Review Horizon

Update: The Absinthe A5 for Windows (absinthe-win-0.2.zip) has been finally released, and it is a much easier method to jailbreak your iPhone / iPad running iOS 5.0.1 than the tutorial below (which still works very well). 

Thanks Greenpois0n!

The Absinthe A5 is available at the time of writing only for MAC, but the last release version command line tools cinject_0.4.3.zip works on Windows as well. I prepared a tutorial (that might become obsolete once the official Windows tools are out) but still works very well if you know what you are doing. I was able to successfully jailbreak my iPad 2 using this method in about 5 minutes, and I’ll provide step by step instructions so you can jailbreak yours.

Step 0. Important!!! Set your iPad 2 / iPhone 4S as a new phone / tablet and restore firmware 5.0.1 on it. If you already started to configure it, run Settings app and select General > Reset > Erase All Content And Settings. Ensure that your iPad / iPhone is on, connected via USB to your PC and iTunes is not started. All other iTunes related process should be also stopped (Run Task Manager and make sure they are stopped). You might also need to turn off any antivirus app you have.

For this process, your iDevice should stay on the Home screen and ON. Disable screen protection and password, set to NEVER or anything more than 10 minutes Read More…

Good news folks, you can finally jailbreak your A5 based iPhone 4S or iPad 2 thanks to the effort of a Chronic-Dev “Dream Team” of hackers and their latest release, the Absinthe A5 untethered jailbreaking solution that unleashes the full power of both iPhone 4S and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0 or 5.0.1.

Currently Absinthe A5 is available on MAC only in version absinthe-mac-0.1.2-1.zip, with a Windows version to follow soon. You can download it from here and start jailbreaking away! For detailed How-to information, check the following video thanks to the same skilled Chronic-Dev team.

Update: If you want to download the new Absinthe version absinthe-mac-0.1.2-2.zip, you can do so here.

With no other purpose other than to close the recently discovered and hugely popular security hole used in the recently released jailbreakme.com 3.0 jailbreak, Apple just launched iOD 4.3.4. Unless you have some self esteem issues if you do not have the latest update, my advice is to stay away, even if you don’t intend to jailbreak right now. Also, always behind version wise, Verizon’s iPhones get version 4.2.9 with the same fix.

So again, the only purpose of Apple’s new iOS versions is to close the existing security hole that allows the current jailbreak. You have been warned!

In case you were living under a rock, the new Jailbreakme 3.0 is a userland jailbreaking method that for the first time worked on the iPad 2 devices (and everything else) running iOS 4.3.3.

This is the best news lately if you are an iPad 2 owner. It took a while but the iPad 2 jailbreak is finally here, and this time is not a leak anymore but official. The jailbreak is web based and you’ll need to point your browser, load a PDF file at this point a certain vulnerability in the PDF renderer will execute some code and install Cydia on your iPad. The Jailbreak 3.o is not limited to iPad 2 but pretty much every iOS based device under the sun including Apple TV, iPad 1 and 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, etc. Unfortunately the upcoming iOS 5closed the vulnerability used for this jailbreak method.

Here is how to do it:

Note: This method was successfully tested on an iPad 2 running iOS 4.3.3
1. User your ipad 2 to navigate to JailbreakMe.com website Read More…

Update: The official iPad 2 jailbreak is out. Check here how to do it!

Well, it looks like it finally happened. The long awaited iPad 2 jailbreak is here, albeit not “officially”, if this is a good word to describe a hack. JailbreakMe 3.0 is the work done by Comex and one of the people in the team is rumored to have released the Beta iPad 2 jailbreak ahead of schedule. One of the good news is that you won’t need anything fancy, other than just to point a browser to a specific place and load a specific PDF file. As of right now, only the PDF file exploiting the vulnerability for iOS 4.3.0 is still up, the other for 4.3.3 was taken down already. The video describing how to jailbreak iPad 2 is still up on YouTube though and you can take a look here. Read More…

Let me start with saying how much I hate iTunes and the way they are organizing the music. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I ripped all my CD collection and keep all my music in a neatly arranged folder structure. Something like Genres->Artist->Album. Many CDs were ripped years ago with various programs and many don’t contain all the mp3 tags so they’ll look really bad in iTunes. I was using dTunes for a while but the application wasn’t updated in more than two years and doesn’t work with the current firmware versions. What to do?

