iOS 5 jailbroken less than a day after Apple's launch

Apple's iOS 5 operating system has been jailbroken by the iPhone Dev Team, less than a day after the software was launched.

Musclenerd, an iPhone Dev Team member, tweeted today: "iOS 5 jailbroken on [fourth-generation iPod touch]: via limera1n + tethered boot..not too many surprises :)".

He then posted some screenshots showing Cydia and iSSH, both of which only work on jailbroken devices, running on the iPod touch, alongside Reminders and Newsstand, two new iOS 5 features.

The jailbreak seems like impressively quick work, but Apple doesn't appear to have patched the holes that made iOS 4 jailbreaks easy. Incidentally, there still isn't a crack for the iPad 2.

Apple only announced iOS 5 yesterday. While us mere mortals have to wait until the autumn before we can load it onto our iDevices, registered developers already have full access to it. It only costs $99 -- about £60 -- per year to become an Apple developer, so there are plenty of people ogling iOS 5 already. 

Although the current developer build of iOS 5 won't be the final consumer version, there are suggestions that Apple could only patch the exploit by updating the hardware. That means the much-anticipated iPhone 5 might be harder to crack. Users of existing Apple devices may well be able to jailbreak iOS 5 with ease once it arrives.

We can expect stony silence from Apple on the matter. The jailbreak doesn't do any harm to 'legitimate' users who are eagerly awaiting the official iOS 5 launch later this year, and the prolific hacking community certainly brings some good publicity for Apple. Who knows, perhaps Apple will even hire another jailbreak hacker.