A new jailbreak for a new era
theodyssey.dev
theodyssey.dev
Then at some point I just stopped caring. It's so much effort to keep up with this stuff (same reason I don't use Android devices, with all the alternative firmwares and such). My stock iOS device is about as reliable as a device can get and I'm relatively happy making the complete freedom tradeoff. I'm not sure how bad of a thing that is however.
Occasionally I'll want to do something like spoof my location and get annoyed that it's not easy. But I just...don't care 99% of the time.
It does seem that slowly iOS/ipadOS is getting more fully featured as they try to make the ipad a real laptop alternative.
Of course (as I wrote here three years ago¹), a non-programmable dumb/feature phone without updateability would also be adequate for my personal needs for what I need a phone for.
Application could be very basic (calendar, address book, calculator, alarm, etc.) - by default. Or users could make their own simple apps - nothing fancy, Arduino like cooperative multitasking, simple screen drawing, maybe a few widget helpers.
I can imagine this being a fun thing to use & play with. :)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-8110-TA-1067-2-45-inches-Unlock...
Still, being able to write your own apps for it would be nice. Even if very low level APIs & you would have to handle distribution yourself if you wanted to share them would be fine. But I don't see any information about that after quickly checking their page.
BTW, a simple mobile terminal with cellular connection that you can program could be preatty useful in comparison to hacking a regular Android phone to only do what you need could be useful as well. For stuff like single use online terminals to give to field crews.
I remember when I was younger, and I felt this odd moral imperative to having root on any device I had that I knew ran an operating system of some sort. Once I succeeded, then... well, nothing. It was pointless. Oh, wow I got Linux running on my PlayStation 2! Root login, baby! Look, it’s X Windows!! I have harnessed the power of the machine and am finally that much closer to..... well, nothing a PC can’t already do better.
Notable ones I remember where:
1. SBSettings, basically control center before Apple added the control center.
2. Flux, before Apple added Night Mode (or whatever they call it)
3. Winterboard, for theming the phone in ways
4. Gameboy emulator, though now I think this can be done without jailbreak.
5. Unlocking the carrier.
6. File explorer
I'm sure there was more too.
For me jailbreaking is partly a philosophical goal, but also I just like seeing all the stuff people come up with when they aren't restrained by the walls of the garden.
If you read above you'll see most of the good jailbreak tweaks were brought into stock iOS at some point, which is great too. Let jailbroken users/devs try new things and if they work well bring them in with some Apple polish.
Making a smartphone that does not behave as a general purpose computer is stuping and not to mention dangerous (as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means).
I disagree with your argument that smartphones should be general-purpose computers. I don't think that having a smartphone be a general-purpose computer provides a significantly improved amount of control for 99.9% of the population.
> as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means
I can imagine as a thought experiment an ASIC or FPGA based phone that implements a very high level application processor, while what we normally call firmware, OS and libraries are implemented in "pure hardware".
(I agree with your sentiment, but somewhat disagree with your apparent conclusion android phones are any better if you're worried about bad actors -- the baseband and DSP from Qualcomm are processors running code we can never touch underlying the entire hardware. Similarly, almost all other computer hardware have separate CPUs inside the main CPU where the mfc. runs their own secret code which cannot be tampered with or even directly seen sometimes)
What I meant is that on Android There is less being done to actively prevent their usage as a self hosting workstation (though some recent "security" changes communig from Google related to running code that does not come from an installed APK might be a reversal of that trend).
Can't remember who did it, but seemed like the consensus at the time was that all you end up with is the worst of both worlds.
Hybrid devices only rarely end up successful it seems.
I think Samsung may have also given it a go.
https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
It's actually really good. I can wirelessly turn my TV into a 4K Android tablet, and with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it turns into a computer.
Same with a USB cable plugged into my desk's monitor to HDMI. If I didn't require a computer for development, I would not buy computers any more.
The Samsung DeX Station (https://www.samsung.com/au/galaxy-s8-accessories/dex-station...) is no longer manufactured which is a massive let down. It does however still work with the S10+, and I presume the S20. The ability send a network cable straight to the phone was pretty handy for a few situations.
My mom refuses to use dex, I found it to be great as a basic workstation. Definitely removes the need for eg a chrome book. Does not replace your power user machine however
Australia: https://www.samsung.com/au/findastore/
US: https://www.samsung.com/us/samsung-experience-store/location...
Wireless Dex is limited to 1080p and wired one goes to max 1440p
Samsung's Dex dock thingy still exists and can be useful when travelling - most hotel rooms you can plug into the TV with HDMI, so a phone and keyboard is less trouble than carrying a full laptop. If you could rely on finding a keyboard (even just a USB one) in any hotel room it would be a lot better. And hopefully with apple shifting to ARM there'll be a lot more desktop software that runs properly on phone processors.
