Some big news this afternoon in the jailbreak community. JailbreakCon, the group behind the annual convention for jailbreakers, has just posted up the schedule for this year’s event, as well as a list of high-profile speakers.
It will be a 2-day affair at the Raddison Hotel in New Rochelle, New York, with workshops and speeches given by some of the biggest names in jailbreaking like Saurik, and tweak developers Filippo Bigarella and Ryan Petrich… Read More
Recently, Saurik, the creator of Cydia, posted a new blog entry explaining the history of Cydia’s TSS caching capabilities. As you know, Cydia has been able to automatically save off SHSH blobs for potential downgrade ability with jailbroken devices.
Things have changed rapidly over the years as iOS’ security evolved. The earlier versions of iOS included absolutely no downgrade protection. Eventually, with the adaption of TSS, basic verification to make sure that you were installing newer firmware, instead of older firmware arrived. This security was enhanced further with the adoption of a new verification scheme — APTicket — which has proved to be a pain in the rear for would be downgraders. Yes, there have been, and will always be a few exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, Apple has done a good job of cutting off the ability to downgrade firmware.
What does all of this have to do with Cydia’s new TSS Center? Well as it turns out, the APTickets saved for iOS 6.0-6.1.2 are all “useless”, as they’re incomplete tickets unsuitable for booting a device.
In a post on his blog named Where did my iOS 6 TSS data go? Saurik explains in verbose detail the issue at hand… Read More
Yesterday, we bid farewell to one of the most infamous jailbreaks of all time: evasi0n. Born on February 4, it lasted nearly 6 weeks before Apple finally disabled it by way of the iOS 6.1.3 software update it issued yesterday.
It certainly served its purpose though. According to Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, Cydia saw more than 18 million unique iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, running iOS 6 (or later), visit during the jailbreak’s 6-week long run… Read More
It’s fairly rare when the mastermind behind Cydia decides to create his own jailbreak tweak, but when he does, the masses take note. That’s exactly what happened when Cyueue was dropped in Cydia recently. Cyueue is a new jailbreak tweak from Saurik, which adds a new queueing option in the stock Music app.
If you’re throwing a house party, then Cyueue is the perfect answer for you. It allows you to keep the current song playing, while still queueing up the records you’d like to hear next. Take a look inside to see how it works. Read More
Cydia, despite being the go-to app and tweak store for several years in the jailbreaking community, has a number of shortcomings. It’s slow to load and daftly unorganized, among other things.
And most people tend to blame Saurik for all of these issues. After all, he is the creator and ‘grandmaster’ of Cydia, right? Not so much, according to his latest comments in a Reddit thread… Read More
The long-awaited iOS 6.x jailbreak, known as evasi0n, has been dubbed the most popular jailbreak ever. And rightly so. In its first 10 minutes, it was used by over 100,000 people. And 4 days later, that number grew to 7 million.
Today, nearly a month after evasi0n’s release, there’s a new statistic out. Evad3rs team member pod2g just passed along the news from Saurik that more than 14 million devices have now been seen running Cydia on iOS 6.x… Read More
We’re not sure if this is cool, or copyright infringement, but either way here you go. We’ve come across what appears to be a toy iPhone, that has seemingly been jailbroken. Notice the Cydia icon in the bottom row of icons?
Of course, it’s not called an iPhone. The packaging reads ‘Telephone Intelligent.’ And instead of Cydia, the iconic brown icon is labeled ‘Gift.’ But either way, it sure looks like someone is selling toy jailbroken iPhones… Read More
If you have used the new evasi0n tool to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad, you’re among the millions of people that have done just that thus far. In fact, an unbelievable seven million devices have been set free in just four days following the release of the evasi0n jailbreak for iOS 6.1, making the free tool the most successful jailbreak ever, on any device, period… Read More
It’s the same story with almost every jailbreak. The new jailbreak is released, and folks rush to download all of their favorite jailbreak apps and tweaks. The result is a less than primed experience due to the stress that this places on Cydia and the repos hosting the various packages. After a new jailbreak is released, it usually takes a few days for everything to calm down to somewhat normal levels.
