After going through a relatively quiet patch during the latter months of 2011, the last three weeks have been a hive of jailbreaking activity. They say; you can have never have too much information, but there has been so many updates posted to blogs, and various Twitter accounts that in some circumstances it has been difficult to keep up. Let’s try and bring some sanity to the situation and see where we are at.
First of all Pod2g announced that through his security research into iOS, he had found a bug which he believed could be exploited to provide an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5. After achieving an untethered jailbreak on his iPod touch third generation running iOS 5, he continued on to extend the jailbreak to other A5 devices on iOS 5.0.1. Various updates followed, all confirming that the various A5 devices were successfully untethered on iOS 5.0.1.
Then, it was Apple TV’s turn to receive some of the untethered goodness, with the latest firmware version added to the list of untethered devices. He also announced that he had run into caching issues which causes the iPhone 4S jailbreak to fail. After the caching troubles were eliminated the community was treated to a demonstration video showing the iPhone 4 successfully running an untethered jailbreak on firmware 5.0.1. All of his information, research and tools were then passed over to the Chronic Dev and iPhone Dev Teams to package into Redsn0w and Corona for an A4 untethered jailbreak. Further updates followed which gave some insight into the difficulties being faced in the pursuit of the A5 devices jailbreak, with some hope being given thanks to the formation of a ‘Dream Team’ and the successful escape from the Sandbox thanks to PlanetBeing and Saurik.
Now that we are done with our brief journey through history, it brings is nicely up to the current day where the situation still remains the same. Owners of an A4 powered device can happily enjoy an untethered jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1 whilst iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners sit patiently waiting. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, Apple have seeded the latest iOS 5.1 beta 3 to registered developers for testing. As always, the community is constantly striving trying to help others, and today, various iOS developers on Twitter like @unimp0rtanttech, @abart997 and @nadeem97 have informed their followers that the latest beta release of iOS 5.1 by Apple is not susceptible to the Corona jailbreak.
The advice, as always, is for users to update their devices to the current production release, which is iOS 5.0.1. This is obviously not 100% confirmed until pod2g himself, or a member or either iPhone Dev or Chronic Dev Teams confirms it, but it is always better to be safe than sorry.
When a new firmware is released, Apple’s signature server will stop signing previous, or old, firmware; meaning that the updating, or restoring to that firmware will not be verified by Apple. If that happens, as a user you would be left either on your current firmware or with the need to go to iOS 5.1 which, if the reports are true, will not be jailbreakable through the use of currently released tools.
For jailbreaking iOS 5 untethered, follow our complete step by step instructions posted here to jailbreak iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on iOS 5.0.1 using Redsn0w.
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