How about being able to not run any code that you don't want your device to run? No DRM, no nag screens, no tracking, etc etc...
A non-rooted phone very much is a general-purpose computer, just not for you.
Android also dropped the ability to do this for a while (the the apps I was using died) and I haven't tried again in a long time. Maybe I'll look again.
I think some folks are starting to match up names and voices, audible fingerprints anyone?
• Google search results lead to AMP pages. When Jailbroken, I can load a userscript that turns this off.
• Random apps have stupid names on my homescreen. Either the name is in all caps, or it's too long and Apple puts a big ellipses in the middle. I can't rename them unless I'm Jailbroken.
• Stock iOS has two separate low-battery alerts, the first of which occurs when there's still a fifth of my battery left! I'm well aware of the red icon at the top of my screen.
• The stock iOS keyboard has a dictation key I always hit accidentally. I can disable it when I'm Jailbroken.
There are many, many, many more examples, these are just off the top of my head. It's been long enough since I set up my Jailbreak that I don't actually remember most of them, but I use a ton of let's-call-them annoyance fixers, and I don't think I could live without them.
change your search engine?
(my setup on all devices: ddg, and when results suck, i try google by adding "!g" to the search. It open my eyes when i see both suck for a few terms, but when using google i don't question the engine)
On desktop I use Startpage but, hey, that's another thing I can't set on stock iOS!
I appreciate everyone who uses DDG, and perhaps that's the route I would go if I couldn't use my userscript. But I greatly prefer my setup.
!s - start page, a google proxy !yt - youtube search !w - wikipedia etc.
Almost all I use I just figured out because it's obvious. !az = amazon, !ebay = ebay, etc. Usually just guessing gets me there 90% of the time, and then I can learn to use it again.
But again, that's just my workflow, not for everyone if you don't care if you use google for 99% of your searches.
Here on HN, mentioning Dropbox makes the circle complete.
wires
and dongles. It's IOS device after all.
Let's not deceive ourselves: Apple deliberately cripples standardised data exchange mechanisms to push iCloud and aht Apple ecosystem.
Not sure but I think moving files within the same share also takes a round-trip to the iPhone.
[1] https://www.expressvpn.com/webrtc-leak-test [2] https://test.webrtc.org/
Install SwiftKey and never look back
I 100% understand why Apple does this, but a keyboard that randomly changes to a different keyboard under some circumstances is completely unusable to me. My brain needs consistency.
You go to Settings and turn Dictation on. (Yes, I know, bear with me.) THEN, you turn it off.
And that should cause the button to disappear. It's really unintuitive, I know.
The one downside to jailbreaking which I never found a working solution for was numerous apps that had jailbreak detection which caused the app to stop working, like Pokemon Go.
General > Keyboard > Enable Dictation and then disable dictation.
The microphone on the keyboard disappears.
I agree, there are a few little things that are annoying. And I wish iOS was more like Linux, in that you could just change anything if you actually cared to. But personally I rarely run into these edge cases on iOS these days. In the early days jailbreak was mandatory.
Aside: I find the concept of a voice "text" amusing and somewhat redundant with voicemail, though I can see an argument that the use cases are slightly different.
Recharging after the first 20% alert might significantly prolong the useful lifetime of your battery. Li-Po cell can provide a couple thousand 80%-20% cycles, but only less than a thousand 100%-0% cycles because working at the ends of the capacity range degrades the battery faster.
I get my battery replaced yearly. I would upgrade to a newer phone instead, but I value my headphone jack too much.
Ultimately it wasn't worth the hassle to keep up (and now as a bonus I'm stuck and can't update or un jailbreak).
This kept me awake, and I’d hardly have called it a distraction unless you would rather me pass out at the wheel.
The big problem with letting the user decide to do something like this is that distracted driving doesn’t affect just you, but everyone around you. There’s a reason drunk driving is illegal: you’re a danger to others on the road. Hence why being a drunk passenger is fine; you’re not a danger to the other drivers on the road.
So, should Apple be restricting what the user can do with their device? Depends on who you ask. But when it comes to distracted driving, it’s pretty well agreed that it’s wrong.
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Now, if you still want to watch YouTube while driving, you actually can. Just load up the YouTube app on your phone and hit play. They don’t stop you. Apple just won’t let you put it on your car’s screen.
My issue with this argument though is that the cat is already out of the bag- by blocking youtube on a larger screen, and similarly not allowing Siri to play youtube via voice commands Apple may claim they are doing it for safety, but in reality all is does is make people manually fiddle with their phone or watch a video on a smaller screen. I just don't believe there is any real world safety benefit to the paternalistic blocking.
