This week in class we talked a lot about hackers and hacker ethics. One of the ideas we learned was how hackers used have more ethics in the 60's compared to the 90's and today. While we learned about their ethics, I could help of thinking about the jailbreaking community that I follow today and how they are still following such ethics.
Before I start on how the jailbreaking community works, I should explain what jailbreaking is. Jailbreaking is exploiting a flaw in an iPhone to allow people to install applications not approved by apple. In a sense, they are breaking the iPhone out of the jail of Apple's restrictions. Just as the hackers in the 60's wanted information and secrets to be shared, these jailbreakers want the iPhone to be free.
Jailbreakers, however, have a lot of ethics and rules to follow. First and foremost, they took apple to court and made jailbreaking legal. Some people in the media have said jailbreaking is only to install applications from the app store for free. Jailbreakers, as a community, do not support this. They refuse to release any jailbreaking software that breaks any copyright laws. They demand that any jailbreaking software must be free. These rules and ethics are very similar to the hacker ethics in the 60's.
The point I am trying to make by explaining this is that there are still hacker communities today that have ethics and do not use their skills just to break the law or get what they want. I only follow the jailbreaking community, but I hope there are more communities like this out there.
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