Jailbreaking has gone into the cloud. Visit the Jailbreakme.com website on your iOS device, slide the big button on the front page (which cheekily mimics Apple’s slide-to-unlock button) and you’re done. It’s that easy. It works for iPhones (including the iPhone 4) and also iPads running iOS 3.2.1.
Jailbreaking – the unlocking of an iPhone or iPad to allow access to the file system and install any app you like – used to be done via your computer with a downloaded program. You’d plug in the iDevice and work from there. It was easy, but this is easier still. No doubt the US federal regulators’ recent ruling that jailbreaking is legal has emboldened the hackers: Apple can’t have the site taken down now, after all.
The cat and mouse game that is jailbreaking is not over, though: Just because unlocking your iPhone is now legal doesn’t mean Apple has to support it. The hack works through a PDF exploit in Mobile Safari. Comex, a member of the iPhone Dev Team (the jailbreaking people), uses Safari’s PDF decoder to run the code. Because Safari automatically opens PDFs, the jailbreak code is run. Expect Apple to close this hole in an update, if only for security purposes.
So how does it work? That depends. Our own Brian X Chen unlocked his iPhone 4 with no problems. He reverted almost immediately because Cydia, the unofficial App Store, has almost nothing in it that is optimized for the retina display. OThers have reported that FaceTime and MMS are broken. Currently, my 3G iPad is stuck in an endless loop and cannot get past the boot screen showing a single, lonely silver Apple. Needless to say, you should back up before trying this, and be aware that you are visiting a website that is doing some rather scary things to your iDevice.
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