Recommendations for Jailbreak Updates

Folks, I know everyone wants to try the latest and greatest BUT it’s very important that if you want to keep your iPhone free from the greedy grips of Apple, your best bet is to subscribe to the iPhone Dev Team blog and never, ever, EVER use the Apple firmware upgrade offered in iTunes.

Tiny Hacker In Us All

I’m new the the jailbreaking scene as I got my first iPhone in April but not new to custom firmware updates.  I was mezmerized by the Lifehacker post Adam Pash did in 2006, Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router because I understood that the power of the device was often constrained by the software.  I began finding “hacks” for my Razr V3 at the HowardForums like custom forwarding and then tweaking my Dell Axim via theXDA developers forum for additional power management.

From the Lifehacker example, we can look at what Linksys (Cisco) did in response to the “hacking”; they put out a specific router that had more memory and even named it to indicate, “Hey!  I’m a hackable piece of hardware!  Buy me!”.  To this day, I am still having my IT clients purchase the Linksys WRT54GL and “hacking” it before I install it for them!

** If you did not store your iPhone firmware TSS for 3.1.2 before Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010, you are too late. Apple has stopped signing that version **

Want to make sure you always have the freedom to install any software and use T-mobile on your iPhone?

Photo credit:
hughelectronic / Electronic Frontier Federation

In preparation for Apple’s next cat and mouse response to users jailbreaking their phones, the iPhone Dev Team urged jailbreak users a few months ago to capture their iBEC and iBSS files which would ensure people could have a sort of “key” that would ensure they could continue jailbreaking.  The process to capture the files was not straight forward and a lot of people had trouble.  It’s sort of like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands.

@saurik, iPhone Dev Team member and creator of the Cydia iPhone repository, explains in a recent “must read” post:

• The importance of jailbreaking as a statement of free choice
• How to redirect your iTunes application to his server via your host file
• How to how to downgrade so you can backup jailbreak files via Cydia

I had already downloaded my 3.0 iBEC iBSS files to my computer for my iPhones and didn’t see a need to try out this feature until today when someone on Twitter mentioned it.

Excerpt from Saurik’s post:

Instead, what you really want, is to store the entire personalized firmware set required by iTunes to do a restore (or, more
realistically: a full set of SHSH blobs). At this point you should be able to use iTunes to do a “normal” restore of the device.

This functionality was offered, very near to the end of the window, by Cydia: one needed only to agree to have the process done, and your ECID was used on Cydia’s server to generate and store a full set of SHSH blobs using Apple’s signature process.
In doing this, over 50,000 3G[S] devices got their ECID SHSHs “on file”, and are now prepared to continue to restore to iPhoneOS 3.0 indefinitely.

Welcome Screen at Cydia Prompting You to Store Your ECID iBSS iBEC File “Key”

So the first screenshot in this blog post welcomes Cydia users to upload their files for future jailbreak happiness:

In order to ensure your future ability to restore this device to iPhone OS 3.1, it is highly recommended that you allow Cydia to keep up-to-date signature hashes for this device on the Cydia signature cache server.  Doing this will ensure that, once a 3.1 jailbreak is released, you will always be able to continue to maintain this device.

Pending Request

After I clicked, “Make my life easier, thanks!”, I got a notice at the top that said:

This device has a pending TSS request.  The TSS queue is deep: check tomorrow.

File Stored

Of course, if you tell me to check back tomorrow, I’m going to hit “Reload”.  Lo and behold, my files have been successfully stored!

This device has a 3.1 ECID SHSH on file.

My Specs

This is a screenshot from my iPhone 3G S.  I’m running iPhone OS 3.0 on it (7A341) and noticed when I connected to Cydia with my 2G iPhone running the jailbroke iPhone OS 3.1, I did not see the same prompt to save my files…curious.