It’s been four days since Comex, the genius behind JailbreakMe 3.0, announced that he would leave the Jailbreak community for an internship at Apple. Naturally this caused a lot of commotion throughout the interent and, it made a lot of people ask questions about Comex’s future and the role it will play for the Jailbreak community.
Luckily for us, Comex has answered some questions on reddit - here are just a few:
Did you always set out to be a hacker or was it just something that interested you and found you had a [knack] for?
Comex: 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.
Your thoughts on Steve Jobs’ departure?
Comex: Really a shame; I was hoping to meet him some day, and, company direction aside, keynotes won’t be as entertaining without him.
Have you made any money from the jb scene?
Comex: 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).
Can you give any insight on how apple views the Jailbreak communitiesmods?
Comex: I have no idea.
As a huge open book for them to steal take ideas from.
Comex: I certainly don’t mind. Jailbreak community puts an idea in front of people with a crappy implemenation; 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, why did you choose to get involved in specifically the iPhone jailbreaking scene, what was it 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 nack 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?
Comex: 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
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.
FreeType was one of the less studied open source components of iOS.
Do you have any regrets?
Comex: I should have worked on these jailbreaks more consistently, and released them more quickly; I’ve had several exploits fixed on me that could have been used in a jailbreak if I was quicker at packaging.
Stay tuned for more Jailbreak related news and information!
