iPhone 3.0 Beta Pwned!

By Davey Winder
Friday, 03 April 2009 15:22

Technology

The iPhone 3.0 firmware is still in Beta, but that doesn't mean it cannot be jailbroken as Apple discovered within 24 hours of releasing iPhone OS 3 Beta 2.

Jailbreaking iPhone firmware as quickly as possible has become a state of the art game it seems. Remember last year when the iPhone 2.1 firmware was pwned within 24 hours of release despite Apple pinning hopes on iTunes 8 erecting a barrier to prevent this?

Well now the pwnage game has been stepped up a notch with the news that the iPhone OS 3.0 firmware has been cracked and pwned before it has even been officially released.

Apple had no sooner made the OS 3 Beta 2 firmware available for those developers participating in the Beta test when the Russians announced they had broken it. QuickPWN for Windows appeared within 24 hours of the Beta 2 release, claiming to work with all versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.

QuickPWN warns that this is "an unofficial release and it’s not created by the iPhone Dev Team." However, it reveals that a Russian hacker called Vortex has come up trumps with the jailbreak.

"I tried it on my iPod Touch with firmware 3.0 beta 2 and it works! You can only jailbreak on the iPhone 3.0 Beta 2, iPhone 3G 3.0 beta 2, and iPod Touch 1st Gen beta 3.0" a QuickPWN blogger reports.

Not everyone in the jailbreak community is impressed, it would appear, as over at the iPhone Dev Team HQ there is a frank warning about using this unofficial QuickPWN release:

"THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THE UNOFFICIAL QUICKPWN RELEASES IS THAT IF YOU USE THEM, YOU WILL KILL YELLOWSN0W, POSSIBLY FOREVER. That’s because QuickPwn, by its very nature, requires you to already have accepted Apple’s official IPSW, along with its baseband update. If you do that, you will (possibly forever) lose your ability to software-unlock your iPhone 3G."

An iPhone Dev Team statement says that "It’s silly to play cat & mouse with Apple during a beta period, when relatively few people are willing to actually use the beta software in their everyday lives. There are ways Apple can tighten the screws, and we’d rather not burn methods just for a beta release."