Time Warner Insinuates Itself Into The Campaign Between Apple and Jailbreak Users
Apple has gained an ally in the fight against Jailbreakers, Time Warner Cable. As it stands now, it is not verified if this is a formal alliance or an impromptu declaration by the MSO to enter into the fray, unsolicited. On July 7th, 2011, 2AM, I went to the app store -as I do every night to check for updates- and the TWCable TV App had an update. Upon downloading I went to make sure the app was Functioning properly and attempted to activate it to see a very disturbing message:
“TWCable TV is not supported on “jailbroken” devices.
Please restore your iPad to factory defaults, then reinstall TWCable TV”
Now if that is not a clear declaration of war, I don’t know what is. So what does this mean? Let’s look at this from two perspectives. TWC seems to have a beef with the Jailbreak community, but this leads to a simple question, “Why? Why would TW risk angering any of it’s customers like this and even care to begin with?” The answer escapes me. But considering the trouble large companies have been having with Hackers, I can’t think of a more foolish action to take. Sony,EA, the CIA just to name three have come under the assault of the hacker community as a result of being pushed around and none of them fared too well with Sony having had incredible damage done to the multi-national technology companies image and reputation. So the business strategy of this action on TWs part just escapes me.
On the other side, what does this mean to the jailbreak community? Is it soon to be that there is some sort of code that apple will supply all developers in order to place another layer of protection within the app, which will cause us to not be able to use our devices even if apples iOS has been cracked? Will there need to be a patch invented for each and every app we wish to use? And if so can there be written a patch that just fixes them all? These questions are begged to be answered. But I believe that things have now just gotten as interesting as they appear scary. I see the potential at the very least of a patch coming from the JB community to correct this brazen insult, soon to be posted on Cydia, and at worst, the community taking more aggressive action against TW for this open and bold slap in the face.
Information regarding this is slim to none right now. As it stands now though, DO NOT UPDATE YOUR TWCABLE TV APP IF YOU ARE JAILBROKEN and wish to keep using your TWCable TV App. The fact is this now may be a three way war and a very unconventional one at that.
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