We are at a crucial time in the jailbreaking community. I call this the edge of our seats situation where all eyes rest on one person, or one development team waiting for the crucial breakthrough to be made in providing a stable, distributable jailbreak. In October 2010 the communities eyes focused solely on the Chronic Dev Team as they prepared us for the release of the GreenPPois0n tool, then without warning George Hotz (a.k.a. Geohot) pipped them to the post with the last minute release of Limera1n.
This time around the gazes of the masses are fixated on the hacker pod2g (@pod2g) who has previously been affiliated with the Chronic Development Team. After splitting from Chronic Dev and going solo, he appeared to have dropped off the radar until an announcement on November 7, 2011, that he had himself found an exploit which he believed could be used to produce an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5, and then later for iOS 5.0.1.
After a number of generous donations, allowed pod2g to purchase his very own iPhone 4S for testing purposes the hard work began on attempting to exploit the bug into a functional jailbreak capable of being distributed freely. With all eyes pointing to his blog on a daily basis, he finally posted an update on Monday advising that the untether for the iPhone 4S was failing due to the Cortex-A9 cache management.
For you and I that may seem like a show stopper, but less than 24 hours later the hacker reported once again via his blog, announcing that by putting the untether into a single thread and and flushing out the dcache, followed by the icache in a row at a strategical point of the process, it proved successful. He also had been taking advice and guidance from the creator of Cydia Jay Freeman (a.k.a. Saurik) about the launch boot process which allowed significant progress to be made.
So that takes us to the present day and the most recent display of public information on his progress. Pod2g has posted a video on his official blog which demonstrates an untethered jailbreak running seamlessly on an iPhone 4 on iOS 5.0.1. The video covers all of the usual things we have come to see in the community like demonstrating Cydia running, showing the iOS version and powering down the device and restarting to prove that the jailbreak is indeed untethered and does not required a tethered boot.
The video is great news for iPhone 4 owners who see the end result in sight, taking this progress as permission to finally update their device to iOS 5.0.1. However, the accompanying blog post does confirm that they believe the jailbreak is nearly ready for primetime EXCLUDING the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.
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