Update (2:30PM): Apple says it is investigating… Good idea Apple!
Thanks to an unpatched hole in Adobe’s PDF file format, the jailbreaking community has been given a gift. Super easy jailbreaking. Just point your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad’s Mobile Safari to jailbreakme.com, slide the “Slide to jailbreak” slider and in less than 5 minutes, your device is jailbroken and has Cydia installed and ready to go.
The folks at TWiT.tv have tried the website and have jailbroken a couple of iPhone 4′s and a couple of iPads. All on camera.
This really works, I tried it with my old original iPhone with iOS 3.1.3 installed and it’s now jailbroken with Backgrounder, Winterboard, and Categories installed.
It doesn’t appear to be perfect. When I boot/reboot my jailbroken iPhone, I see a couple of lines of random colored pixels. I wasn’t able to get a screenshot of the boot process, but I did take a picture:
This doesn’t appear to have any ill effects to the operation of the phone. At least not in it’s iPod touch like operations. I can’t tell if it causes any problems when using the phone to make calls since the phone doesn’t have a SIM card anymore.
There is an interesting side-effect to this security hole. The only folks that can apply a patch to protect themselves from this are folks that jailbreak their devices. There is a patch available via Cydia called “PDF Loading Warner” that will display a dialog whenever a PDF file is attempting to be displayed.
The concern here is that any website could use this exploit to install malicious software without the user even knowing it was installed. The fact that Apple hasn’t jumped on this exploit yet really surprises me.
People have been taking advantage of this exploit in Apple stores by jailbreaking the display iPhones:
(There are other videos, but this one was the “easiest to watch”.)
For me, this was mostly an experiment to see if it would work and how easy it was to do. There is one very important use that is tempting me to jailbreak my iPhone 4: MyWi. MyWi allows you to create a WiFi hotspot protected by WEP so that, in theory, you can connect any WiFi capable device to it. In my case, I want to connect my iPad to it in order to access 3G on my WiFi iPad.
So far, MyWi alone isn’t enough to make me want to take the chance and jailbreak my iPhone 4. However, there are other apps that only work on jailbroken iPhones that are starting to tempt me as well. The ability to do 3G FaceTime is one of them.
Of course, both the tethering and 3G FaceTime do something that would cost me way more money. Chew up bandwidth. I switched to the 200MB a month bandwidth plan to save money. 3G FaceTime apparently would fill up that 200MB’s in about an hour of FaceTime and using MyWi with my iPad would also increase my 3G usage. Fortunately, I haven’t had the need to use my iPad outside my house except for once and that location had free WiFi. As for FaceTime, I just don’t know that many folks that even have an iPhone 4, much less would want to make FaceTime calls with me.
So, I’m still on the jailbreak fence with my iPhone 4. Maybe someday…
