14 DAY TRIAL // iOS hacker Chpwn, in cooperation with developer Ryan Petrich, has rolled out Spire, a legal Siri port for all A4 handsets, and even some older devices - so long as they support iOS 5. The iPad is also compatible with the hack. Read on for the details.
According to Chpwn, “Spire uses a new method to obtain the files necessary for Siri, so it doesn’t have the copyright issues encountered by previous attempts.”
The hacker explains in a blog post that Spire is but a mere jailbreak tweak that requires a proxy and data from an iPhone 4S to operate.
“As the point of Spire is to get Siri on devices that aren’t the iPhone 4S, this might at first seem to imply that Spire is useless,” he writes. However, he claims it’s far from being useless.
“…this is not because I hate you or because I’m lazy, it’s because Apple has made it very likely impossible to defeat the authorization requirement,” the tinkerer continues. “I reverse engineered it, and it does not appear possible to connect Siri to the cloud without information from an iPhone 4S.”
He proceeds to list a few ways for users to get a proxy that will help them connect Siri to Apple’s servers (visit the blog for those).
Chpwn admits that “Spire is far from perfect, but at least at this point in time, it’s the best that I can do. Maybe in the future someone will find a way to evade the authorization requirement, but from my position here that’s unlikely. Hopefully, however, you’ll be able to figure something out.”
Spire is available as a free download from Cydia, which means that those interested in using the tweak will require a jailbroken device. It weighs in at approximately 100MB, therefore users are encouraged to download via WiFi, not their cellular network.
According to Steven Troughton-Smith, one of the hackers behind the Siri port, “Until the iPhone 4S is jailbroken, this is the best Siri port [available]”, adding that “when the iPhone 4S is jailbroken, then we can avoid the proxy server issues.”