Well, the cat is out of the bag. The 3.0 firmware from Apple can be jailbroken, and there are now sites out there giving you that jailbreak (after you sort through various ads and browser popups, etc).
Of course it’s not really a surprise that it can be jailbroken. One of the nicest things about the jailbreaking iPhones and iPod Touches nowadays is that once a given device can be jailbroken, it can always be jailbroken. The exploits we’re forced to resort to are down at the hardware level, where nothing can be done about them via software. That’s why within a day or two of 3.0 beta1’s release we were able to snap this screenshot of a jailbroken system:
(we also captured the date of the SHA1 of the above image for historical purposes here and here)
Why did we not release the jailbreak two weeks ago when the above image was captured and hashed? There are many reasons, mostly resource-related:
- We don’t want to have to release a new version of PwnageTool and QuickPwn for every beta release. Last time around during the 2.0 beta period, there were nine (9!) Apple releases, spaced within a few weeks of each other.
- There are unresolved problems that we’re still working on. It’s currently impossible to get the 3.0 firmware to talk to baseband 02.28 where yellowsn0w lives, for instance.
- We don’t want to have to support everyone who wants to back down from the betas…because the betas are, well, buggy.
- It’s silly to play cat&mouse with Apple during a beta period, when relatively few people are willing to actually use the beta software in their everyday lives. There are ways Apple can tighten the screws, and we’d rather not burn methods just for a beta release.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THE UNOFFICIAL QUICKPWN RELEASES IS THAT IF YOU USE THEM, YOU WILL KILL YELLOWSN0W, POSSIBLY FOREVER. That’s because QuickPwn, by its very nature, requires you to already have accepted Apple’s official IPSW, along with its baseband update. If you do that, you will (possibly forever) lose your ability to software-unlock your iPhone 3G.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and so perhaps we should be flattered that so many ad-supported sites are now using our own tools to create unofficial jailbreaks (QuickPwn in particular is so easily adapted from one release to the next that it’s reduced to a handful of binary pattern searches in a good hex editor). But please don’t expect support for them on this blog, because we’re actually busy with the hard part of the 3.0 jailbreak (the 02.28 incompatibility and the new compressed ramdisk they’re using).
Oh, and also the unlock :)
