Screenshot by <a href="https://twitter.com/saurik/status/414810297937838080">@saurik</a>.
(Updates below)
This morning, the evad3rs released the first public iOS 7 jailbreak. At the time, it seemed like something was off because other key members of the community had not been informed of the upcoming release. For instance, Jay Freeman (@Saurik on Twitter) had not been notified and as such the version of Cydia bundled was not official or up-to-date.
*sigh*: evasi0n, in China, installs an "app store" for cracked apps.
TaiG/cracked: http://t.co/shsanSqxSG
Apple/real: http://t.co/e5nvc5477F— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) December 22, 2013
It turns out, however, that more questionable activity has taken place. The evasion jailbreak includes a Chinese ‘alternative’ app store, which is full of cracked versions of real apps and games found in Apple’s App Store.
The pirate store only appears if your device language is set to Chinese. The reasons for the inclusion of this app is unconfirmed, but speculation on Twitter by several ‘informed’ members of the jailbreak community claim that the evad3r’s accepted a cash deal with a Chinese company to bundle the illegal app. The Chinese company responsible for the pirate app store is Taig.com.
[tweet https://twitter.com/chronic/status/414807013290696704]
Chronic says that this opportunity was offered to several high-profile people in the jailbreaking scene, with cash values of over $150,000 being offered.
pod2g, one of the creators of the jailbreak, has responded to the controversy saying that any pirated apps found in the Chinese store will be removed from sale:
@saurik wait 5 minutes, it's going to be removed.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 22, 2013
The evad3r’s are yet to give an official comment on the matter although a post on Reddit explaining the situation is expected shortly.
They are rumors saying that Taig is a piracy app market. We are really concerned about piracy. Apps of this kind will be removed.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 22, 2013
We will soon post an article on reddit of the whole story, explanation and truth of evasi0n7! And there's a lot to say :) Stay tuned.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 22, 2013
Update: Here’s the official statement and some tweets from @saurik
Update 2: It appears that TaiG is no longer installed by Default on this particular jailbreak.
We have decided to remotely disable the default installation of TaiG in China for further investigations on the piracy issue.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 23, 2013
Dear Jailbreak Community,
We are deeply troubled by the rumors and speculation surrounding our iOS 7 jailbreak. We would like to present the whole story to you.
Most of the concern surrounds the inclusion of the Chinese App Store Taig. In the course of developing the iOS 7 jailbreak, we were approached by the company with an offer of partnership in offering Taig bundled with the jailbreak in China. Taig is a Chinese App Store written in Chinese. tailored and, we believe, well suited to meet the needs of users for the Chinese market. Users are not locked into Taig. Cydia can also be installed and Taig removed afterwards. It would be deeply hypocritical to remove choice from the user in the course of jailbreaking.
Taig has never asked us to disclose our exploits to them, let alone sell them. We were simply asked to bundle their third-party app store in China in a similar way we bundle and distribute Cydia around the world as an additional App Store, and in a similar way to how previous jailbreaks like blackra1n have bundled non-Cydia stores.
Of course, the safety and security of our users is a paramount concern, and due to the amount of close scrutiny by security professionals around the world, we offer one of the lower risk programs available for download on the Internet. We are saddened by the accusations that we would ever do such a thing, or sell weaponized exploits. If anyone ever attempted to include malware in a jailbreak, we are confident that the many security experts combing through jailbreak software would find it. The binaries are obfuscated for a similar reason to why we have in the past compiled in Cydia rather than including it as a separate file. We wish to secure the integrity of the jailbreak and discourage its use by third parties who may in fact wish to weaponize it. The obfuscation is of course not intended to deflect serious analysis by security professionals (who have quickly already fully analyzed and discussed the contents of the jailbreak), it is simply intended to prevent easy repackaging by other parties.
Preventing piracy is also extremely important to us. We are deeply sorry and embarrassed about the piracy that was seen today. All of us have spoken out vehemently against piracy in the past. We don’t believe it’s right for developers to not get paid for their work. In our agreement with Taig, we contractually bind them to not have piracy in their store. This was an extremely important precondition of working with them. In entering the agreement with them, we had hoped and continue to hope that our cooperation with Taig will improve the piracy situation in China. Many App Stores within China, including those run by large corporations, have many issues with pirated software. Promoting an app store that is required not to have piracy with our jailbreak, we believe, will help developers.
We are very upset that despite our agreement and review by their team, piracy was found in the store. It was not acceptable and they have been strenuously working to resolve the problem in good faith, and have removed all instances of it that we have brought to their attention. We are happy that it was not overlooked by the community. We’ve been so heads down working on the code that we didn’t see this. We are sorry. We will continue to monitor this issue and work to resolve it completely. Taig will be pulled from the jailbreak if it cannot be resolved.
Many of you have also wondered why this jailbreak was released without Cydia and MobileSubstrate being updated for iOS 7. After we received the offer from Taig, we informed Saurik, our friend, of our decision to accept the offer. SaurikIT had been in talks with Chinese companies regarding potential partnerships, made a counteroffer. We believe they share our views on how a relationship with companies in China currently utilizing jailbreaking might benefit everyone in the community. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not work out. A few days later, we received information that SaurikIT was working with another group to release a jailbreak ahead of us. We decided to release, knowing that Cydia, MobileSubstrate, and jailbreak tweaks would be updated after a few days, just as it always has in the course of jailbreaking.
