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Tech

Inside the New Effort to Jailbreak iOS7

Technology advocates Chris Maury and Elizabeth Stark have teamed up to make jailbreaking iOS 7 open-source, and free technology.

Open internet advocate Elizabeth Stark had just formed Threshold, a new Kickstarter meets XPRIZE platform, and was looking for a test project. Something to follow Threshold’s soft launch. It had to make a statement, but also satisfy the criteria of either tackling an unsolved problem or building new technology. Stark reached out to accessibility advocate Chris Maury to see if he had any ideas. Maury recommended jailbreaking the iOS 7. Stark liked the idea, and the competition was born.

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They both understood how hard it would be, knowing full well that each iOS update becomes harder to jailbreak than the last. To aid in the pursuit, Maury enlisted project advisors who also joined him as judges, including Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, and Biella Coleman, professor and author of Coding Freedom.

Maury didn’t want to jailbreak the iOS 7 for internet glory. His aim was a bit more personal. He suffers from the genetic eye disorder Stargardt's Macular Degeneration, which will leave him legally blind in a few years. A jailbroken iOS 7 phone would allow Maury to use apps forbidden by Apple, but which make the mobile experience easier on his eyes. While Apple is known for its work in accessibility, especially for handicapped users, iOS 7 isn’t nearly as accessible as it could be.

For Maury, the iOS 7 jailbreak is also political, ideological. He, like Stark and many others, believes that the owners of technological devices should be able to do with them as they please. They love Apple, but they reject the company’s “nanny state”-like obsession with control, as they call it.

People always say that information wants to be free. It’s been the popular refrain of the post-WikiLeaks years. Now, maybe it’s more appropriate to say that technology wants to be free. If Stark and Maury have their way, then this new incentivized platform could better help liberate technology and, by extension, users. As Stark noted in our chat, it flies in the face of the insulated jailbreaking community. But, every once in awhile someone needs to shake things up.

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MOTHERBOARD: Elizabeth, this project grew out of a platform you’re building called Threshold. Can you talk about that project a bit?

Elizabeth Stark: I describe Threshold as Kickstarter meets XPRIZE. It’s a means for communities to come together to fund prizes. With my background in open source or alternative approaches to IP, I see the way our economy normally deals with these things, which is to grant monopoly along the lines of a 20-year patent or a 95-year copyright. Maybe that incentive doesn’t work. It doesn’t encourage openness. Maybe we need to bring communities together to fund an incentive along the lines of an XPRIZE, and then you can encourage people to make things available for the public good.

How did the collaboration between you and Chris begin?

Stark: I reached out to Chris because we have some mutual friends, and we’re on some of the same mailing lists, and he’s very into the issue of accessibility. So, I said I would love to do some projects for the disabled community. It’s a great example of something that’s niche. He said, “Yeah, let’s talk; but you know what I would really love? A jailbreak for iOS 7.” He wanted to do that because he needs to use apps on the iPhone that Apple doesn’t allow.

So, that’s how it started. He got folks on board to support the project and then be judges. We’ve also sparked a fun debate in the existing community around financial contributions, and whether or not people should be paid to do this.

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How so?

The truth is that Jay Freeman, the individual behind the open app store Cydia, has a very significant interest in that market and is freaking out because we’re making this process transparent and opening it up to the rest of the world. He thinks that the model should remain one where people do it for free and get donations, specifically because he is the one controlling all of the finances for the people that were already doing that. We said, no, we want to open it up so that anyone will work on the problem. We want to encourage more people to work on it, not one group that is taking six months.

Chris Maury: One thing to add to what Elizabeth is saying is that one of the big motives here is for an open source jailbreak. There are a lot of good reasons to do that, not least of which is because of the high probability of malicious code being introduced into the phone, given the low level access to the operating system, and given recent concerns about security and privacy, which is not something previous jailbreaks have incorporated or taken on.

Chris, you’re pretty involved with the accessibility jailbreaking community because of your eye disorder. Can you talk about that?

Maury: I’ve been working on accessibility for about the last three years, starting when I found out that I was going blind. I have this genetic disorder where the retinal cells in the center part of my eye are dying off, and I’ll be legally blind within the next three to five years. This sent me down this path of exploring what tools are available now for when I’m fully blind. From there, Elizabeth and I started talking about her platform, and then came up with the iOS 7 jailbreak idea given the impact it would have on the accessibility community.

