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Not too long after iPhone OS 3.1 came out, a minor update to 3.1.2. I didn’t bother with the update, since it had been such a hassle to upgrade to 3.1 and maintain my jailbreak. And I had lost my tethering hack.

geohot is the 17 year old kid from NJ who developed the very first iPhone jailbreak, which apparently involved soldering.
I had read how much easier to use purplera1n had been than the iPhone Dev Team’s PwnageTool and redsn0w. With the current generation of devices and OSes, geohot has just released blackra1n. For a while it looked like it was going to be Windows only, but he eventually did release it for the Mac too. It boasts the ability to jailbreak all iPhone OS devices released to date, running any firmware, thus simplifying greatly the menagerie of iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking tools. And since geohot had found a vulnerability in the new baseband firmware (05.11.07), I don’t need to hold on to old firmware, as I did with PwnageTool in jailbreaking 3.1. Although I understand the newest PwnageTool 3.1.4 now allows current baseband firmware too.

And holy shit, was it easy. Just launch the app, press a button, and you’re done. Much much easier and simpler and fun than PwnageTool. No building custom IPSWs, no hour long restores of your iphone, no giving it your admin password for reasons unknown. All in all, a very pleasant experience. It makes me not want to go back to PwnageTool.

The other news is about iPhone tethering hacks. I’ve been periodically checking the iPhone Dev Team’s blog and iClarified.com for news about this, with no results. Also just generally googling around the web turned up nothing. But today I decided to see if anyone was saying anything on twitter and I hit pay dirt. Here and, via this hit, here. I used the last one.

So you do a mysterious binary patch to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/Support/CommCenter, reboot, and voilà! Tethering should work. Well, pretty much. When I opened Settings -> General -> Network and clicked on “Internet Tethering”, I got a popup that said something like “To enable tethering, please contact AT&T”. For a moment I thought it wasn’t going to work. But on a second try, I got the Internet Tethering control panel open, turned it on, and all worked beautifully. And apparently this hack will even be included in the next version of PwnageTool. That’s one thing that might tempt me to go back.

I’m very happy to have my tethering back. Kudos to the iPhone Dev Team!