Jailbreak developer Nicholas Allegra, better known as comex and best known for userland exploits that allowed untethered Jailbreaks, and the Jailbreakme.com web-based Jailbreak, has announced on Twitter that's he'll be taking an internship at Apple this fall.
It's been really, really fun, but it's also been a while and I've been getting bored. 3 hours ago
So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple.
Switching sides -- going from mouse to cat -- is an interesting move. Rather than finding exploits to help the Jailbreak community gain unrestricted access, he'll be finding them to help Apple stop bad guys from getting it first (and hopefully keeping iOS malware effectively at zero.)
On behalf of the TiPb Nation, we want to wish comex well in his internship and future endeavors. And we want to wish the Jailbreak community, with or without comex, well in finding future exploits.
[@comex]
Reader comments
Jailbreak developer comex to intern at Apple
As I've said in the past, the JB community is the best research Apple doesn't have to pay for.
We don't know if Comex is working on the "cat" side of JB, or on something else entirely, but either way, his post-Apple career will be interesting. Assuming he works on an iOS team, once he has seen certain aspects of the code, what legal limits would that put on him participating in the JB scene after he leaves Apple? Non-competes are generally not valid in California, and would likely not apply anyways since the JB community is not a competing company, but any lawyers out there care to hazard a guess?
Non-compete's arent the issue. NDA's are. I'm sure anything he would/could learn would be tied up forever.
Right, but would an NDA apply to a closed-source JB? Nothing is being disclosed, strictly speaking.
Well lets say legally he doesn't do anything that discloses info..Its still misuse of proprietary information he probably would have not known otherwise. Yeah he may have figured it out on his own..he is smart, but Apple have even smarter lawyers. I hope he isn't dumb enough to even consider doing anything like that.
Yes...that is the kind of thing I am wondering about. It might be misuse of proprietary information, depending on what he works on while at Apple. While comex has an almost peerless track record of figuring these things out on his own, even if he does not use any proprietary information in a hypothetical future JB project, it would be difficult to impossible for him to go up against Apple's legal team should a dispute arise. In effect, this internship will have taken him out of the JB community, not only for the period of employment, but for some time (forever?) afterwards.
He is a talented developer, so I hope is worth it to him and/or he keeps on making valuable stuff from inside Cupertino.
It's an internship, normally they are unpaid. He certainly will not have any stock options.
TRAITOR !!!!!