If you’ve been keeping up with the recently released iOS 7 evasi0n jailbreak from the hacking group known as the evad3rs, you may have heard of some of the accompanying controversy.
To sum things up, the new evasi0n7 jailbreak included a new Chinese third party app store called “Taig”, which reportedly would only install for users that had their computer’s language set to Chinese. The real controversy comes in after people discovered that this Taig app store included pirated apps, with some reports claiming that the evad3rs accepted a $1 million dollar payment from a Chinese company to include it in their jailbreak. There were also concerns of user information being sent to this mysterious Chinese company.
Today, the evad3rs released an official blog post to try and defend itself and to help clear some things up. Firstly, the team assured users that their privacy was not comprimised in anyway. The evad3rs say that they have reverse engineered the Taig code to make sure of this.
First and foremost, and of utmost concern, is privacy. No one’s data was ever sent anywhere. Of course, as a member of the community whose work frees devices, it would be against everything we’ve worked for the last 7 years to jeopardize the security of the users of our software.
They then moved on to piracy, where they stated that their contract with Taig explicitly forbid any pirated apps to appear on their store. After since noticing that Taig has, in fact, been supporting pirated apps, the Evad3rs have announced that they have terminated any form of relationship with the company/app store.
We dropped the ball on this. While we at first did not believe Taig purposefully violated our agreement, the depth of the transgression against the software developers and the jailbreak community cannot be overlooked and we could not move forward after that even if it were fixed. We terminated our relationship with them.
In regards to the rumored $1 million, the evad3rs have said that they’ll be refusing any money from Taig.
There have been a lot of rumors listing various amounts we’ve been paid. We will not be accepting any money. Our donations are being given to Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure to help protect jailbreaking as your legal right.
A fishy aspect about all this is that the creators of the popular Cydia third party app store were not given the usual heads up from the evad3rs that a new jailbreak for iOS 7 was on its way, resulting in some aspects of Cydia not being properly optimized at the time of release. Some believe that Cydia was purposefully undercut like this to ensure a prompt release of Taig and the associated contract money that came with it.
With evasi0n being the only way for iOS 7 users to jailbreak their device, a situation like this that has users questioning the trustworthiness of its developers is quite a mess indeed.
