Comex Handing Over the Reins to Fellow Hackers

Nicholas Allegra, or Comex as the jailbreak community knows him, will no longer serve the needs of iOS enthusiasts looking to break free from Apple’s ‘shackles,’ now that he is beginning an internship with the Mac maker.

He will, however, want to jailbreak his phone. Whether or not he joked about it during a Q&A with Reddit, in this respect he hopes there will be others who find exploits in the software.

But it’s kind of ironical really, because if Comex does get a full-time job with Apple he will be tasked with finding and closing those very holes ahead of the fellow hackers he’s leaving behind to pick up this new “challenge” as he calls it.

“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,” he said.

And if Comex finds them and patches them, you can bet it will be a lot harder to see new iOS releases get jailbroken on day one.

He admits that “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.”

Still, according to the Q&A, the hacker’s promotion, so to speak, has been greeted with congratulations from the entire iOS community, including jailbreak artists like himself.

Asked whether he made any money from the jailbreak scene, Comex replied:

“|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 current jailbreaks and JailbreakMe site will not disappear, he said. “I’ll hand them over to MuscleNerd or chpwn or whoever will take care of them.”