone uses a Chinese service with traffic going to servers on Chinese mainland, be sure that you are being tracked.
As a side note, unhappily what i described above is increasingly common on western nations too. In the end, you need to select what nation you want spying you. =D
I want one that does not have the tools to use any misdemeanor I may have done to wreak havoc on my life. By this angle, a foreign country is less worrisome.
Best make sure they don’t have any record sharing or extradition agreements with yours then, just to be safe.
Oh, how the Chinese prove every day which is the truly smart tribe out there. A significant percentage of them have no problem installing pirate copies of Windows, building their own PCs, deeply modifying their Android devices and even jailbreaking their iPhones (or at least know how to take advantage of a jailbreaked phone, which is in itself a plus).
Can you imagine a significant percentage of “westerners” doing those kinds of things with their technology? (instead of a small minority that are geeks and nerds?). Of course not. They want to be handholded for everything, only keep to vendor-endorsed use-cases, and when some knowledgable person comes over and starts fixing their problems (almost always caused by lack of willingness to learn), they “ooh” and “aah” as if that person is Morpheus from The Matrix. And never really want to understand what they did wrong. They ‘ll find some other knowledgeable person to fix the problem again next time it happens. Or pay someone to fix it.
And don’t tell me this is not true.
PS: Jailbreaking is a thing because it allows for the sideloading of apps, if you know what I mean. Also, some of the features that don’t officially make it to older models can be had by modifying a jailbreaked phone with 3rd party substitutes.
Edited 2015-07-01 22:55 UTC