Now that you have the option to jailbreak your iPhone 5, iPad Mini or other iOS 6 device, you might be wondering if you should. For many, it's a no brainer. For more casual users or folks who only recently jumped on the iOS bandwagon, there are some important questions.

Is jailbreaking legal? That depends. The latest DMCA rules do not provide an exemption for jailbreaking and rooting tablets, which means jailbreaking your iPad is technically illegal. Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch is fine, though, which makes absolutely no sense. 

Is jailbreaking hard? No, not really. The process will likely take you less than an hour, as long as you're cautious and back everything up. We have step-by-step instructions outlining how to jailbreak iOS 6 running on your iPhone, iPod Touch or, if you dare, iPad. 

Why should I bother jailbreaking? Now, there's the really important question. For an answer, here are 12 of the most compelling reasons to break free of Apple's control. 

1. Rename And Reorganize Apps

It may seem mundane, but having the ability to rename your apps is kind of nice. Maybe you want to call Sparrow "Email" or change "Spotify" to "Music." It's so basic, it seems like something iOS should just let you do by default. But it doesn't. You have to jailbreak to get that ability. 

Jailbreaking also gives you more freedom over the organization of your apps. You can add an additional row of apps, adjust icon sizes and even add a more icons to the home screen's dock, which is handier than it sounds. A tool called FolderEnhancer lets you create subfolders, put folders on the dock and customize the way folders generally look and work. Want to get rid of Newsstand? There's a Cydia tweak for that. 

2. Make Chrome (Or Anything Else) Your Default Browser

The fact that Apple won't let you change your default browser is positively Orwellian. BrowserChanger fixes that by letting you choose from several dozen different mobile browsers, including Chrome, Dolphin, Skyfire, Opera Mini and Atomic. 

3. Change Your Default Email App 

Apple's native Mail app is pretty dull and its feature set evolves only gradually. The Sparrow+ tweak will let you boot Mail from your life by making Sparrow the phone's default email app, which is so much better.

4. Tether Your Data Connection To Your Laptop 

This is now something you can legally do through your carrier, but jailbroken phones can tether their data connections to other devices at no extra charge (aside from the cost of the app). MyWi and TetherMe are both popular options in Cydia. 

5. Customize the Look And Feel Of iOS

Apple does a pretty nice job of polishing the way its mobile OS looks, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have the option to change its appearance. Jailbreaking lets you do things like change the logo that appears when the device boots (vintage rainbow Apple logo anyone?), change the lock screen design or overhaul the entire theme. If you ever wanted iOS to look like Android, now's your chance.  

There are some really well-designed custom themes available, but also plenty of gross-looking ones. Cydia is loaded with themes and discovering the best ones isn't easy, so you may want to search the Web for theme options first. 

6. Make The Most Of Siri 

When Apple launched Siri in 2011, it gave jailbreak devs a whole new playground in which to experiment. Using the Siri tweaks available in Cydia, you can install chatbots, have Siri tell you jokes, ask it to search YouTube and integrate it with third party apps like Spotify and Waze. In my testing, some tweaks caused Siri to freeze, so proceed with caution. 

7. Play Classic Video Games

Since day one, running video game emulators has been popular among the jailbreaking set. On Cydia, you can find emulators for a number of classic video game consoles. These apps don't come with games (called ROMs), so you'll have to do some searching online or grab the EmuROMs app from Cydia. Note: It's not always legal to download ROMs of video games, so proceed at your own risk. 

8. Beef Up Security 

Jailbroken iDevices have more options in terms of privacy and security, although it's worth noting that not all of them are necessarily reliable. 

The Security section of Cydia offers tools that let you lock down media files and individual apps, install key loggers, encrypt messages, remotely track and wipe your iPhone and make it harder to access the device. There are also tweaks that let you use facial recognition to unlock the device or email a photo of whoever keeps trying to guess your passcode. 

9. Get A Taste Of GoogleNow 

Okay, so it's not exactly GoogleNow, but the functionality provided by the NowNow tweak brings iOS users a step closer to using Google's predictive, voice-enabled mobile assistant. NowNow works with the jailbreak-only Activator app Google's own iOS search app to integrate Google voice search right into the device's home button. This way, you can hold down the button to ask Siri question and then triple-press it to get a second opinion from Google voice search. 

10. Rid Your Life Of Apple Maps Forever

MapsOpener is a jailbreak tweak that lets you open map URLs in Google Maps rather than default to Apple's famously imperfect replacement app. Some third party apps may still default to Apple Maps, but this tweak will minimize the likelihood of you ever seeing those smushed-up skyscrapers again. 

11. Multiple Users 

One commonly pined-for iOS feature is the ability to have multiple users on a single device. This is especially true of iPads, which are often shared among family members. Thanks to a tool called iUsers, it's now possible for different people to log in and out of the device without ever seeing each other's weird little secrets.

12. Catch a Glimpse Of The Platform's Future

Even though there's plenty of junk in Cydia, the jailbreak app store has become home to some very useful, impressive and well-designed apps, tweaks and themes. In some cases, Apple has not only hired jailbreak developers but stolen ideas directly from the jailbreak community. Before Notification Center arrived in iOS 5, for example, it was something jailbreakers had been been using for quite some time. Things as basic as multitasking and copy/paste were also available via Cydia before Apple implemented them. 

