Avid jailbreakers are somewhat spoilt this Christmas. Having had an end-of-life iOS 10 32-bit tool by tihmstar, and an iOS 11 tool too, the gifts just keep on coming. The Apple TV 4 and 4K have been brought into the fold, with a tvOS counterpart to Jonathan Levin's LiberiOS, called LiberTV.
Coming into Boxing Day, developer Jonathan Levin is clearly fighting fit, with his second jailbreak tool in as many days. After a tvOS 11 update to his LiberTV jailbreak yesterday, today we have an iOS 11 tool, dubbed LiberiOS.
If you've been tinkering around with your Apple TV 4 jailbroken on tvOS 10 with liberTV, you may have noticed that its built-in SSH client, Dropbear, has a tendency to be purged every so often, requiring it be re-spawned and set up again. This is due to the developer's (admirable) desire to retain all jailbreak-related files in temporary folders on the filesystem, reducing the risk of bricking your device while fiddling with it to near-zero. If you are confident enough to move a few files out of their temporary folder however, you can easily get your SSH client up and running persistently, avoiding those tedious reconfigurations which otherwise occur.
With several Apple TV jailbreaks in use by our readership, it's important to remember that with them comes both the power and risk of running SSH connections to your device.
Once jailbroken, you may want to tinker around with the device, grab your apticket off of it, copy files to and from it, or investigate the filesystem. To do this you'll need to connect to it from another device via SSH. In this guide we'll take you through how to do just that, as well as how to protect yourself by changing the default passwords.
Given the recent news that a jailbreak for tvOS 10.1.1 may be coming after all, we recently advised all Apple TV 4 owners to downgrade from tvOS 10.2 to tvOS 10.1.1 immediately before signing closes.
Hand in hand with the possibility of a jailbreak comes the necessity of saving blobs for your device, which will allow you to upgrade, downgrade, or restore your device at a later date, without worrying about signing windows. This guide will walk you through how to save blobs for your Apple TV.
As you may recall, software internals consultant Jonathan Levin recently released LiberTV, a jailbreak tool for tvOS 9.1-10.1.
Based on Luca Todesco and Marco Grassi's work which brought us the Yalu jailbreaks for iOS 10.0-10.2, Levin's original work covered the equivalent tvOS firmwares, up to a maximum of tvOS 10.1. However, Levin may be able to go one better, based on a tweet posted today.