jailbreak

If you jailbroke your iPhone, you understood there were both positive and negative elements to doing this. Still, if you're staring at a picture of Rick Astley that you never installed or the new iPhone worm is sending personal information out to others, you're in a bit of a bind and need to remove them.

Presently, the three known worms out there for the iPhone are as follows: Ikee changes your wallpaper to Rick Astley, iPhone/Privacy.A pores through all your personal information, and the third as-yet-unnamed worm copies your personal data and redirects online banking customers of a Dutch bank to a fake phishing website.

Several jailbroken iPhone users recently had their iPhones held hostage by a Dutch iPhone hacker. They were surprised one day to find a message on their device stating that their precious iPhone had "been hacked because it's really insecure," saying the mystery messenger had access to all of their files.

Good news, everyone! Yesterday, the unfortunate news broke that Apple was now shipping iPhone 3GSs with a modified boot ROM that would make the devices impervious to the Dev Team's jailbreak exploit, 24kpwn. Amazingly, this has already been cracked, and one of the new devices has been successfully jailbroken.

The hacks don't stop with the iPhone (despite Apple's wishes) and there are some pretty cool ones out there. One we found today was that's the handywork of developer Steve Troughton-Smith, which, according to SlashGear, essentailly places Mac OS X's Exposé feature on your iPhone 3GS.

Rumors are circulating that Apple has begun shipping an iPhone 3GS that is now impervious to the 24kpwn exploit, making it impossible to do a standard jailbreak for the time being. A screenshot (shown after the break) posted by Mathieulh shows the new version number, and it was confirmed by Dev Team member MuscleNerd.

The iPhone Dev-Team has released the latest version of its Mac-only jailbreaking software which is now compatible with iPhone OS 3.1.x. PwnageTool 3.1.4 now supports the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and all 1st and 2nd gen iPod touches. The Dev-Team warns all iPhone 3GS users who wish to jailbreak now or in the future that they should do so as soon as possible. This is recommended so that your ECID hash can be saved for use in future update jailbreaks. More information can be found at the iPhone Dev-Team blog.

Windows users looking to jailbreak their iPhone or iPod touch should check out Blackra1n.

Geohot has just announced the release of blackra1n, which he describes as, "a 30 second ALL device 3.1.2 jailbreak," for Windows. The tool uses the same hack as the tool Chronic released recently, though Geohot is credited as being the first to discover it.

Last week the Dev Team released an update to their PwnageTool for the Mac which now jailbreaks all OS 3.1 devices. Today it was announced that a Windows jailbreak is also on its way from another source. Project sn0wbreeze is a new jailbreaking tool for Windows users currently in the works from ih8sn0w and DarkMalloc that will serve as a Pwnage Tool substitute on Windows.

Maybe there's still something to be said for jailbreaking after all. According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, the following footage of SmartScreen, an app that lets you add and use widgets on your iPhone lock screen, has been released:

Pinch Media, provider of analytics services for advertisers on iPhone applications, somewhere around 8.43% of all iPhone users out there are using jailbroken iPhones. This number has gone up a little since last week, when it was at around 8%. It is possible that this may be related to the banning of Google Voice applications, but a solid correlation hasn't been proven yet.