It is becoming more and more increasingly difficult to jailbreak our devices. Once upon a time, when new hardware or software was released, there was a small interim period when the researchers tinkered with a few things and then voila, we had a viable jailbreak. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and with Apple releasing new devices and versions of iOS which contain fewer vulnerabilities and bugs, the production of tools capable of giving us the all important untethered jailbreak is getting harder.
Up until his recent return to the jailbreak scene, you had to go back to August 2010 to see any sign of public activity from legendary coder PlanetBeing. With French security researcher Pod2g having some issues with Apples sandbox, PlanetBeing stepped in to become a part of the jailbreak Dream Team, and in doing so brought himself back into the public eye and out of the wilderness.
The pursuit of the untethered iOS 5 jailbreak has been a non stop, full on roller coaster ride which started in November, and looks set to continue for the next week or so at least. The development past has been anything but smooth, and all involved have had to overcome a series of technical hurdles just to get to the position we find ourselves in.
iPhone developer iH8sn0w has just pushed yet another update to Sn0wbreeze, bringing the version number up to 2.2.1. This new release fixes issues when jailbreaking Verizon iPhone 4 on iOS 4.2.6, adds drag and drop IPSW files support, 100% fixes the iBooks issue, and all the issues that you maybe experiencing when using Windows classic theme.
We informed you yesterday how Apple's iBooks app refused to open digital books loaded with DRM if the device was jailbroken. Comex discovered that the app was checking if the operating system allowed it to execute an unsigned binary, and if it did, the book wouldn't open. Now both PwnageTool 4.2 and Sn0wbreeze 2.2 have been updated to include a fix, but what if you're already jailbroken using Redsn0w 0.9.6, 0.9.7 or GreenPois0n? Now thanks to a simple fix available on Cydia, you can now easily fix iBooks from the device itself.
It appears some people have been experiencing issues when trying to run Apple's iBooks app on jailbroken devices, specifically the ones done via recently released GreenPois0n. Today though, iOS hacking king Comex tweeted that he has discovered the reason for the crash, and can now start to implement a fix.