Planetbeing explains why hackers can’t afford “burning” their exploits

Jan 7, 2013 13:26 GMT  ·  By

Planetbeing, one of the prominent hackers involved with iOS jailbreaking, takes to Reddit to clear away any confusion regarding the iPhone 5 / iOS 6 jailbreak. In a nutshell, don’t hold your breath for a release until iOS 6.1.

The hacker, well known for his work on past jailbreaks, decided to stop all negative speculation about a potential untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 / iPhone 5.

So he opened a thread on Reddit where he wrote, “Yeah, I'm not really sure what all the doom and gloom is about. The fact is, I have an untethered iOS 6.0.2 JB running on my iPhone 5 right now.”

Had Planetbeing left it at that, the jailbreak community would have been up in arms at this point. Luckily, he didn’t.

“The reasons it's not released are because 1. releasing it would burn an exploit we want to save for ourselves so we can always get in to look at new firmware and help JB in the future, 2. iOS 6.1 is coming very soon and will likely break a small part of it anyway, there's no point in sacrificing the many bugs it won't break,” he explains.

In other words, the hackers cannot afford wasting months of hard work over people’s whining. The release will center on iOS 6.1. Period.

Planetbeing makes a reassuring note, saying, “Anyway, where there are 4+ bugs (that it took to get this to work), there's gotta be one or two more so while jailbreaking is getting harder, reports of its death are highly exaggerated.”

He also explains why he decided to use Reddit instead of Twitter to convey all this to his followers. The gist of it: Twitter’s 140-character limitation.

For who’s asking, iOS 6.1 shouldn’t be too far off with WWDC only six months away. Apple needs to clear developers’ desks of any old software to start focusing on the new stuff.