If we call a thing "jailbreaking", we're going to be battling negative perceptions forever. We're trying to explain to people who really don't care that they should take time out of their day to help legalize something called "jailbreaking". The RIAA, MPAA and ESA would struggle to dream up a more dubious name if they were embarking on a spin campaign to criminalise it outright.

Why couldn't we have called it "derestricting" or "liberating" or something? Why couldn't we have chosen a positive, all-American sort of name? I know, I know, these are our devices and we're having our freedoms taken from us, so we're totally like POWs, not criminals. We're the good kind of escaped prisoner. Now explain that to my mother in a few short words while Bill O'Reilly accuses you of supporting Al-Qaeda.

For a bunch of geniuses, we do some really dumb things.

And honestly, I don't think we could find a better name if we tried. Everyone likes a good jailbreak, especially when the inmate has done nothing wrong.

But why would you think like that? If, outside of any smartphone connection, someone said they'd "jailbroken" I would think "they were in jail", not "I wonder if they deserved to be there".

If you call yourself a jailbreaker you a describing yourself as an escaped criminal to many people.

  If you're not a criminal, why are you in jail?

We live in an entirely nuance-free culture. We have an electoral campaign where candidates are being attacked for speaking basic French. Where an electorally significant percentage of the population believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim.

When the US government is unable to successfully impart basic factual knowledge, basing a political campaign on anything with the slightest element of ambiguity or nuance is madness.

Shortly thereafter, he gets a very worried call from his brother, saying "We've been hacked!" He saw a lot of traffic in the logs from an IP connected with the word "Hacker" and got a bit panicked.

Situations like that (moving phone networks) are commonly understood, and you can easily explain how locking is designed not to protect you, but to try to force you to buy a new phone.

Except jailbreaking != sim unlocking.

As the parent says: for a bunch of smart guys, we keep doing stupid things. Stubbornly, with the excuse that it 'should work'. It doesn't. It's preaching to the quire.

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[0] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/choir#Noun

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[0]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quire#Noun_2

This scared me and makes me feel as if we believe 'normal human beings' are party members from 1984.

> The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

We've actively regressed since McCarthy. The modern political vocabulary is dominated by doublespeak and thought-terminating cliche[1]. Most of the fundamental battle lines in American politics have long since been distilled into meaningless soundbite slogans, devoid of any real semantics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psycholo...

Authorize DHS (including its component CBP) to share pre-seizure information about, and samples of, products and devices with rightholders to help DHS to determine whether the products are infringing or the devices are circumvention devices

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/15/concrete-steps-con...

Basically, giving Hollywood veto rights on anything imported into the country that can be used for jailbreaking. Sounds like we are in danger of losing DMCA jailbreaking protections.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

You don't pay any monthly service and I don't see how the carrier you have chosen to buy a sim card from has any basis for claiming that the phone I'm using is somehow not owned by me.

Since I purchased my first mobile phone around ~11 years ago this is how I have always done it.

I could unlock my phone and use a different carrier (considered doing this after the o2 fiasco yesterday) but it wouldn't make economic sense to me.

[1] Nexus devices, most Sony Ericsson phones, many HTC phones, soon to include the ASUS Transformer Prime, ...

Apple's underlying Darwin system works great on a mobile device. I don't own an Android, but afaik it's underlying Linux system is not as robust as Darwin. So where else do you go for a Linux/Unix based smartphone/tablet?

Where are the Linux tablets, and where is the support from the Linux community for such hardware?

What are you basing that on? You can easily install Unix tools on Android devices. Here's a complete development environment that doesn't even require rooting: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.spartacusrex.spart...

Note:

I myself had to jailbreak my iphone to install spotify (and asked a friend to pay for it since he's outside of Canada). For some reasons, spotify is illegal here. (Yes, I know, I illegally downloaded an illegal application to legally download/listen to music).

You mean to _illegally_ download/listen to music; there's no license in your region.

principle