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?

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