Pwn Your Phone

...rooting your phone is now illegal :(

Not true, caitlyn.

It is illegal to unlock a phone that your carrier subsidized and sold to you. You must get the unlock by requesting it from your carrier, however, rooting your phone is quite something else, and there is no law against it in the US.

EFF: "The legal shield for jailbreaking and rooting your phone remains up - it'll protect us at least through 2015" http://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone

We have the right to root our phones.

Lesson Learned: Don't purchase hardware you don't have "permission" to do whatever you want with the software on it.

It really is a shame Nokia went off the Microsoft deepend... I still use an N900, it is a great device with a Debian-based operating system powerd by apt-get that lets me do as I please.

~Jeff

My phone is the Nokia N9. What a wonderful device, like the N900 it is quite open and it comes with vendor supported root. It would be hard for me to convince myself to go back to a closed device.

I would have liked to have been a mouse in the meeting room when Microsoft first met with Nokia to discuss the future of the N900/N9 products. I imagine it went something like this:

MS: We have lots of patents and we demand that you pay us a billion Euro a year for a license to sell the N900/N9 or else we will take you to court and drain the lifeblood out of you.

Nokia: But we don't have that much money to give you.

MS: We have an idea, sell our Windows OS instead.

Nokia: Ok

Thanks for the clarification.

Hey Walking Bird,

You misquoted* MS:

Quoting:MS: We have an idea, sell our Windows OS instead.

Nokia: Ok

It went this way:

Quoting:MS: How about you sell our phones exclusively and we will pay you?!

Nokia: Ah ... Ok

YBT

* Artistic license as allowed in fiction.

I'd really like to know how closely this "fiction" resembles how it really happened.