iOS 5 Jailbreak Call to Arms Issued by Chronic Dev Team

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Today has been a pretty busy day in the iOS jailbreaking universe. We just heard that the iPhone 4S can be unlocked, although the iPhone 4 will not have the same faith, and that there’s a new iOS 5 / iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak in town called Ac1dSn0w. Now it’s time to check out a jailbreaking call to arms coming from the Chronic Dev Team.

Apparently posixninja and Co. believe the iOS community have to help with jailbreaking efforts as the available exploits are consistently found by Apple and patched in new iOS 5 releases. To do that the company partly relies on user-generated reports that describe various program crashes that can occur during daily iPhone, iPad or iPod touch use:

One of the primary challenges in working with userland exploits is that, every time any program crashes on your iPhone, a “crash report” is generated and instantly sent back to Apple. As you can imagine, while we’re working out all the kinks in the exploitation of a vulnerability, we may need to crash any particular program thousands & thousands of times.

It’s possible to change your iTunes settings to stop sending this diagnostic information back to Apple, and of course everyone in Chronic Dev has made this change on all our development machines. However, even this is not always 100% effective at preventing Apple from obtaining our data. For instance, if one of us is at a friend’s house and plugs our iPhone up to his or her computer (even just to charge it), it’s very likely that computer is set up to send all our valuable data & crash reports right back to Apple.

Now the Chronic Dev Team wants iOS users to send those crash reports to them instead of Apple in order to help out with the discovery of various iOS security holes that can be used in future jailbreaks:

Instead of allowing this vicious cycle to continue, we decided to write a new program to turn Apple’s own beast against its master, per se. All this program requires from you is to attach your iOS device to your computer and click a single button!

At this point, the program copies all the crash reports off your device (which, under normal circumstances, would be sent right back to Apple), and instead sends this data to a secure, private server hosted by your friendly Chronic Dev team. Next, our program proceeds to neuter your copy of iTunes, simply by changing your settings to prevent your computer from sending any further diagnostic information from your device to Apple.

The Chronic Dev Team is yet to release its own iOS 5 jailbreak tool (whether tethered or untethered) as it looks like Apple managed to patch all the exploits they found in various iOS 5 beta versions and therefore their work has been delayed since. In fact they have not mentioned when such a tool would be available and it looks like they really need you to go forward with their jailbreaking endeavors.

Naturally, we’ll never encourage you to jailbreak or unlock your device or to send crash reports to any other party than Apple. It’s up to you to decide how you’ll want to handle such action but it’s also you’re the only person responsible for whatever you do with your iOS device.