Comex Answers Your Questions

After being featured in a Forbes article last month, jailbreak prodigy and all around hacker Comex started to draw attention outside of the jailbreak scene. As a matter of fact, the folks at Apple started paying attention to the point that they offered him a job. Our loss, their gain.

Of course, questions started popping up in every jailbreaker’s mind. Will Comex give away his exploits to Apple? Will he keep working on jailbreaks and exploits? Will he keep JailbreakMe alive? Many questions that remained unanswered, until today…

Comex is not the kind of guy who likes to get media attention, which is probably why he never accepted to do an interview with us, or anyone else but Forbes for that matter. He, however, decided to answer many of the questions people have on Reddit.

Here is a selection:

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

Comex: No.

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

Q: Why an intern 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 forapple?

Comex: 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 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).

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?

Comex: 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.

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

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…

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.

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

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

Will the current jailbreaks and/or the site disappear?

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

There are a few more questions answered on Reddit, but don’t expect Comex to talk about his new position at Apple. It’s obviously classified information.

We’ll miss Comex, but we wish him the best.

[Via By: idownloadblog.com]

Comex, Father of JailbreakMe, Has Been Hired by Apple

It was only a matter of time. 19-year-old Nicholas Allegra, better known as infamous iOS hacker Comex, has announced that he has accepted a job with Apple in Cupertino.

Comex has been responsible for many famous jailbreaks, most notably his web based tool called JailbreakMe. He is a well respected member of the jailbreak community, and we wish him the best with his future endeavors at Apple.

Comex announced the news on his Twitter account moments ago, and he seems to be receiving mostly positive responses from his followers. Other famous jailbreak developers, like MuscleNerd, have congratulated him on his new job.

Apple has been known to hire talent from the jailbreak community, with the Cupertino company most recently hiring developer Peter Hajas — as we uncovered first — for his work on a system of notifications for iOS called MobileNotifier. Peter is assumedly now working on improving iOS notifications in Cupertino.

It’s a bittersweet thing for the jailbreak community to lose Comex. In one way, we’re happy that he’s been given such a wonderful opportunity to showcase his talents and further his career. On the other, we’re sad to see such an invaluable jailbreak hacker go.

We don’t know what Comex will be specifically working on at Apple, but we can only assume that he will be assigned to fixing security holes in iOS. It’s funny to think that he will help patch the vulnerabilities he exploited. Everything comes around, I guess.

We congratulate you on your success, Comex. Best of luck at Apple!

[Via By: iphonedownloadblog.com ]

A Portrait of Comex

If you’ve ever considered jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad, no doubt you’ve heard about an iOS hacker going by the handle Comex, the guy who discovered several important exploits, and the creator of JailbreakMe.

Besides his Twitter handle, we don’t know much about Comex. A Forbes journalist did a bit of digging and found out who Comex really is, and managed to talk to him…

This Forbes article doesn’t tell us much about Comex, but it gives enough to finally be able to put a face on a name.

These are a few extracts from the article:

Nicholas Allegra lives with his parents in Chappaqua, New York. The tall, shaggy-haired and bespectacled 19-year old has been on leave from Brown University since last winter, looking for an internship. [...]

“It feels like editing an English paper,” Allegra says simply, his voice croaking as if he just woke up, though we’re speaking at 9:30 pm. “You just go through and look for errors. I don’t know why I seem to be so effective at it.” [...]

Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook, says JailbreakMe’s sophistication is on par with that of Stuxnet, a worm thought to have been designed by the Israeli or U.S. government to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities. He compares Allegra’s skills to the state-sponsored intruders that plague corporations and governments, what the cybersecurity industry calls “advanced-persistent threat” hackers: “He’s probably five years ahead of them,” says Dai Zovi. [...]

He calls himself an Apple “fanboy,” and describes Android’s more open platform as “the enemy.” “I guess it’s just about the challenge, more than anything else,” he says. [...]

The young hacker taught himself to code in the programming language Visual Basic at the age of nine, gleaning tricks from Web forums. “By the time I took a computer science class in high school, I already knew everything,” he says. When he found that he couldn’t save a screenshot from the Nintendo Wii video game Super Smash Brothers to his computer, he spent hours deciphering the file, and later worked on other Wii hacks, getting a feel for its obscure operating system.

The article doesn’t really go in depth about who Comex is, but it’s nice to learn a little more about our favorite iOS hacker.

You can read the full article here.

[Via By: iphonedownloadblog.com]