Looks like Apple’s loss is Google’s gain. Nicholas Allegra, famously known as Comex, the guy behind the JailbreakMe hacking tools for iPhone and iPad will be joining Google as an intern.
Allegra broke the news via his Twitter account saying that he’d be interning with the search engine giant in a few weeks. He also tweeted that he won’t be working on Android, Google’s mobile operating system that competes with Apple’s iOS and that he never liked Android enough to hack it. The tweet was first spotted by Forbes, which also mentioned that the 19 year old hacker did not elaborate on what he’d be doing at Google.
Allegra created the JailbreakMe tool that exploits loopholes in Apple’s Safari web browser to jailbreak an iOS device in a single step, without requiring the user to plug the device to a computer. He worked under the pseudonym Comex, till Forbes revealed his identity in 2011.
Apple hired Allegra as an intern in August 2011. It even offered to extend his employment after an year but Allegra claims he missed responding to the mail that had the offer, following which Apple took the offer back.
For the uninitiated, users can run unapproved third party apps on their iOS devices after jailbreaking them.
The first version of JailbreakMe was released in 2007 used to jailbreak the iPhone and iPod Touch running the 1.1.1 version of iPhone OS and was developed by nine anonymous hackers. This was followed by the second version of the hack in 2010 released by Comex, that allowed users to jailbreak iOS 3.1.2 to 4.0.1 on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
The JailbreakMe 3.0 hack was released in 2011, and allowed anyone to jailbreak iOS devices on versions 4.3 to 4.3.3 and iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3. It was the first hack to jailbreak the iPad 2. The jailbreak was a browser based hack that didn’t involve the use of any other tools. Apple was able to fix all the JailbreakMe hacks with a software update.
Source-NDTV