This time around, though, Saurik, and the repo managers appear to be taking preemptive actions to ensure a smoother experience immediately post jailbreak release. While nothing is assured until the inevitable deluge of user requests places stress on the system, you should look forward to a much better experience than in times past. Read More
For most people, Jay Freeman isn’t exactly a household name. Neither is Saurik, his online alias. That said, if you’ve used a jailbroken iPhone since 2008 then you’ve definitely seen both names frequently. Saurik is the developer behind Cydia, the package manager we use to easily install tweaks, themes, and other software that Apple won’t allow developer to distribute through iTunes.
You might know his name, but would you recognize Jay Freeman if he was walking down the street? If you did, would you approach him? Would you ask him questions? Would you pose for a picture with him and post it on Reddit? Well, that’s what the first stranger who recognized him did… Read More
TechCrunch has published a lengthy article today entitled “Behind The Scenes of The iPhone 5 Jailbreak.” The piece takes a look back at all of the jailbreaks that have been released over the years, as well as at the work being done on the current jailbreak.
While the report doesn’t offer any new information regarding the progress of the iOS 6 JB, it does have a couple of interesting tidbits sprinkled throughout its contents. One of them, for example, is the number of devices that are currently running Cydia… Read More
I went to JailbreakCon full of good intentions. I was going to live tweet the event, I was going to write posts about every speak, and I was going to interview as many speakers as I could. As it turned out, I did none of that. Instead, I soaked in as much as I could from everyone around me. I did what I hadn’t done for a long time: I socialized!
When I say that I socialized, I’m not saying that I pretended to be friends with some people I mostly knew on Twitter. No, I actually lived with these people for three days, learned about their lives, their habits, and their personality. I learned about the real “them”, not the image they sometimes give of them on Twitter or IRC.
This is the story of my three days at the epicenter of the jailbreak community. You won’t learn anything here about the iOS 6 jailbreak, because what happens at JailbreakCon stays at JailbreakCon, but hopefully, you will get a glimpse a the other side of the jailbreak community… Read More
Have you ever wondered how much money Saurik makes for running Cydia? Or whatever happened to Cydia for Mac? Good. We’ve just come across the answers to these questions, and more.
In a response to a recent forum tantrum, Saurik decided to address a number of misconceptions in the jailbreak community regarding him and his popular underground app store… Read More
The App Store hasn’t had any shortage of knockoff apps since its creation a few years ago. When popular games such as Angry Birds or Cut the Rope make their way up the charts, you can expect a few unscrupulous developers to rush and try to get their copycat app approved and available in the App Store in order to make a quick buck.
Surfing on the popularity of Cydia, the App Store for jailbreak apps and tweaks, one shady developer thought that releasing an app called Cydia and making it available to over 300 million iDevices (no jailbreak required, mind you) would be a good idea…
Late last month, Apple finally put the tickets for its highly-anticipated WWDC event up for sale. But within two hours, the tickets were gone, leaving hundreds of developers out to dry. Luckily, there’s another option.
If you’re going to be in the San Francisco area around June 11-14, you might want to check out Indiedevlab. No, Scott Forstall won’t be there giving a rundown of iOS 6 features. But Saurik and others will be attending… Read More
Saurik is on a roll with his Cydia updates today. Earlier this morning he rolled out a new version of WinterBoard. And now we’re going to take a look at the also-new-today Mobile Substrate update.
For those that aren’t familiar with it, Mobile Substrate is the de facto framework that allows 3rd-party developers to provide extensions to system functions. And it just received a killer new feature…
WinterBoard. It seems like just mentioning the name of the utility can send shivers down the spine of jailbreakers everywhere. In fact, a lot of folks won’t install a particular app or tweak of it requires installing the unpopular themer.
So what’s wrong with it? Speed, stability, you name it. WinterBoard has long been a scapegoat for jailbreak-related problems. But the utility may be worth a second look now, as it has just received a major update… Read More
Have you ever wondered why Cydia has to perform the ‘loading packages’ step every time you open it up? Well reddit user indochris609 did, and decided to take his question to the reddit jailbreak forum.
Dozens of users responded to the query, including Cydia’s creator, Saurik. And as usual, the hacker/developer’s explanation of the topic at hand is both interesting and informative… Read More
Back in January we told you that the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was asking for everyone’s help in its fight to keep jailbreaking legal. It suggested leaving a comment on the Copyright Office’s comment board to show your support.
The board closed on February 10th, and the Copyright Office recently published everyone’s entries. And even though there were only about 700 comments submitted, some big names turned out to defend jailbreaking, including Saurik… Read More
