I honestly don't really see a reason anymore to jailbreak the iPod...
Sigh.
I've been over this once before already. Take away the jailbreak, and you take away 50% of the reasons that this device is currently useful to me.
I'm not a child who is content with being restricted to a sandbox, Apple...I'm a grown man who wants to roam the beaches.
[...] I also think the jailbreaking process needs to be looked at in a different way now. For example... instead of trying to "jailbreak" the iPod so that a custom app manager and software can be installed... why not try to "jailbreak" iTunes into allowing custom applications to be installed the way they were meant to be installed (disregarding the app security key thing).
Okay, you obviously don't understand how this works. The enforcement of the "security key" as you call it is not done by iTunes,
it's done by the Phone/Touch firmware. iTunes, frankly, couldn't give a crap whether your app bundle is properly signed and encrypted or not. That's why in order to install cracked apps (
not that I am advocating such action, mind you), you have to patch up MobileInstaller
on the Touch, and don't have to do jack-squat to iTunes itself. And Apple specifically engineered it this way because software that's running on a computer you control (iTunes) is easier to hack apart than software on a closed piece of hardware that only they control (iPhone/iPod), and they being highly-skilled engineers know this fact. If iTunes were the gateway to running whatever software on the iPhone/iPod that you wanted to run, it would have been hacked to do so not more than a week from the release of the "App Store"-aware version.
And the MobileInstaller patch (since it invalidates the Apple signature on their own code, it having been tampered with) is impossible to undertake without patching up the kernel to allow unsigned code to run; ergo,
jailbreak.
It was getting rather old holding back on a software update in anticipation of an updated jailbreak release.
On "pwned" hardware such as the iPhone (EDGE), iPod Touch (1G), and iPhone 3G, those days of waiting that you refer to are completely over with. The bug/vulnerability in the boot ROM of every single Apple Touch device that has been shipped to-date (with the exception of iPod Touch 2G) cannot be patched around in the field, and so is not fixable by Apple, except when they ship a completely new product like the 2G Touch and thus have the luxury of going back to the drawing board. This is why PwnageTool has been able to consistently release updates to itself which support the latest OS release not more than 48 hours after Apple has let it out of the gates, and Apple can do nothing about it since the bug that was discovered which makes this possible is at the hardware/silicon level.
-- Nathan