There’s no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it’s the little things that get me excited.

While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you.

Sure, it’s already technically possible to do this — setting your Twitter account to accept tweets via text gets the job done, but its reliance on a mobile network means that illicit Siri users with iPod Touches can’t join in the fun. With this new tweak though, any user with a jailbroken Siri-friendly device will soon be able to verbally tweet with reckless abandon.

InfectionFX — also known as Grooveshark employee and part-time iOS hacker Tyler Nettleton — whipped up the tweak late last night after asking his Twitter followers if they wanted to see it happen. The demo videos that have since popped up show it that it works like a charm even in its pre-release state, as Siri remarks that the tweet was sent and the sound of a sweet little bird can be heard punctuating her announcement. Pay no mind to the displayed text though — the tweet seems to go through just fine even though Nettleton hasn’t yet changed her text response.

The Siri tweak isn’t available just yet though, but it should find its way into the third-party Cydia app store by the end of the week.

Hat tip to Phil Synowiec of iOSVlog for the video!

While the once long list of legitimate reasons to jailbreak your iPhone has taken a hit with each new iOS release, that burning desire to “Free your device” and/or “Fight the power” and/or “Just do crazy stuff that other people can’t do” never really goes away.

3 months after the release of the iPhone 4S and 10 months after the release of the iPad 2, the ridiculously talented iOS hacking community has finally cracked the ultimate challenge for both devices: the untethered jailbreak.

I know these things can get a bit jargony, so a quick recap: to “jailbreak” means to modify a device to run code and applications not signed or approved by Apple, thereby allowing you to do things with your device far outside of what would normally be possible. “Untethered” means that once it’s jailbroken, it stays jailbroken (whereas a “tethered” jailbreak means the device resets to its normal, un-jailbroken state whenever it is reset)

The team behind this hack, Chronic Dev, is the same group that makes the greenpois0n tool that’s been jailbreaking iOS devices for years. Remember comex, the iOS hacker who went legit with an internship at Apple? He was a key member of this group.

While their server seems to be taking a bit of a pounding right now, you can find the new iPhone 4s/iPad 2 jailbreaking tool (dubbed “Greenpos0n Absinthe”) right over here.

iPhone jailbreakers should probably stay away from the latest Siri port, dubbed H1Siri, which brings Apple’s digital assistant to the iPhone 4. The new hack comes from a group of Chinese hackers calling themselves the “CD-Dev Team.” According to the team’s account on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter), the hackers had originally wanted to just run a small test, but the code was leaked. Now their servers can’t keep up with the demand.

But beyond server unresponsiveness, there are several other good reasons to skip this hack, including the fact that it seems to break people’s phones and involves running illegal code.

H1Siri (aka, Hi Siri!), for those of you tracking the Siri-hacking space, is a different hack from the one that emerged in October and the other arriving last month.

According to iDownloadBlog, which wisely advises readers to be wary of this new port after its own tests with H1Siri failed, the new port involves the use of copyrighted binaries from the iPhone 4S. Simply put, it works because it uses illegal code. Notable iPhone hacker @chpwn (Grant Paul), confirms this.

He also points out another good reason to think carefully before installing H1Siri on your iPhone 4: it gives the software’s creators access to your personal data:

Please note: if you use a proxy to access Siri, you may be sending your Email, SMS, Calendar, Contacts, Location, etc though that server.—
Grant Paul (@chpwn) December 05, 2011

(It's up to you if you want to accept that risk. It's also your choice if you want to violate copyright law to obtain the needed files.)—
Grant Paul (@chpwn) December 05, 2011

Those are all very good reasons to avoid H1Siri, but if your Siri lust can’t be assuaged, maybe this last bit of info will: the darned thing doesn’t really work.

Numerous posts from brave (crazy) early adopters report various complaints after installing. For example, it has been said to cause random reboots, break the camera, brick the phone, mess up the Settings app, cause the phone to get stuck at the Apple logo and other such things.

Guys, seriously…Siri is cool, but it’s definitely not worth all this.

Most folks spent their Thanksgiving weekend ensuring that every inch of their intestinal track was thoroughly covered in gravy. Others spent it trying to get just drunk enough that their relative’s worst habits were bearable.

