“Well-know iOS hacker chpwn (aka Grant Paul) along with Ryan Petrich have released a new tool for installing Siri on jailbroken phones,” Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch.
“The Siri port, called ‘Spire,’ works on any phone that can run iOS 5,” Perez reports. ‘However, because Apple only officially supports Siri requests coming from the iPhone 4S, a proxy server address is still required.”
Perez reports, “Oh, there’s one more thing: Spire is legal.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Anyone like to take a shot at how this legal
Yawn, this is so complicated, that about 0.00000098% of geekazoids will attempt that… Oh wait, they are too busy rooting and defragging their Android phones, while installing and virus software, to worry about that.
Since it is not approved by Apple and requires illegally hacking the phone, it is clearly NOT legal.
At least in the US, jailbreaking is legal. Uncle Sam says so. Or more specifically, the powers that decide what is and isn’t allowed under DMCA.
Well if you bothered to actually read the article you would have found the very next paragraph in it answered the question:
“While it’s technically been possible to run Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices, as previous Siri ports have shown, those ports have violated Apple’s copyrights. Siri’s resource files, images and code are not meant to be copied and widely distributed. So instead, Spire downloads Siri itself directly from Apple. Clever!”
Just because you’re downloading the files directly from Apple does not make it legal. If I hack into a bank and transfer funds directly from the bank, does that make it legal? I wish these idiots that have been hacking or reporting on Siri hacks would stop with the “this or that is legal” nonsense. Unless you own an iPhone 4S and are using it under allowed conditions as outlined in the terms of service, it is not legal to use. It’s that simple.
It’s not legal to speed over the posted limit on a highway either… But people do it. Damn lawbreakers.
Indeed! I would start with the stop sign/red light running turds, though.
I think the problem is that the article implicitly conflates “legal” with “Apple is totally cool with it, so go ahead and install!”
It may be “legal” in that Apple can’t stop it with a lawsuit, but that doesn’t mean that Apple is just going to sit back and let this port gain traction. Expect Apple to find a way to block requests from “Spire” if it starts to take off in any way.
——RM