Chris’ comments on the JerrySIM leak

We voted Zibri out of the dev team because he couldn’t STFU about things on his blog and was jeopardizing the work of everyone. We told him he either had to stop blogging about what we were collectively working on, or he had to leave. He refused to stop blogging, so the latter option was taken by default.

You (defined as the consumers of our collective work) need to understand some things:

(1) For myself with regards to donations, I’ve never seen A1 fucking dime from this. Period. This basically means I am doing work for free to help all of you, 99.999999997% of whom I don’t know at all. Please understand that this means that I, in no way, feel obligated to deliver you status updates, release times, etc. You should just be thankful that we continue to do this at all, since it takes up a tremendous amount of our time and energy.

(2) No one was trying to earn any money on this at all. What we *were* trying to do is figure out how to release this thing without allowing unscrupulous people to screw all of you nice people over by selling you these SIMs for $50/ea on eBay. Undoubtedly, someone will find a way and a lot of you will probably buy them. But the idea was to try to help you avoid being taken advantage of. Unfortunately, that’s a rather difficult problem to solve given the nature of how it works, but we were thinking hard about it.

(3) The idea of ’study the source and learn from it’ versus having an easy solution may appeal about to 1 in 1000 of you, and we’re aware of that. That’s why when releases do come out from us, they tend to have a big green flashing ‘DO’ button on them. We know that for the vast majority of you, you just want something that works and is foolproof. For the 0.0000001% of you that care about the mechanics, you’d know how to figure that out whether we shipped the source or not.

(4) There was not a baseband downgrade sitting around for a month or any great length of time. No one is secretly holding things back just for the hell of it. Please understand that it is not reasonable to expect everything to be released the moment it’s in testing or even complete. You all want total control of your phones, Apple seemingly wants just the opposite. To that end, they will patch exploits or bugs that are found as soon as they are understood. Thus, sometimes it makes a little more sense to hold off on showing your hole card than to rush out with it the moment you have it.

(5) We give credit where credit is due. Zibri helped with the 1.1.3 JB and deserves some recognition there. He had nothing to do with anything of any substance after that. He did manage to do this though:

Comment by zf.iphone, Today (moments ago)

Honestly, and that’s the only comment I’ll put here, as the guy who worked out
the exploit conditions. I’m only speaking in my own name. Releasing that was
just plain stupid. Hacking is about knowing what to release and when to release.
This isn’t your own personal sandbox. You just ruined a perfectly good and original
exploit. Then instead of apologizing you’re just posting more crazy demands ?
Yeah right. If you weren’t already older than me, that’d be the time to tell you
to grow up

This is just a sad day for the community.

Zf

That was a note from the principal author and discoverer of the exploit. I just want everyone to be aware that there are consequences to people’s foolish actions. Rather than be goaded by Zibri’s subsequent takedown of the code and post of a ‘challenge’ to release it, Zf has completely lost any further motivation to work on this.

Anyhow, that’s all I’m going to say for now. I hope a lot of you read this and think things over a bit.