iPhone hackers seem to have discovered that all of the applications run as root. In the world of Windows, that’s no big deal. In the world of Unix, it’s unheard of. As Andrew Shebanow points out, it also explains why third party developers aren’t yet allowed to publish iPhone applications.
July 11, 2007 at 1:58 pm
It’s possible (likely even) that it really doesn’t matter because the processor on the iPhone doesn’t have mechanisms for memory protection. I don’t know which processor they’re using, but I know that several embedded processors I’ve played with (and run Linux on) don’t.