OK – I get how there are many who find it pretty neat to jailbreak or unlock a device. It shows off their skills and opens up possibilities with hardware to make it do things it was not designed to do.
In this past week amongst all of the discussion coming out of Las Vegas for CES 2013 was the news that someone had figured out how to jailbreak the Microsoft Surface RT. This jailbreak would allow you to run apps from outside of the Windows Store on the device. The stories went on to say that the jailbreak could only last until the next reboot of the machine and then it would have to be done again. Shortly after that someone released a tool to automate that process for anyone who wanted to jailbreak their Surface RT.
Then just yesterday a picture emerged that showed an early MAC OS running on the Microsoft Surface from where someone used the jailbreak tool to run other programs than those available in the Windows Store.
Pretty nifty skills being displayed but if you put that part aside this jailbreaking stuff opens up other possibilities that really bother me and that is the risk of introducing malware, viruses, trojans, etc. to your system.
Currently as an app is processed through the Windows Store it is checked for these things and dealt with appropriately if something is found and other steps have been taken within the OS itself to minimize these threats as well.
If some type of a home brew repository is opened up who is responsible for checking those programs out before you install them on your Surface RT? Would you be 100% comfortable in installing and running a program from this type of environment?
I thought back when the same thing was discussed with Windows Phone 7 that a homebrew setup would be like the wild wild west and so would this. If I am unable to get that 100% warm fuzzy about what I am installing on my computer system then it is not happening.
I say to each their own but you need to enter that situation with your eyes wide open and understand the risks involved.