That's their "official solution" to the problem, even if it's somewhat exclusionary.
For the rest of us, a checkm8'ed iPhone X works great.
To be eligible for the Security Research Device Program, you must:
Be a membership Account Holder in the Apple Developer Program. I used to be, I could be again.
Have a proven track record of success in finding security issues on Apple platforms, or other modern operating systems and platforms. I have a CVE in Signal for IOS, and some embedded device shit.
Be based in an eligible country or region.* I am that.
Participation is not available if you are:
In any U.S. embargoed countries, on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals, on the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List, or on any other restricted party lists. I am not that.
Under the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside (18 years of age in many countries). I am not that.
Employed by Apple currently or in the last 12 months.} I am not that.
The other reason is to hide obnoxious features I'd never use that serve as screen clutter (such as stories in messenger)
A feature I really like on Android is being able to block specific notification channels for any given app.
Want to receive notifications when your Uber is near, but don't want to receive marketing notifications? Just disable the Marketing channel in the Uber notification settings.
Of course it relies on devs to correctly mark their notification channels, but I haven't found many apps that don't.
When I did jailbreak, it was never about apps and rarely about high-level features (I did use NC settings before that was an official thing, and I installed a torrent client and some emulators, I think).
I jailbroke because I wanted to have access to a local terminal and write and execute arbitrary code on the phone - nothing major, mostly small bash and Python scripts and some C code when I was learning how to program.
It was also a philosophical thing: I want to have full ownership over my phone, whether I need that on a day-to-day basis or not.
I moved to Android when iOS jailbreaks started to become rarer and slower to appear, and more and more jailbreaks started to be tethered-only. There are only so many hoops I am willing to jump through when I can instead buy an Android phone that officially supports unlocking the bootloader and rooting it.
Android and iOS are really not equivalent here. Similarly you can install apps from outside the play store normally. No root, no unlocked bootloader, no funny business. Just a big difference in how each OS treats its users.
Also termux is going to be a thing of the past, because its developers refuse to use the newer Java based APIs in recent Android versions, as Google is closing down the API space available to the NDK, as means to close down on security exploits.
I need to jailbreak to get music off it. Lost the orginal itune laptop hard drive where the music is on. Don't want to install some no free iMyPHone type of software to do the extract, don't want to run them on my computer, seems a bit fishy. I really just need root access and then I can scp off the music.
EDIT: iOS 10.x, old iphone.
Until iOS14 you actually had no way to set another default browser and email-client.
With that fixed, I find iOS actually half way usable.
I don't even remember what all the drama was about—as I recall, it was exceedingly stupid—but I know it was nasty enough to drive Saurik and much of the rest of the old guard away from the Jailbreak community for good. I really, really hope that ugliness is behind us. The Jailbreaking scene could use everyone's talent.
Reddit thinks it’s a way to permanently store nudes from Snapchat.
Definitely that period made me glad I had switched to android. If I'm running an exploit on my own device to take control, it damn well better be open source so I can be confident I am the only one getting control.
In that case why we call it a Jail-Break? I would rather call it a Jail-Switch/Choice ...
It's another Jail if I still don't have a full control.
Oh boy, what security risk we took only to change the default font of the system...
But this is out of the question with closed source proprietary software like iOS running on hardware with a closed down bootloader.
uhh why would apple support developer-oriented things that 99% of the audience wouldn't use, on a consumer-oriented device
To me it would seem that the vision for iPad OS is the exact opposite. An attempt at bridging towards having the iPad as a much more generic, almost laptop solution. Close to what the Surface has been trying.
I know it runs counter to what a lot of folks seem to think (and definitely what a lot of folks want). But it's genuinely the way I read the tea leaves. The iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard arguably is an "almost laptop solution" already -- what I'm saying is that I don't think Apple has any desire to give the iPad a Unix shell, a fully open file system, the ability to sideload apps, and so on. If you want to run Microsoft Office or Photoshop on your iPad, they think that's great, because there are iPadOS versions of it that fit within their vision of What iPads Are. If you want to run a Docker container with a local web server and Visual Studio Code on your iPad, though, I don't see that fitting in that vision.
I don't intend this question as a troll. I'm legitimately interested in understanding your perspective.
Doesn't it make you mad that Apple makes it so hard for you to jail break your device? If you are jail breaking your device, I assume you aren't part of the "I like Apple to protect me from myself" crowd, so wouldn't an Android device with an unlocked boot loader be a more attractive platform for you?
Or are you saying they will hack on what they have, but don't like to enough to go out and find hackable things?
So I could see it if you were just buying an Apple device and leaving it alone, but if you're rooting I'm not sure I understand.
