July 6, 2009 by Jenny Sanderson
George Hotz, the teenage hacker who managed to unlock the original iPhone, claims to have done it again. According to reports, his new program, Purplera1N, allows users to install third party software onto iPhones, completely bypassing Apple’s quality control and security processes.
If these reports are true (and it looks like they are) it’s a bit of an embarrassment for Apple as it proves that the security of the device and their software is far from impregnable and chips further away at the credibility of Apple’s claim to offer better security than PCs. The particularly embarrassing thing about this latest jailbreaking is that it took so little time to pull off. The software has only been out since June the 19th that’s a little over two weeks, implying that not only can the software be broken, but it wasn’t actually that difficult.
Well, now the software is out in the open on both Windows and Mac and there’s nothing Apple can do except quietly fume.
A brief word of warning to anyone thinking of trying to jailbreak their phone though, you could be risking data loss, so be careful. Even Hotz himself advises people to do a backup before they try the software.
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