Yes, we have benefitted financially from our work, just as many others in the jailbreak community have, including tweak developers, repo owners, etc. Any jailbreak from us will always be free to the users but we believe we have a right to be compensated in an ethical way, just as any other developer. However, the interests of the community will always be the most important thing to us. When releasing the jailbreak, we pledged all our donations to foundations supporting the interests of the community. We are deeply upset at how we have inadvertently distressed the community and we are focused on fixing it.
We love the jailbreak community and you motivate us to do this work. Having a choice and freeing your device is important.
We hope you understand and we thank you for all of your support.
evad3rs
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Jailbreak with secret settings? And key people within the jailbreak community unaware of this effort?
This sounds like something absolutely NOT to try and absolutely NOT to trust. A Jailbreak with open code being reviewed is one thing, but a secret hack made by very anonymous players is very, very untrustworthy and potentially very dangerous.
I’m sure noting nefarious will be going on in the background. You know “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
It’s like the jailbreak is more Android now.
I really want a jailbreak, but unfortunately I’m going to have to pass on this one. With each update things get sketchier and sketchier.
Not the language of the device,is the language of the computer.
A developers from China said that the illegal app makes Cydia can’t work properly (<-This is true)and steal personal information.Hope pod2g will explain soon.
I just Jailbroke my iPhone running ios7 and non of the cydia modifiers work on my phone.
This is very disappointing. Jailbreaking is not so we can pirate apps, it’s so we can choose to open the gate in Apple’s walled-garden. Shame on them for doing this.
China is one of the largest sources of malware for mobile devices and users are constantly warned to only install apps from trusted sources. It now seems that the evasi0n developers were offered a large sum of money in exchange for including a Chinese app store in the jailbreak. The problem is that the evasi0n team has no control over the content of this Chinese app store. It’s rather trivial to reverse engineer an app, add malware, and release the app as if it were the original app. Any app from a third-party store should be avoided for exactly that reason.
It appears that the cracked apps will be removed from the Chinese apps store. But, what about the rest of the content? How many other apps in that third-party app store have malware included in them? One has to wonder why a third-party app store would offer such a large amount of money. This should have raised numerous red flags in the minds of the evasi0n developers.
They sold themselves out for content over which they have no control. What will the evasi0n team willing to sell themselves out for next time?
Oh gawd!! All these Communist cry-babies. Make money for Pete’s sake. Charge for it even. This generation that expects others to labor away for free so they can enjoy their free entitlement-generation ride need a wake up call. I’d be far more happy to pay a $10 annual subscription to ensure continued and much faster development than wait around for months upon months to set my phone free.
The only reason for me to consider jailbreaking is so I can install XBMC. Infuse 2 comes very close to what I want, unfortunately no DTS support. Also, I really like the Java Nitro thingy so all the 3rd party browsers or browserviews from apps like Flipboard are as fast as native Safari). It’s just evil that Apple deliberately blocks their speedy Java engine for anything else then their own apps. It doesn’t make sense.
But for this jailbreak I’ll wait ’till the scene is stable and Cydia is optimized. Don’t want any unstable crap and or pirated stuff.
This letter is so clumsily written, I feel I’m back in the 5th grade. Somehow, being “compensated in an *ethical* way” sounds as a contradiction in terms to what the letter actually implies.
Moral of the story: Never, ever trust the Chinese.
All I wanna say is that Taig thing bundled with evasi0n is somehow connected with Qihoo 360 Technology Co.,Ltd. It’s a notorious company that secretly collects user private data in a vicious and malicious way.
There is some extremely shady shit going on with this jailbreak. Who knows what this shadowy Chinese firm got their hands on from all those who were duped in to installing it. That’s why I never mess with this and keep my iOS devices as clean as a virgin, man.
I don’t know why people are so shocked, I mean jail breaking means less protection in the first place, if you want freedom you have to risk it, you can always uninstall the damn thing people cool down, you want your cake and eat it too SMH!!!
Taig, the new NSA. bwahahha
Can’t you guys see the writing on the wall? Jailbreaking is becoming more and more useless the more Apple implements the popular features into the stock OS. These guys know this, and so they are selling out to the highest bidder in order to make a quick buck. They can see the inevitable day coming where nobody cares about jailbreak, and there’s no longer a chance for them to profit off it.
The whole fact that Saurik wanted to release his own jailbreak and isn’t working with them should tell you the whole story. He’s got integrity and these other shlubs don’t. All they care about is money.
The whole “we don’t support piracy” nonsense is a joke. They pretend to be against it as a legal move so they can’t be sued as accessories to piracy. Meanwhile the majority of people jailbreak so they can install pirated apps or do illegal tethering that’s against carrier policy.
Don’t be fooled by this “we care about the users” bullcrap. They got caught with their pants down and are now backpeddling. How would they strike a huge deal with a Chinese app store and NOT investigate if piracy already existed in the store? Plus this sudden release of the jailbreak just shows there’s crap we don’t know about.
Avoid the jailbreak… it doesn’t even do anything yet anyway. It’s a crap shoot.
I trust the evad3rs and even Saurik and all developers who sign the packages. The Jailbreak is a very big thing, can also affect governments. All the money they have received have all earned every penny. I want my free iPhone, to do this I have to give up the security. Then I decide what I install on my device. The guys do a tough job (even if they do it for the money) and we have to thank them.
kudos to yall !. Love the haters and don´t hate the love :D
I for one am greatfull for the JB and greatfull for releasing it when they did! Shame on Saurik for trying to work out a deal to release a JB b4 pod2g AFTER working with them and knowing their pros and cons. It sounds like the JB comunity was about to try to screw them and evad3rs beat them to the door! Great Save and my phone works great with the JB
I tried the jailbreak and its very good