I'm specifically asking people who buy iOS devices and then want to jail break them why they aren't more attracted to an unlockable Android instead since they obviously don't like the restrictions that Apple puts in place.
I don’t like android OS, and I like iPhones. I also like to tinker so I jailbreak.
That’s kind if the nature of Jailbreak programs hooking into private functions though, and I don’t mind...
I grok that, makes sense :-)
Just a few months ago I tried to install an alternate rom on a Motorola Moto e6 and was dumbfounded by how impossibly complicated it seemed. Turns out this less than one year old phone had a locked boot loader and was not compatible with any modifications like I was attempting.
Every time I jailbreak my iPhone I always end up reverting it. Cydia is so janky and everything about the mods seem so tacky, tasteless, and janky I figure why bother. I need my phone to work.
For everything else, it really depends on what you install. I think Colorflow, for instance, could very easily be mistaken for a native iOS feature.
If you buy a hack-friendly phone though, I've found it to be fairly easy to do, although I've always used CLI tools, so if someone (like non-techy friends) were to do it they'd probably be put off by the CLI.
That being said, my current and last phone are the pixel 4a and 2 and they feel just as snappy as the iphones I haved used, I can install any software I want, and the 4a is really nice as it is only $350 with a fingerprint sensor and a headphone jack so I don't plan on going back to iOS any time soon.
Some quick searching indicates previous most popular tool unc0ver only went up to iOS 13.5 (vs newest 13.7 that this tool jailbreaks).
Edit: Actually looks like another tool called checkra1n already covers those iOS versions, but this one covers more devices.
I’m going to be getting an iPhone 11 Pro deal from T-Mobile, my carrier, now. After I re-confirm the in store device is on 13.7 or earlier.
I am not really interested in jailbreaking iPhones, but I have some equipment from the early 2000s running software that are no longer maintained that I'd love to tweak.
In other words, does the existence of a jailbreak like this also imply the same strategy could work for malware?
Or is "jailbreak" here a more targeted exploit, to allow sideloading apps?
The reason I'm curious is because Apple seems to have put lots of effort into their "secure enclave" and specialized hardware to avoid this type of situation. So I'm curious if this bypasses all that, or only part of it.
Malware could probably use the same exploits, yes, but the exploits used for most Jailbreaks are pretty "noisy", and I have trouble imagining a situation where they could be used without the user's knowledge. It's certainly possible though.
Me deciding not to install supersu 10 years ago. I think it’s finally been replaced with an open sourced utility but I’ve already moved on
Somewhat. Apple designs multiple layers of security into their devices and jailbreaks these days compromise some set of these, and plus the security model of iOS is really "the user vs. everything else on the operating system" so the concept of "root" is much less important. You could consider it equivalent to "rooting”, however.
> In other words, does the existence of a jailbreak like this also imply the same strategy could work for malware?
Yes.
An Android device with AOSP firmware will likely suit these needs better.
Is there funding behind it? Are people somehow making money off jailbreaks, perhaps downstream?
You can also sell tweaks and themes and earn quite a lot of money.
That being said their website looks pretty standard imo.
I know that all of this sounds extreme, but the mental benefits are of the chart. I have enormous focus, no "fear of missing out", no "notification hell", no "social media" rush. So no jailbreak or any form of functionality will bring me back to this time waisting mental bonanza.
If smartphones are the future of mandatory personal identification governments must offer them free of charge. Just saying:)
But as someone interested in understanding how it works without a lot of time on my hands, I would have loved a high level explanation to support a "genuine windows of interest".
As is, I will not be able to extract much knowledge from it.
Huh? You know it's an opt-in feature, right?
When Bluetooth is on, your iPhone broadcasts itself with a rotating random MAC address (a feature now called Bluetooth LE Privacy). It rotates at a fixed interval, something like every 5 minutes.
With contact tracing enabled, your phone broadcasts another random identifier, and that identifier rotates at the same interval as your MAC address. The random identifier is actually cyphertext, and the key to decrypt it is stored on your phone.
I think it should have been turned on by default if Bluetooth is turned on by default, but people would have complained very loudly.
Isn't this only when the iPhone is "discoverable", which is pretty much never the case unless you have bluetooth settings open?
I'd be shocked if it doesn't remain opt-in, for all sorts of reasons.
Upgrading to iOS 14 does not magically turn it on.
But I would also suggest you learn how this feature works in the first place, it's an interesting design that makes clever use of Bluetooth and cryptography. It's likely much more private than the way you have your device set up right now.
The complete specs, including what is being broadcast over Bluetooth and the cryptography used to preserve privacy, are available here (the Google and Apple system are one and the same): https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/#exposu...
These are pretty technical, but this is a good high-level overview: https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/#grid-h...