By jailbreaking, you can get a glimpse at the future of iOS itself, even if it's often in an unpolished and experimental form. 

There are many, many more reasons to jailbreak than this. Cydia has thousands of tools and tweaks available and developers are always hard at work coding the next experimental feature. Some are better than others. Some are downright awful. A few might screw up your device. But the freedom afforded to you by jailbreaking iOS can be hugely rewarding, not to mention addictive. 

You can debate how much we have evolved emotionally since our early primate days in Africa, but there’s no arguing about our looks. At that point in human development. we were to beauty what the butt is to fine cuisine - distantly related, and in all the wrong ways.

How can we tell? Popular Science has a new $6 iPad app that maps your face to the digital skulls and muscles of eight of our extinct forebears. And the results aren't pretty.

Ugly Is As Ugly Was

PS Evolver is a top-rate teaching app, concisely explaining a lot about these early hominids and the worlds in which they lived. But you’ll want to buy it for the face-mapping feature.

It’s one thing to know that our various ape-like ancestors had a jutting jaw, a flat and flaring nose or a brow you could rest a pencil on. It’s another to see how you’d have looked with those features.

Seeing my skin wrapped around an ancient, weirdly constructed skull was bracing, and made me wonder again if Mick Jagger isn’t really a flash-frozen caveman rescued from a peat bog in the 1950s. I mean, check it out:

It's Easy To Travel Back In Time

Getting the images is easy. Match your eyes and mouth to guides on your iPad’s screen (sorry, iPad only) and take a photo. The app shows you thumbnail images of your ape self, there for you to choose. Click on one, and you can expand, shrink and spin the image on every axis.

There’s plenty of information about that particular failed branch of the human experiment, including a sober, PBS-esque voiceover about their lives. Learn how long they lived, how big their brains were (one line’s brains were larger than ours), even what liked to eat them.

The app crashes too often, and for some reason, the Neanderthal face-map sometimes doesn’t render, but bagging on the app because of this is like complaining about the wrapping paper on a birthday present. There’s a lot of enjoyment here.

There's something weird going on in Apple's App Store.

Last week, I called attention to Dental Surgery, an unbelievably bizarre iPad app, which had somehow risen to become one of the most popular free apps in the store. Within hours, it was gone. This week, a new app called Nose Surgery found its way in the top ten, apparently from the same developer using a different name. What's the deal? 

To its credit, Nose Surgery is considerably more playable and less spammy-looking than Dental Surgery was. The latter was apparently yanked by Apple due to trademark infringement because, as one diligent ReadWrite commenter pointed out, the game borrowed names and likenesses from a show on Nick at Nite. Nose Surgery doesn't appear to steal anyone's intellectual property, but it's still pretty weird. 

Like Dental Surgery and other games produced by this developer (who goes by various names in the App Store), Nose Surgery is very crudely designed with cheap-looking graphics and simplistic, often odd gameplay. And like Dental Surgery, Nose Surgery is loaded with negative, one-star reviews from users, most of whom are baffled by the game. 

What's most striking about these games is not just that they're crappy and sort of strange. It's that they've managed to occupy the App Store's list of top ten free apps, a coveted achievement that most app developers only dream of. It's an honor currently shared with the likes of YouTube, Angry Birds, Skype and Google Earth. Sure, there are plenty of games toward the top of the charts, some of which are pretty banal, but nothing quite as crummy or bizarre as these surgery simulation apps.  

When I first came across Dental Surgery, I thought, "Oh, Gawker or some tech blog clearly wrote about how bizarre this is. That's why it's the third most popular free app for iPad." That wasn't the case. In fact, other than my story last week, none of these crude, weird games have gotten any press coverage. Something else is up.  

Gaming The App Store For Fun and Profit

One way or another, these guys are gaming the system. Not unlike Web search engines, app store rankings can be influenced using everything from white hat optimization techniques to sketchy paid services that artificially inflate downloads and positive reviews. That's nothing new. In fact, it's been going on long and aggressively enough that Apple had to explicitly decry the practice earlier this year, threatening to the revoke developer program memberships of anybody caught doing it. 

With the launch of iOS 6, Apple introduced a number of new measures designed to thwart spammers and make these ranking manipulation techniques less effective. The names of in-app purchases, for example, now weigh less in App Store searches, eliminating a common source of spammy tactics. Apple has also decreased the value of an app's total number of downloads, making it less fruitful to utilize third party schemes that try to drive rankings by driving bogus installs.

So who's the developer behind Nose Surgery and Dental Surgery? It's hard to tell. Apple lists the developer as Florene Mitchell (it used to be Maura Thompson), and the "App Support" button links to a MyLife.com profile for Ms. Mitchell who appears to be a 78-year-old woman from Wilson, North Carolina. 

It's theoretically possible that people are downloading Nose Surgery out of some morbid curiosity. Maybe there's some contingent of iPad-toting cosmetic surgeons-in-training who love slicing up nostrils on a touch screen, as a fun form of pseudo-educational preparation. I highly doubt it, though. Getting an app into the top ten is no small feat to accomplish once, let alone twice. 

Something is definitely up. 

Have you noticed anything fishy in the iOS App Store lately? Let us know in the comments.