Actually, if you've ever bought a iPhone in certain Asian countries - such as MKB in Bangkok, the phones from small dealers are sold pre-jailbroken and loaded up with pirated Apps, movies and other content, as a "service" to the customer. As phones are frequently sold outright and off plan, this kind of distribution channel is a much higher fraction of the market, than it is in the US , where subsidised phones dominate. This likely represents millions of devices. Given jailbreak downloads are typically 10 million , its at least a very significant fraction, and it wouldn't be unreasonably be a majority.

I strongly suspect the motivation for, and the rate of jailbreaking varies wildly by country.

I'd also hazard a guess, the whilst there are people with pretty reasonable motivations such as the Wi-fi scanner example, they represent a tiny fraction of the jailbroken device owners - most have it done for them for commercial reasons - either explicitly to pirate Apps, or out of ignorance when its done for them because the offer of "free extras" is too good.

Well ... doing it on purpose to your own device it is jailbreaking and is fine. Having it done without your permission or knowledge is pwning and is an exploit.

The line isn't that simple. iOS already knows when it's been jailbroken. There's even an API for that so that programs that deal with security can refuse to operate if they don't trust the environment. Square Payments won't let you read credit cards on a jailbroken device; AirWatch reports jailbreaking back to corporate servers (I keep an un-jailbroken device around just for reading company email); and even Skype pops up a warning dialog that says "this app is unsupported on a jailbroken device."

Since Apple can detect a jailbroken phone, they could obviously take harsher actions themselves. They could shut the phone down, or make it rapidly eat batteries, or delete your accounts, or do any of a hundred different nasty things to the phone. But they don't. They have arrived at a somewhat unstable cease-fire with the jailbreakers. So Apple, in this weird way, actually has OS level "support" for being jailbroken. They don't treat us as criminals.

And they need to. I own many different iDevices, but I wouldn't have even bought the second if I hadn't been able to jailbreak it. I won't upgrade iOS until there's an untethered jailbreak for it. I seriously never consider buying an iDevice unless I have high confidence that I can jailbreak it the day I buy it. It's all a part of making a deal with the devil: if Apple wants my money, they have to tolerate my jailbreaking their device. And I've heard that somewhere around 30% of iPhones are jailbroken -- that's just way too much money for them to walk away from.

Evasi0n7 is the name of the method used to apply a tethered jailbreak to the phone. The 7 is for iOS 7. The jailbreak is what disables the security features that lock people out of their own device.

TaiG is the name of a "store" the distributes Chinese applications, similar to Cydia, the store that is currently considered to be the "default" for distributing applications on jailbroken devices. Aside from using Cydia or TaiG, you can also put apps on the device manually or use other stores / distributions.

The deal with TaiG was not a result of any stealing. Evasi0n (the team that made the Evasi0n7 method) had been approached by TaiG with an offer of bundling their store instead of Cydia (which doesn't have a lot of Chinese content) for Chinese users only. Terms of the deal included that TaiG would not be allowed to distribute any "pirated" applications. Evasi0n's rational was that without TaiG on the device, most Chinese users would proceed to install an app store that did provide "pirated" apps and this way they would be condoning a "non-pirating" app store to the huge Chinese jailbreak audience. In exchange for bundling TaiG and therefore giving TaiG a huge userbase in China, Evasi0n was offered a lump of money.

Unfortunately, it turns out after the fact that some pirated apps were spotted on TaiG. Evasi0n reported these to TaiG ASAP and they were removed. You can imagine the trolling that ensued especially from competing jailbreak teams.

Other teams working on a jailbreak method in parallel to Evasi0n were also given this offer from TaiG. In fact, another team was getting a jailbreak release ready with a similar, stolen or different method, I don't know, but since they were getting close to a release, Evasi0n decided to fast-track their working method and release a jailbreak early. The up-side of an early release was that they'd get TaiG's money and they'd get the credit for the jailbreak. The down-side is that the huge volume of apps written for jailbroken devices hadn't been tested and fixed to work on iOS 7 yet, including "Cydia". iOS compatibility is even more crucial for jailbroken apps than for standard iOS apps since they often use undocumented API which is obviously very volatile across iOS versions.

As a result of Evasi0n's early release, a bunch of people jailbroke their device only to find that almost all of the apps written for jailbroken devices that they were installing crashed or cashed their phones to break - since, as I said, they weren't updated for iOS 7.

TL;DR - Evasi0n worked really hard to find a method for jailbreaking, figured they deserved some money for their effort, figured in the mean time they'd condone a safe store to the Chinese, saw their chance at success slip away as other teams were gearing up to steal the glory and released before the developer community was ready, causing breakage and mayhem, never mind the trolling about the sudden appearance of a Chinese app store instead of Cydia.

For Evasi0n's side of the story, read http://evasi0n.com/l.html [evasi0n.com]

You don't need to create a contact in iOS 7. Just find the number after the call is done and ask for it to be blocked. It's near the bottom.