Apple and Cotton Growers Both Fighting a Losing Battle
How long did Apple expect to keep iPhone 2.0 locked up? A month, six months, a year? It's over now and hackers have unlocked iPhones faster than some of us could finish reading Techme stories about the upgrade. The same kind of thing is hitting cotton growers who are planting genetically engineered to poison insects that attack the plant. In both cases someone wants what nature won't let them have, at least not for long.
From Gizmodo we hear:
The cool thing here is that Dev Team told us that this is 1) a true unlock and 2) Apple will have a very difficult time closing this hole. That's the news, not just jailbreak--in fact, it's not even jailbreak in the classic sense. It's built-in the hacked firmware, which allows for installation of any application, unsigned or "Apple Approved"
In a botanical version of trying to control your environment, NPR reports on cotton plants engineered to produce the Bt toxin
Scientists who study insects, however, predicted that the crops wouldn't work for long, because insects eventually would evolve to resist the Bt toxin, just as they resist other insecticides.
and one researcher has found:
that cotton bollworms -- a worm that feeds on cotton plants and corn before growing wings and turning into a moth -- are surviving much higher doses of Bt poison now than they were several years ago. His findings, which he says are clear evidence of "evolution in action,"
Apple just found how hackers are surviving and thriving even in spite of their efforts to keep the iPhone locked up. There is too much demand to unshackle the iPhone and unlike nature that has to progress through trial and error, hackers have the intelligence to get what they want a lot faster.
In a battle of survival of the fittest, open platforms will likely win out.
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