Apple Reporter

It’s been out for only 6 days, and already the iPhone/iPod Touch firmware version 1.1.3 has been jailbroken by the iPhone Dev Team. According to Jonathan Zdziarski, the developer of the NES.app application for the iPhone and iPod touch and also a member of the iPhone Dev Team, the jailbreak is software-based and was created by himself and six other members. From Jonathan’s page:

“I wasn’t going to post anything, but since there is a lot of confusion surrounding the 1.1.3 jailbreak, I thought I’d clear a few misconceptions up. The iPhone-Elite team and the iPhone/iTouch Dev teams have recently merged and collaborated on a software jailbreak for v1.1.3. I’ve posted some screenshots here and here. Overall, it took the work of about seven members, including myself, to craft this jailbreak - it was a true team effort. It has been previously speculated that this followed up a previous hardware jailbreak, but this is not the case. The software method we used involves some fancy command-line work, however a few other team members have already begun writing scripts to perform most of the difficult stuff, dramatically reducing the amount of time and brain power you’ll need to invest. As to why it hasn’t been released yet, we’re actually a bit torn about the subject. Some of us would like to see it released, but at the end of the day it really does make sense to hang onto the method until next month when Apple’s SDK is released.

According to the post, the jailbreak will apparently not be released soon, apparently not until past the SDK is released (end of February). This could be disappointing for those who upgraded to the 1.1.3 firmware from jailbroken devices, but we can hope that when the SDK is released there will be no need for jailbreak applications.

The last jailbreak for the iPhone and iPod Touch was 1.1.2, which required a downgrade to 1.1.1 and back to 1.1.2. There was also a variety of methods to jailbreak the iPhone and iPod Touch after this, including the TIFF exploit in Safari. With the 1.1.3 update, Apple has made it more difficult to jailbreak the devices, not unlike the catch-up game that PSP users are playing with Sony right now.

[via iPhone Atlas]