Paul Morris on October 8, 2018, 8:55 pm

Old School Jailbreak: iPhone 3GS And Original iPod touch Get Jailbreak Updates

Apple initially released the original iPod touch back in September 2007. That’s more than 11-years ago. However, out of nowhere, a team calling itself the iPhone 1337 team has announced a jailbreak for that very device running firmware 1.1.

This announcement is about as strange as it gets. In fact, in any other walk-of-life, we would consider this an utterly ridiculous announcement and release and wonder why someone would invest time and effort to produce a jailbreak for a hardware and firmware combination that doesn’t exist anymore.

However, this is iOS device jailbreak, and, as history has shown us, pretty much anything is possible and developers and researchers find motivation in all sorts of places to carry out the work that they do.

The jailbreak, which is called the “4039 jailbreak,” requires a running installation of Windows XP and a working USB dock cable in order to work. It relies on the libtiff exploit and requires a device owner to use SSH to “get around SpringBoard being unpatched” and to launch the invisible third-party apps on the device.

Given the niche nature of the firmware, the hardware, and the Windows XP-based system that is needed to actually execute this tool, it’s nigh-on impossible to actually test and out through its paces. However, if this type of work does interest you then you can find out more about it over at the original Reddit post.

In other “bizarre and unexpected jailbreak news,” iOS hacker axi0mX has pushed out some new updates to his iPhone 3GS alloc8 untethered bootrom that was published in early 2017. Taking to Twitter to announce the updates, axi0mX has written a “better exploit for this vulnerability”, which is instant and take things to the next level without having a 3-second delay:

Untethered bootrom jailbreaks are fun! Here’s some exciting news for iPhone 3GS users using alloc8.

I wrote a better exploit for this vulnerability, and the new one is instant and does not have a 3 second delay during boot or when waking up from sleep. No more delays! ETA: son.

Just how useful this new exploit will be considering the iPhone 3GS is a deprecated and no longer supported device is anyone’s guess. However, it’s still great to see people actively working to make the jailbreak scene a better place.