X

Teenager claims to have easy iPod Touch jailbreak

If you want to install third-party applications on your iPod Touch without spending an evening hunched over a keyboard, a 13-year-old named AriX says he's got the solution for you.

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
See full bio
Tom Krazit
2 min read

A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class.

A simple iPod Touch jailbreak program is out that apparently lets you install third-party applications. Ina Fried/CNET News.com

AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn't work for the iPhone, and it's only available for iPod Touch owners who are using Intel-based Macs. I don't have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I'm unable to test whether it actually works, but some users on MacRumors.com reported that it worked.

Ever since Apple released the 1.1.1 software update for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch in late September that broke older third-party application installers, hackers have been hard at work searching for a new way to bypass the restrictions. A preliminary jailbreaking application was released last week, but it required a great deal of expertise to get up and running. Erica Sadun, a writer for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, installed that iPod Touch jailbreak Friday evening but warned, "This is not ready for prime time, kids. Don't do this at home."

The iJailbreak program, however, is apparently designed for those who would like to put other applications on their iPod Touch but aren't crack coders. According to the press release, "the only user interaction required for iJailBreak to work is to restart the iPod Touch using the button on the top of the iPod. The application does the rest." AriX said he spent about nine hours writing a program in AppleScript that automatically does the scripting required to install the update released last week.

He said there's a slight risk that the program could "brick" your iPod Touch, but it's pretty easy to restore an iPod Touch to the factory settings if something goes wrong. As we noted last week, we don't link to these kinds of programs, but it's called iJailBreak. That's iJailBreak. One more time, in case you missed it, iJailBreak.

If you've successfully installed this program, or if you can't get it to work, let us know in the comments below or drop me an e-mail at tom dot krazit at cnet dot com.