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From a kind of ideological point of view, the jailbreak is a means of taking control instead of waiting to see what’s given to you.

How important is jailbreaking to the accessibility community?

One of the reasons the jailbreak is so important is that it gives complete ownership of the device to people who are generally the last ones the device was ever built for. They’re the last to receive software updates and, generally, software updates will break the previous experience. So, from a kind of ideological point of view, the jailbreak is a means of taking control instead of waiting to see what’s given to you.

There are a lot of applications that aren’t able to be supported on a non-jailbroken device. Personally, I use f.lux, which is an app that changes the color tone of the screen to reduce eye strain, which is not allowed in the app store. Then there is the VoiceOver app. You could add additional voices natively in iOS 6, but once jailbroken you can increase the speech rate, which is huge for people who have been using screen readers for awhile. The default screen reader is just too slow and cumbersome that it increases the time it takes to perform tasks.

What else can be done to make the iPhone more accessible?

The jailbreak allows for the changing of the default keyboard so you can use more accessible and disability-friendly devices. It also allows for interaction with other assistant technology that isn’t currently supported on iOS.

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Why won’t Apple allow f.lux for its accessibility users?

Maury: Well, I don’t know the specifics, but it’s pretty well in line with Apple’s policy of apps needing to be sandboxed so that you can only control what is inside of that app. What f.lux does is change the color tone across the device no matter what app you’re using.

The reason iOS is so important is that, these limitations aside, it’s the best platform for accessibility. Apple is really involved in the accessibility community, and has won a lot of awards for their work. So the vast majority of blind users who have smartphones and mobile devices are on iOS, and the switching cost would be way too high in moving to Android, where the functionality is worse.

We want to encourage a public and open-source release of the jailbreak.

Stark: If Apple would just let users install what they want, and weren’t such control freaks or authoritarian, then these users would have the best of both worlds.

Is there a fundraising goal?

Stark: As much as we can get. [laughs] Lots of people have potential solutions to this, but they may not release them because there is a market for private exploits, which will pay a lot of money. The private market is six figures, but we’re just trying to drum up as much support as we can, and get as many people working on it as possible. We want to encourage a public and open source release of the jailbreak, so folks like Chris can install the apps that they want on their phones.

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It’s pretty mind-blowing that iOS 7 hasn’t yet been jailbroken.

Stark: It gets harder each time. Jay Freeman said that people were already working on it. Well, they’ve been working on it for months. If they had done it, we wouldn’t have launched this campaign. We want a solution as soon as we can possibly get it.

Why is it that users cannot currently control their devices? For example, if I want to install a Bitcoin wallet on my iPhone, I can’t. Apple has decided they don’t want to allow that. There are all sorts of examples of Apple not allowing apps on the iPhone, whether it’s competition or they think Bitcoin is dangerous. Thirty million people jailbroke their phone last time, so there is clearly demand for this. Users want to run code that they chose on their own devices. No one has solved it yet, so there is this need.

You both have noted that jailbreaking is ideological. Why is that so important to you and to others?

Maury: A big part of it is the principle. I feel like I have the right to own my device. With jailbreaking, even if I’m not getting that much utility out of it, I’d do it anyway just because I feel that I have that right.

Stark: With my background in privacy and surveillance issues, I’m already kind of an advocate of technological freedom. In a world where Apple wants to control our devices, we want a means to be able to install what we want on the devices that we own. In a lot of ways, it raises a broader question about the nanny-style approach that Apple takes. It raises important questions around the corporations controlling the technology that we are buying as users. You either choose between a bad user experience, especially for people in Chris’s situation, or ultimate control.

From what you tell me, this system of control seems to extend to the jailbreaking community itself, which is ironic. Shouldn’t there be several nodes of attack in this game?

Stark: Yeah, we all have the same goal: we want to jailbreak phones. [laughs] People have complained about us collecting funds, spending a ton of time on development, doing press, and taking the equivalent of a Kickstarter-like fee. But, this always happens when newcomers come along and upset the incumbents. We really want to see the solution happen. We want to make it a reality.