One of my favorite ancient Chinese proverbs is: May you live in interesting times.
Well, times couldn’t get any more interesting for Microsoft’s first ever table, the Surface RT. The Redmond giant released the tablet to great fanfare, but the first few months saw it make an uninspiring start thanks in good part to inefficient distribution.
Things were further complicated when a slew of bugs and errors made a showing, both hardware and software. While Microsoft will most definitely squash these problems in due time, one thing it is still in two minds about is the jailbreak tool that was released a few weeks back.
Microsoft, at first, applauded the ingenuity of the developer of the jailbreak (netham45 from over at XDA Developers forum), but soon enough dropped a hint that it could release a fix to block the modification of the kernel in the near future.
Now three weeks have passed, and Microsoft is still undecided how to tackle the jailbreak.
The latest word is that the company is still investigating the matter and a determining a course of action. Microsoft is in no particular hurry as the hack does not compromise user security in any way. But still, the number of Windows RT users that have unlocked their tablets is continually on the rise.
To make matters even more interesting, the developer says that it is not all that easy to block the jailbreak:
“They can patch it through Windows Update, but since we have the ability to reinstall from recovery partitions we can revert any Windows Updates they release.”
Real swell.
The jailbreak allows users to run unsigned code on the Surface RT, and the community has already started recompiling applications to run on the tablet. The list is small, but set to grow with desktop applications like Chrome and Firefox also being readied to run on the new platform.
Interesting times, indeed.
