Let’s start out with this awesome quote: “It’s not going to be impossible to jailbreak even if the exploit we used is gone,” said Eric McDonald, a member of the iPhone Dev-Team, which publishes tools to jailbreak the iPhone, in a phone interview with Wired.com.
That is awesome! I knew that hackers were smart enough to figure anything out. The 24kpwn exploit used to help jailbreak previous generations of iPhones and iPod Touch devices only made it easier to boot up the hacked devices.
The newly shipping iPhone 3GS’s bootrom interferes with 24kpwn, but that will only make the handset difficult to start up after it shuts down. Booting up will require being “tethered” to a computer, which is what we saw with the iPod Touch 3g. That means if you shut down a jailbroken iPhone 3GS, or if it runs out of power, you can only turn it back on by plugging it into a computer and then re-jailbreaking the device.
So this whole thing will just make jailbreaking a bigger bitch than it is already for some users. However, McDonald said the Dev-Team will just have to find a new exploit to enable untethered booting once again, which we know they are capable of.
The reports of the new 3GS were sort of true, as the phones do indeed ship with different firmware with a new bootrom, but they are still hackable.
Here is a quote from Steve Jobs in regards to jailbreaking: “It’s a cat-and-mouse game, We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.”
That didn’t work too well Mr. Jobs.
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