Items tagged with jailbreaking
Way back in the day -- dating back to just after the release of the first iPhone -- hackers chipped away at the security defenses in iOS to give users functionality that was lacking in the default software. This practice is known as jailbreaking, and it is something that Apple unsurprisingly frowns upon since it breaks through its “walled garden”. Ian Beer, a researcher working for Google's Project Zero team, announced via a tweet that he has discovered an exploit that could jailbreak devices running iOS 11.1.2 or older. Project Zero is tasked with finding bugs in competing software, as we've seen over the years with the prickly relationship Google has with Microsoft on the matter....
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Speaking of Google Glass and hacking, the new $1,500 spectacles, which are as yet only available to a select group of “Explorers”, have already been hacked. Tweets from Liam McLoughlin (also known as Hexxeh), who works for Google on the Chrome side of things indicate that he found a way to do it, and although he doesn’t say for sure that he rooted the specs yet for fear of breaking them. He did, however, tweet that he found a debug mode that seems to give him ADB access, and a reboot-loader offers a way to root the device through fastboot OEM unlock. Jay Freeman (@saurik) doesn’t think that the fastboot OEM unlock necessarily offers root access, but he’s definitely...
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Apple has always gone out of its way to keep users from tinkering with their iOS devices, from using funky screws and lots of adhesive to prevent do-it-yourself (DIY) repair, to locking down iOS so that it's extremely difficult to jailbreak. Speaking towards the latter, hacker i0n1c posted on Twitter that the upcoming iOS 6.1 update will be even tougher for modders to crack, which is especially disappointing when you consider that iOS 6 hasn't even been jailbroken yet. "There must have been some change of guard at Apple. iOS 6.1 adds again tough protections although public JB community hasn't broken iOS 6 yet," i0n1c posted to Twitter. This is par for course when it comes to iOS devices, and...
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Although jailbreaking one’s iPhone is a fairly common practice, it can be intimidating for plenty of folks. Apparently, after the Chronic-Dev and iPhone Dev teams released the Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak tool for iOS 5.5.1 devices on Friday, a few more people decided to give it a try. According to a tweet from Chronic-Dev, nearly a million devices were jailbroken over the weekend--973,086 to be exact. Of those jailbroken devices, 211,401 of them were iPad 3s. Absinthe 2.0 is alleged to be “so easy your grandma could do it”, but you can judge for yourself by watching this handy video: Cult of Mac also noted that after the release of Absinthe 1.0 back in January, there were a million...
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Siri is the most compelling reason to upgrade to an iPhone 4S, but it's obvious that Apple's locking the software to that particular phone in order to convince iPhone 4 owners that they just have to have the latest and greatest. Why, technically speaking, won't Siri work on other iOS devices? Looks like it's due to a choice of Apple's. But thanks to genius hackers roaming the planet, there's a new solution. Spire is a new solution that allows for Siri to be installed previously unsupported, but jailbroken, devices. Spire is a small download, but while installing it will download Siri itself (directly from Apple). The whole process uses around 100MB of data, so you definitely want to be on Wi-Fi...
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