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MrThompsonR

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 15, 2009
337
6
I am w/o a PC, my 4 year old Laptop/PC recently crapped out on me, I have sorta replaced it with my iPad which can handle most of my computing needs, browing the web, paying online bills, watching videos... The thing is if/when I buy a new iPhone(5) will I be forced to buy a new PC/ Mac just to jailbreak..? I haven't had to plug my phone into a PC since updating to IOS5 and of course doing the jailbreak.. Has the "JailBreakMe" hole beeen closed forever? I would think with the computing power built into these phones now they should be "tether" free...
 
no friends?

The jailbreakme exploit has since long be closed.
Last jailbreaks needed the backup/restore function from itunes.
By the way, you can't update over the air to iOS 6 as you are jailbroken, so a restore/upgrade to iOS 6 you will have to connect to a pc or mac anyway.
 
It depends, if someone finds an exploitable bug in, PDF, Tiff, HTML, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, or other browser related protocols or file mimes.

Personally I'm rooting for Tiff of the above, it has a "bad" track record of such things ;)

Even more so, I'm rooting for a hardware level bug :)
 
I doubt it.

The prior two used PDF exploits in Safari.

While brilliant, I'm not sure if there are any exploits left.
 
I doubt it.

The prior two used PDF exploits in Safari.

While brilliant, I'm not sure if there are any exploits left.

There is, the reason being same as the problem. The code is so complex. PDF even supports its own scripting platform called Postscript. And to boot, we can edit these files on the computer, and we do not need to sign them to run them on the iPhone.

Imagine a reverse engineer, a hacker if you will. That has a working knowledge of how roughly PDF is built up, changing segments of the file while running the iPhone with a debugger in Xcode, at the same time even running a USB sniffer.

What he does, is that he wants the iPhone to crash, not all crashes are good enough, the type of crash most often used is called a buffer overflow, which some times allow to inject unsigned code right into play. If someone firstly gets a way of running unsigned code, it is only a matter of hours or days before a working jailbreak is in existence. It takes much longer now to package this, and even making sure its not dangerous to run. In worst case scenario, which is very often in fact, this is not enough to make an untethered jailbreak. But no problem if its just a PDF after you boot to get Cydia working it can be done every boot. But if we first can run unsigned code on the OS, its much easier to find a way to make the jailbreak unthethered. Sometimes it takes a while longer.

It has almost come to a point where it annoys me that people who does not understand that EVERYTHING is hackable, posts that "there are no more exploits now". Even the PS3 was said to be an unhackable fortress, though it just took some pissed of hacke(s) 3 weeks without Linux to run unsigned code. Even when exploits are fixed by updates, more features, and more exploitable code is put into the updates. So no need to worry :)
 
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