Before going into details, the solution offered here will only work if your iPhone/iPad/iPod is jailbroken. Thanks to mighty Apple, there is no file system access on a regular non jailbroken device so if you don’t like to get your hands dirty you are out of luck. That being said, if you want to play your mp3 folder structure there are two main methods:

Read More…

This must be one of the quickest jailbreaks ever – and it comes again from our trusted Dev-Team. Its member musclenerd tweeted earlier in the day with the big announcement. Why so fast? Because the current jailbreak method is based on the popular limera1n vulnerability. The only problem is that this jailbreak is tethered, meaning you’ll have to re-apply it if you ever reboot your iOS based device. We are quite sure that an un-tethered method will follow, especially since there are still several month until the release iOS 5.0 will be publicly released. Meantime, we are still waiting for our iPad 2 jailbreak which Read More…

Facts: have an iPad 2, want to jailbreak it, check obsessively Google several time a day only to find useless posts made to bring out traffic to their respective blogs, getting frustrated. Sounds about right? If yes, read away:  This update is actually from the smart guys that actually released Greenp0ison and posted on their website today:

iPad 2

“As I’m sure many people have heard, Josh (posixninja) has recently been quoted saying the iPad 2 jailbreak is coming in “weeks”, I know I have been very publicly abrasive and non-commital on giving any kind of timeframe or comment on this matter, but at the behest of Josh (in conjunction with his need for a swift kick to the ass for motivation) we’re ALL going to hold him to that!!! I’m not going to get into extensive detail about this, but what I will say one of the missing puzzle pieces may have reared its head and cast a glance in our direction… take Read More…

It seems that to date, iPad 2 proved to be the toughest nut , err, apple to crack and without a doubt, Apple will do whatever it can to keep it this way. While many are eagerly awaiting an iPad 2 jailbreak utility to pop-up for legitimate reasons, as customization, tethering (although tethering is available right now via WiFi or Bluetooth – I am using  MyWi / iPhone 4 to connect my iPad 2 while writing this), or many quite good applications only available on Cydia including native Flash support via the popular Frash app, there is also a large group that will jailbreak their iPad 2 just to install pirated content, obviously cutting into Apple profits.

Why iPad 2 is so hard to crack while every other iOS device gets jailbroken promptly for each iteration? The culprit seems to be what differentiates iPad 2 from any other iOS device to date – the A5 processor and its newly embedded bootrom which only seems to be active during the boot process and then turns off until the next reboot, making it harder to access / modify. The bootrom was dumped though (meaning downloaded out of the device), which is an important first step in the jailbreaking process but the whole process will obviously take some time prompting a bunch of hopeful and more or less informed posts around the web (including this one ) to keep up the hype.

Different from a bootrom jailbreak which would be permanent and applied for every device sharing the same hardware design, a so called “userland” jailbreak is easier to perform (if you find the vulnerability) but also easier to patch since it will be limited to less important, user layer (applications, user interface, various stacks) versus kernel or bootrom layer for the other jailbreaking methods.

Are you waiting for the release of a jailbreak tool for iPad 2? Why? Share with us your thoughts / comments. Read More…

Another iOS version, another redsnow jailbreak. Just days after iOS 4.3.3 is released,  iPhone Dev Team also released a new Redsn0w version, RC 15 (0.96rc15) for your jailbreak pleasure. Like the last version, this version is also is untethered (meaning you only have to perform it once ans sticks even if you reboot your iDevice) and once again it is very similar with the previous method since, luckily Apple has not close the vulnerability the tool is using since iOS 4.3.2.

The new redsnow version 0.96rc15 update works on all iOS devices supporting iOS version 4.3.3 (iPhone3GS, iPhone4 (GSM), iPod touch 3G, iPod touch 4G, iPad1, AppleTV2G (v4.3 8F202))  but once again iPad 2 is left out. Tough nut to crack, deh, although rumor has it that famous geohot hacker (yeah, the one behind the PS3 hub-bub) will try his luck where everybody else failed (or where nobody has gone before if you wish). We wish him tons of luck. Meantime, if you want to jailbreak your iOS 4.3.3 toy, download redsnow from here (filename redsn0w_win_0.9.6rc15.zip) and follow the same instructions we published for iOS 4.3.1. They are identical. Just be sure to download the right 4.3.3 ipsw files for your iDevice (links after the break, directly from Apple so you can be sure are safe).

Note: redsn0w allows now to enable “multitasking gestures”, useful for the owners of iPad devices. Read More…