For those of you who have been involved in the jailbreaking community for quite some time, you will no doubt be familiar with the legendary hacker known as PlanetBeing. His real name is Yiduo David Wang, and at one point he was one of the core members of the iPhone Dev Team alongside the likes of MuscleNerd. Obviously we all know the former as one of the biggest names involved in providing baseband hacks and device unlocks, whereas Wang was more focused on the actual jailbreaks.
During the early days, the developer was heavily involved in the jailbreaking scene, being a member of the iPhone Dev Team as mentioned above, but also being an associate member of the Chronic Development Team. His iPhoneWiki page credits him with various achievements throughout his iOS ‘career’ including being the maintainer of XPwn which is used in the front end of the popular jailbreaking tool, Sn0wbreeze.
Although being regarded as one of the most gifted developers to enter the iOS jailbreaking community, Wang disappeared off the radar in the middle of 2010. If the comments and reports on the Linux on the iPhone blog are to believed, the reasons are personal and work related, although his partners on that project maintain that he was still involved in the project.
Fast forward eighteen months to the present time, and the re-emergence of PlanetBeing is causing some folks to get excited, including me. Pod2g, the developer responsible for producing the recent A4 jailbreak, recently announced on his personal blog that PlanetBeing was lending a helping hand, along with Saurik and p0sixninja to overcome some sandbox issues they were experiencing.
As a quick recap, Pod2g, along with the iPhone and Chronic Dev Teams, has recently produced and released the Corona jailbreak which allows A4 devices running iOS 5.0.1 to benefit from an untethered jailbreak. However, due to the lack of usable exploits to inject the untethering files, the same treatment couldn’t be afforded to the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.
The good news is that PlanetBeing looks as if he is fitting into the project extremely well, after coming out of his 503 day Twitter exile to announce that they are now out of the sandbox. Cydia creator Jay Freeman is credited with lending his expertise to the situation, but I think the jailbreak community would stand with me and welcome PlanetBeing back home.
The recent Tweet represents only a small step forward in the process, with working continuing on a daily basis with all involved to provide that elusive A5 jailbreak,
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