Jailbreaking

The popular skinning app for jailbroken iPhones, DreamBoard, is now free on Cydia. DreamBoard is a great alternative to Winterboard because it doesn't require you to restart your springboard every time you change themes. Dreamboard also allows much "deeper" themes and user-interface redesigns compared to Winterboard. Where Winterboard basically allows theme developers to re-skin existing iPhone graphics and interfaces, Dreamboard allows theme developers to build entirely new interfaces and methods of displaying information.

Apple's new iOS 5 has already been jailbroken by iPhone Dev Team member MuscleNerd who tweeted yesterday, "iOS 5 jailbroken: via limera1n + tethered boot... Not too many surprises." The tweet was accompanied by a picture (shown below) of Cydia and iSSH icons displayed on the screen of a 4th-generation iPod touch.

It looks like Apple essentially has done nothing to patch the known, existing exploits. Presumably this is because the next generation iPhone will have the iPad 2's A5 processor (or similar), which is not vulnerable to the existing bootrom exploits. In other words, though this jailbreak (a tethered one at that) delivers a jailbroken iOS5, it doesn't deliver a jailbroken iPhone 5 or iPad 2 running iOS 5.

Questions surrounding iPhone tracking have exploded recently thanks to the revelation that cellular-capable iOS 4 devices have been recording their location accurately and consistently since the firmware installation date. All of this location information is logged in a single file that can be parsed and mapped by the new iPhone Tracker application. Although some users don't care about this kind of thing, others are concerned and will want to stop their mobile device from logging location data.

As it turns out, turning off Location Services under Settings will not help, as this only controls the GPS chip inside the iPhone. Security researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan have discovered the location data comes from cellular network tower triangulation, which doesn't require communication with satellite GPS.

The long awaited untethered jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1 is here, albeit in limited fashion. The instructions below pertain to Redsn0w 0.9.7b1, a beta release of the so-called "backup plan" untethered jailbreak. This release is not the final release and, being a beta, requires a bit more effort than the eventual final release should. This jailbreak is also limited to the iPhone 4, iPad and iPod Touch 4G.

The following provides step-by-step instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone (or other iOS device) using Redsn0w 0.9.7b1.