Each day throws us further into the software war hackers are waging against Apple. Seeking bold new mobile web hosting abilities and the power to come face to face with their devices’ root operating systems, jailbreaking software hackers continue to up the ante.
The newest untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 uses the dual-core A5 processor and is the lovechild of a team of different hackers who say that each new device that is released is getting hard and harder to crack. Will this take the steam out of jailbreaking? Probably not. The new “Absinthe,” which for a while was only available on the iPhone 4, 3GS, and original iPad as a “corona” jailbreak, was recently unveiled for both the 4S and the iPad 2 after 10 months of painstaking work. The reason for the difficulty was that the hackers had to bypass the stringent permissions and securities Apple built into their newer A5 devices.
Since the Cydia-accessed jailbreak is untethered users don’t need third-party software or any additional computers in order to run their devices. Still in a beta version, Absinthe is available for download at the Chronic Dev Team’s Greenpoison site, which has previously been used for jailbreaks related to the iPhone 3GS, iPhones GSM and CDMA, and both the iPod and iPad. The public version will be available soon and is expected to work on both Macs and Windows, though the Chronic Dev Team will be recommending that people backup their data on iTunes before commencing.
According to the Dev Team, in the first few days after the release of Absinthe 491,325 iPhone 4 devices acquired the jailbreak, in addition to 308,967 iPad 2s. In addition to their impressive metrics, the Team also issues a stern warning to not to update firmware until a more recent jailbreak is available, which they say is even more important for A5 users.
The stigma once attached to jailbreaking has lessened considerably in recent years. Federally legalized in 2010, the only considerable drawback is the loss of warranty. Many users consider that a worthwhile risk to take when taking into account the extensive upgrades and changes they can make to their operating systems. Other users jailbreak simply to make a statement against Apple’s censorship practices.
The Chronic Dev Team has also released its command-line interface tool, which allows users to go through the GUI jailbreaking application step by step in order to pinpoint bugs and flaws.
Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune. Microsoft has plans, especially in the realm of games, but I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the future if this aspect is important to you. The iPod is a much better choice in that case.