Apple Goes After iPhone Hackers

Jailbreak iPhones have been an aggravating issue for Apple. The company has tried hard to stop people for getting around its measures, but hackers always find a way to help those who want to jailbreak their phones get the job done. Till now, Apple decided to combat those hackers by releasing security updates once in a while. Now the company is going after their iTunes accounts as well. After all, if you can’t beat them, just cut off their access to iTunes and hope for the best.

Sherif Hashim, an iPhone developer who developed a hack for the latest iPhone OS 3.1.3, and iH8Sn0w, who developed the XEMN tool designed to unlock iPhone 3.1.3 radio baseband both had their accounts suspended. Both individuals posted a message to their Twitter account talking about their accounts being closed by Apple for “security reasons.” Of course, some of these people have multiple iTunes accounts, so I am not sure Apple can close them all.

Apple is one of the most controlling companies in the world, so it is no surprise to see the company push the envelop to try and stop jailbreaking. The problem is the latest approach just don’t work. Besides, the company is essentially giving the signal that it can’t keep up with jailbreakers. A few experts have argued that if Apple was smart, it would ban all jailbroken iPhones. That wouldn’t be such a good idea either as we are not talking about just a couple of phones here.

If Apple was smart, it would hire as many as these hackers as it could to help it improve the security of its platform. Apple may not like jailbreakers, but let’s not forget that a decent number of people buy their iPhones only to jailbreak them. So they do their part in helping iPhone succeed as a phone and platform. Maybe Apple should just throw a hacking competition and ask participants to hack its platform and provide anti-hacking measures for each case as well. At least that would be something productive. Blocking people’s iTunes accounts is probably not.