Comex talks about the money made from the jailbreak and about going to Apple

     If you read iDevice.ro last week, then you surely learned that Apple managed to hire Comex, the one who made the jailbreak solutions jailbreakme.com 2.0 for iOS 4.0.x and jailbreakme.com 3.0 for iOS 4.3.x. The hacker is a student at Brown College in the USA and his passion for developing jailbreak solutions helped him pay his school fees and helped him get a job at the company that produces the terminals he "broke".

      Speaking of money, comex managed to collect no less than $55.000 from the 2 jailbreak solutions: $40.000 from jailbreakme.com 2.0 and another $15.000 from jailbreakme.com 3.0. Of course, going to Apple will leave us without an excellent source of jailbreak exploits, but comex claims that he sees everything as a new challenge and does not think that Apple will be able to block the exploits now available in iOS. Below are some of the questions he asked answered on the Reddit site.

After your internship with Apple and after iOS 5 is officially released, will you continue to support the jailbreak community by providing exploits?

No.

Edit: But I'll want to jailbreak my phone, so I hope someone finds them :p

How has the core jailbreak dev teams responded to you going to work for apple?

Mostly with congratulations.

Have you made any money from the jb scene?

I've made a good amount of money through donations, which is mostly being used to help pay for college. JailbreakMe 2.0 was like $40,000; 3.0 was $15,000 (not quite sure why it decreased).

The jailbreak community took a huge hit when you left. Do you think the active players can outsmart you now that you're playing for the other team, or are you Apple's final solution to their jailbreak problem?

There are a lot of smart people working for Apple already; maybe I can help, but I doubt I can stop people from finding exploits.

What, besides money, made you flip to the other side?

It's not about money. A large part of my motivation to jailbreak was always the challenge; the internship will be a new kind of challenge.

Will the current jailbreaks and/or the site disappear?

No, I'll hand them over to MuscleNerd or chpwn or whoever will take care of them.

Congratulations on your new position. Why an internal position though? It seems like you could carry a regular position at apple.

How has the core jailbreak dev teams responded to you going to work for apple?

I don't know if I'd want to do that- I've never had a job before and I don't know what it's like- and I intend to go back to college soon.

Mostly with congratulations.

Have you met Steve Jobs?

I wish.

Can you give any insight on how apple views the Jailbreak communities mods?

I have no idea.

As a huge open book for them to steal take ideas from.

I certainly don't mind. Jailbreak community puts an idea in front of people with a crappy implementation; Apple polishes it to the point where it can be an OS feature. I don't know whether Apple actually pays attention to jailbreak apps, but see App Store, copy and paste, multitasking, etc...

Firstly, congratulations on the new internship, it sounds like a wonderful opportunity for you and I'm sure you'll love working with Apple.

I have a few questions for you if you wouldn't mind answering them. Firstly, why did you choose to get involved in specifically the iPhone jailbreaking scene, what was it that attracted you to the iPhone? Secondly, did you always set out to be a hacker or was it just something that interested you and found you had a knack for? Finally, in regards to the PDF bug used for the JailbreakMe.com jailbreak, where on earth did you get the brilliant idea for it?

1. I had one… and it was a device that (a) had a lot of functionality, (b) had a nice and flexible UNIX OS, (c) already had an active homebrew community, and (d) was really cool. : p

2. I never wanted to be a black hat hacker, but I did enjoy hacking (originally SQL injection and crap) as a natural extension of programming.

3. FreeType was one of the less studied open source components of iOS.

Are you optimistic about the future of the iOS platform? What features are you looking forward to next?

My personal opinion: it will probably continue to beat the pants off its competitors in performance for a while yet, and Apple's "take your time but do it right" policy on features will probably continue to make it a pleasure to use. But I'm impatient: other platforms (WebOS) have a lot of fun stuff with no real equivalent in iOS.