Nicholas Pike

… and broke my iPod Touch out of Jail!

My iPod wasn’t in the local slammer here in Rochester - but it was locked down by Apple to prevent installation of third party and unsigned code.

The FreeBSD jail mechanism is an early implementation of operating system-level virtualization that allows administrators to partition a FreeBSD-based computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails.

The need for the FreeBSD jails came from service providers willing to establish a clean cut between their services and those of their customers, mainly for security and ease of administration reasons. Instead of adding a new layer of fine-grained configuration options, the solution adopted was to compartment the system, both its files and its resources, in a way that can only be accessed by the right compartment.

You can read more about BSD Jails at Wikipedia here.

The process was a little crazy - I have already jailbreaked (??) two iPhones previously (Jenn and Kevin).  The process for that was ridiculously simple and safe, as the process had been out for weeks and had had time to be refined.

Yesterday an exploit was made public by a programmer with the handle Naicin (I am not going to link to his site).  This exploit took advantage of a bug in MobileSafari on the iPod:  namely, loading a cleverly crafted TIFF image that contained assembly code could remount the internal file system as Writable, instead of readonly.

This is all he released - no instructions, no easy way to install applications ALA iPhone.  The rest was up to the user.

Many, many, many kids attempted and had to restore their iPods to factory defaults - but I took my chances and did it anyway, and was extremely successful.

I now have the iPhone apps on my iTouch that I so desire:

• Calendar (with add ability)
• Notes
• Google Maps

I now also have a few third party apps installed.

Pictures of the hacked iPod Touch below:

 

Google Maps!

Many more icons on the desktop (compare with the original here )

And last but not least, a third party application on the iPod Touch:  Lights Off!