Jailbreak is back- and with a force


The jailbreak community has been given new life today with the release of Evasi0n, a new jailbreak software for iOS devices running 6.x. It has been a long time coming since the last major untethered jailbreak release for the masses. 

Recently the jailbreak community was hit with a big change when Hackulous decided to shut-down, leading a lot of people to proclaim that the jailbreak community was going to die a slow death. (read my take on the Hackulous shut-down in this post). True to this diagnosis of dying slow- evasi0n was reportedly downloaded 270,000 times after less than 8 hours from its release. 

The new jailbreak software was developed by a new group of hackers who call themselves @evad3rs mostly composed of veteran Jailbreakers @pod2g @planetbeing @pimskeks @MuscleNerd. This group had announced an exploit they found on the iOS 6.x releases but decided to wait it out until 6.1 was released to the masses to make sure Apple was not able to patch the exploit they used for the jailbreak. 

You can download the evasi0n software in this link and start the liberation of your iOS device. The jailbreak supports all iOS devices running iOS 6.0 - 6.1 with the exception of Apple TV 3rd Generation. 

Why Jailbreak?

There are many benefits of Jailbreaking but the community is split between two main groups: i. those who jailbreak for better device customization and ii. those who jailbreak to get hacked apps.When Hackulous announced its shut-down a lot of people claimed that the jailbreak community was going to die, basically assuming that the jailbreak community is about apps piracy. However as observed by Jay Freeman (@saurik) there were approximately 22 million iOS devices running Cydia in the last two months w/c to me shows that the jailbreak community is not dying. To me, the main benefit of Jailbreak is customization. With jailbreak, you are able to do things on your device that Apple did not include in its base OS. This allowed me to better utilize the capability of the device and gave my User Experience a huge boost. 

Will Jailbreak void my manufacturer's warranty?

Yes jailbreak will void your manufacturer warranty since you are installing an unauthorized software. However, here is the beauty of Jailbreaks, it is not permanent! You can just restore your iOS device and no trace of the Jailbreak will be left. So, if you have a jailbroken device and for some reason you need to send it in for in-warranty repair, just make sure you restore your device in iTunes before going to the repair centre and you are good to go. 

Do I have to be a hacker to jailbreak?

To jailbreak your device using evasi0n requires only one skill- the skill of following instructions! If you have this skill then you will have no problem with completing the jailbreak. If you need tutorial, this is the best video tutorial I found so far (Mac, Windows).

I was able to successfully jailbreak my iPad mini running iOS 6.1 today and it went smooth.  It took me less than 5 mins to complete the Jailbreak- it took longer to back-up and restore my iPad. As expected there is not that much good jailbreak tweaks optimized for the iPad mini yet as i'm sure dev teams are still scrambling to update their existing tweaks to be optimized with the new devices suddenly open for jailbreak. I am also getting a lot of "POSIX" error message in many of the sources that I use and this could be mainly due to traffic in their servers. 

For now, I am just happy that the jailbreak has been released. I will be checking out Cydia now and I will let you know if I find any interesting tweak in future posts. 





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