The news coming in from Cupertino doesn’t cease to amaze us. First, it was the rather abrupt resignation of Steve Jobs and the announcement of Tim Cook as his successor. Now Comex a.k.a Nicholas Allegra tweeted that Apple, whose iOS firmwares he has jailbroken for long, has offered him an internship and he will be starting his internship the week after next.
Modern day hackers try not to attract too much attention. All of the major iOS hackers are only known by their pseudonyms as they never use their real names or talk about their personal lives. However, Forbes was able to contact Comex and give us a rare insight in to his daily life. Nicholas Allegra or Comex is he is commonly known, is a 19 year old iOS hacker based in Chappaqua, New York. He’s your average run of the mill geek, who taught himself to code in Virtual Basic at the age of 9 by help of online tutorials.
Only recently Comex was under the spotlight because he released the iPad 2 jailbreak. By discovering a PDF based exploit in mobile Safari, Comex made it possible to jailbreak the iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3. Within a day of its release, JailbreakMe 3.0 was used to jailbreak over 2 million iPads around the globe, not to mention the millions of iPhone and iPod touch units that were jailbroken worldwide using JailbreakMe 3.0 as well. In his interview with Forbes, Comex said that he had taken a leave from college because he wanted an internship. Little did he know that the company, devices of which he loves to jailbreak, will be the one offering him the internship.
Comex announced through twitter that he will start his internship at Apple the week after next. While it is still not known what exactly his duties will be at Apple, it can be presumed that he will be helping Apple fix the countless jailbreak exploits that exist in the iOS firmware. If Comex stays on for long at Apple, the future of jailbreaking will definitely be bleak then.
More and more companies are taking to hiring devs because of their sheer talent. The notorious iPhone hacker, jailbreaker and unlocker George Hotz a.k.a Geohot now works for Facebook. Apple previously hired MobileNotifier developer Peter Hajas who helped the company revamp the way notifications are displayed on iOS devices. Now, Allegra joins Apple as an internee, who knows what he might end up doing for the company. Only time will tell.
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