Hacking the iPhone and Other Nonsense
I read over at Brown Thoughts about DVD Jon (the same guy who cracked CSS protection on DVDs) bypassing the registration/activation process of Apple’s iPhone. Personally I am getting sick of reading about the iPhone, so what is the logical thing to do - write about it myself.
No not really, I don’t know anything about the iPhone - it won’t be available in Australia for some time anyway.
What I do find interesting however is the protected status some products receive. Based on my limited reading it would appear that without this “hack” the iPhone would not operate as a stand alone music player. It seems that the phone has to be activated before the device can be used, even as an iPod (correct me if I am wrong). There will of course be some perfectly legal reason for this buried somewhere in the legislation that attempts to control our digital existence. My question is, should there be?
Within reason, when I buy a product I expect to be able to use that product in any way I see fit. Note that I said within reason. If I can modify a product to make it work better for me I should be able to. I don’t want to reverse engineer it and sell an improved version. I just want it to do the things I want it to. I own a car. If I want to modify that car so that I can take it to my local race track and enter a drifting competition I can. The car wasn’t designed as a race car. It wasn’t intended to be used as a race car but I am not prevented from modifying it to make it one. I can legally make modifications to it as long as I don’t do something illegal once it is modified. Why should modifying an iPhone so that it operates as an iPod prior to activation be frowned upon?
Video game consoles are another product that comes to mind in this debate. Ever since the original PlayStation people have been “modding” these consoles. Of course many have done so to allow for the playing of illegally copied games but there are other legitimate reasons for wanting to modify a console. For example, the original Xbox can be used as a media centre after the installation of a mod chip. There is also the issue of backing up legally purchased games and using the backups so that the original stays in perfect condition (have you seen the way children handle discs?).
This issue is part of a much wider one that encompasses things like DRM applied to music and I don’t propose to say any more - you have been kind to read this far and I don’t want to push the friendship. The anarchist in me smiled with delight when I read the news of the hacking of the most talked about product in the world. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong.
“You can’t coach that”
