The war against jailbreakers took an interesting turn this week, with an update to the Time Warner Cable iPad app that specifically disables the service on devices that have been tweaked -- even though the hackers have already discovered a workaround to the problem.
Engadget is reporting that Time Warner Cable released TWCable TV 2.0, an update to their iPad-only app which allows subscribers to view more than 100 channels from anywhere in your home through a Wi-Fi Roadrunner connection. But this update also comes with a nefarious unannounced feature: It blocks users who have jailbroken their devices.
Upon launching TWCable TV 2.0 on a jailbroken iPad, the user is greeted with the following message: “TWCable TV is not supported on ‘jailbroken’ devices. Please restore your iPad to factory defaults, then reinstall TWCable TV.”
We certainly can’t think of any possible reason for Time Warner Cable to stick it to jailbreakers in this way, especially when Apple is already doing a fine job of patching exploits such as the one used in this week’s JailbreakMe 3.0, which has already racked up north of a million users.
Of course, jailbreakers don’t like to be told what they can and can’t do, which is why an enterprising hacker has already figured out a workaround to get things working again, involving the installation of a .deb file. You can get the full details by following a link from iPhoneDownloadBlog.com -- at least until Time Warner Cable releases another update to block that from happening.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Image courtesy of Engadget)
delric
July 08, 2011 at 5:15pm
The sad part of them doing this is the app only works over wifi and it must be connected to a roadrunner router. I had the app and did no find a need for it. It was just a look what i can do app. If it was over the Internet like sling player then I would care more about timer warner apps. They seem to fail a lot when the try to branch out in other areas, let me stop here thats a whole another topic.
