Apple launched iOS 5, the latest version of their mobile operating system, this week at their annual worldwide developer conference and showed off a number of new features. One thing about iOS that remains the same, however, was the ability of hackers to jailbreak devices running it within 24 hours after the software was released.
While iOS 5 will not officially be released to the public until sometime in the fall, hackers quickly got their hands on the beta build, which was offered to developers following the event. And they didn’t have to work very hard to crack it.
A Dev-Team member who goes by the name “MuscleNerd” tweeted on Tuesday that he had jailbroken the new OS on an iPod Touch 4G, along with purported screenshots of the device. Dev-Team is well known for quickly hacking new Apple products, including Apple TV last fall.
The iOS 5 hack was done using the limera1n jailbreaking method, according to a report by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.
“Unfortunately, this jailbreak is tethered, which means you have to have your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad connected (or "tethered") to your computer whenever you reboot your device, in order to maintain the jailbreak,” writes Perez. “Most jailbreakers will likely wait for an untethered option to become available before proceeding to upgrade to the new OS.”
There is, of course, a very good chance that Apple will repair the vulnerability over the next few months before the final version of iOS 5 is released. As Perez also notes, however, Apple has already embraced many of the “popular tweaks and enhancements” used on jailbroken iOS 4 devices by building them into the new version. This could mean that fewer customers will feel the need to jailbreak their iOS 5 devices.
