geekosystem

Like any recent gadget on the market, the race to jailbreak Google Glass was on as soon as the device was announced. Now that the Explorer Edition, which is just another way to say that they're still kind of testing things, is out, folks are fast at working trying to bend and not break it. For anyone that thought it might take any real length of time: Surprise! Google Glass has already been jailbroken.

The way in which the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is enforced only shows just how silly the entire thing is. For example, the DMCA allows the Library of Congress to grant exemptions to the act, allowing folks to circumvent digital rights management schemes, for whatever reason they deem fit. If that sounds horrifyingly arbitrary, that's because it totally is. One of the actions that always seems to be up for exemption is the jailbreaking of smartphones. Thanks to a new set of exemptions, jailbreaking is totally legal, but only under ridiculously specific circumstances.

Security was a major issue for Sony when they designed the PS Vita. Anyone who's familiar with the PSP likely knows that the console is one of the easiest consumer gadgets to crack out there: It was (and is) very easy to pirate PSP games, and that's something Sony does not intend to allow on the PS Vita. Despite Sony's best efforts, no device is "unhackable": Self-proclaimed reverse engineer Yifan Lu says he's found an exploit in the system that will eventually allow custom software to run on the device. While many gaming pirates are hopeful that the breakthrough will lead to hackers eventually jailbreaking the PS Vita, Lu says that his work doesn't allow people to pirate games, and he has no intention of helping them figure out how to do so.

Technology moves fast, so it should come as no surprise that with the introduction of a new version of iOS there's a new jailbreak that can crack it open. What might come as a surprise is that this new jailbreak surfaced less than 24 hours after the announcement of iOS 6; the operating system proper isn't even out yet. That said, the jailbreak isn't totally polished or even what you might call "usable", but it exists and it works.

This is huge: jailbreaking iPhones and other electronic devices to run software unauthorized by the companies that make them is no longer a criminal act. Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and their latest review, which among other things protects jailbreakers, appears to be a major victory for free speech proponents who find the copyright law too restrictive.