A select few, however, spent the weekend doing something pretty much only they can do: hacking the heck out of the iPhone. As a result, everyone waitin’ and wishin’ for an iPhone 4S carrier unlock has something to be thankful for.

It’s not quite a done deal just yet, but iPhone Dev-Team star MuscleNerd tweeted out that a “promising 4S unlock” had been discovered after a bit of Turkey-fueled hacking.

Oddly, his tweet goes on to confirm that this unlock works only with the 4S (and not the iPhone 4), suggesting that it relies on a hardware-level exploit that went overlooked during the 4S’ creation. While such exploits are increasingly rare, they’re also considerably more challenging for Apple to patch post-manufacturing.

The makers of the Peel iPod phone adapter have outdone themselves. Their new device – called the Vooma Peel PG92 – is a unique case that, in conjunction with a jailbroken iPhone – adds dual SIM capabilities to the iPhone 4 and 4S.

The device itself consists of a back-up battery that can charge your phone and what amounts to a dumbed-down cellphone. When you jailbreak your iPhone and download the Vooma app, you can control the phone inside the case to make calls using an SIM card. In short, it charges, unlocks, and enables dual SIMs for your iPhone.

The model I tested is still in pre-release stage and you can enter your email address at the Vooma website to request more information on the device. Once it’s set up the Peel PG92 works seamlessly and even uses a similar interface to Apple’s own dialer – although it’s clear that the programmers had to cut a few corners to get the look and feel correct. For example, the dialing screen is actually a bitmapped copy of the original dialer and the letters and numbers are slightly warped. However, all of the major functionality is recreated in the Vooma app.

However, this is clearly a very cool and clever hack and it works without problems on any jailbroken iPhone. Because it also ostensibly unlocks your iPhone the PG92 adds quite a bit of value in a package that is little bigger than a standard iPhone case.

Through the mists of time, the elders tell of a website that could jailbreak and iPhone in seconds, allowing users to free their devices from the shackles of Apple’s all-seeing eye. They spoke of a great war between Apple and the warriors of justice and how the warriors, for a time, were vanquished. And the elders told that this website would return, gloriously, bringing peace to iOSia once again.

The elders were right. The site has returned. This site will jailbreak devices running up to 4.3.3.

Point your iOS device right here and watch as your iPad, iPad 2, or iPhone begins to download and install Cydia. You can then quickly and easily install homebrew warez and, if you’re not careful, open up your iPad to potential mischief. Per usual, please back up before you try this and be prepared to restore from iTunes if everything goes pear shaped.

iPhone3GS
iPhone4 (GSM)
iPod touch 3G
iPod touch 4G
iPad1
AppleTV2G (v4.3 8F202)

In other words, just about everything except the iPad 2. Redmond Pie has links to all of the ipsw files you need to get the deed done. iOS 4.3.3, if you’ll recall, is the update that fixed the location tracking problem. Otherwise, not much has changed since 4.3.2 so you could either sit still on this one or, like all others with iPads 2, curse the jailbreaking gods for not supplying you with a product that will crack your firmware.

There were apparently a few jailbreaks for 4.3 but nothing available for the A5 processor. The Dev Team should have something in the next few days/weeks.

PS3 owners will be prompted to update their system to firmware version 3.56 today. Why is that? Hmm, could it possibly have something to do with Sony trying to prevent your from jailbreaking your system? Yes, obviously. (“This is a minor update that adds a security patch.”) If you update your system say goodbye to being able to hack your PS3 to pieces… for now, at least. And maybe for a good while, too, given that Sony has managed to win a restraining order against Geohot.

Not only has Sony won a temporary restraining order against Geohot, real name George Hotz, and his crew, but it looks like the case will be able to be held in San Francisco, in front of judges who haven’t been too kind to lone coder types before.

The 3.56 update was pushed out within the past few hours, so it’ll be interesting to see if A) it stops jailbreaking for good or B) will merely signify a new game of cat-and-mouse between Sony and the larger jailbreaking community. I seem to remember frequent PSP firmware updates back in the day that were designed to mitigate the effects of custom firmware, but, really, once the system was cracked it was pretty much cracked for good.

And even if you were to jailbreak your PS3, please don’t hop online and ruin everyone’s good time. Nobody likes a bully.

You can now install XBMC on your jailbroken iPhone and iPad. It’s available on Cydia, which is the secret hideout for Apps that haven’t been authorized by Apple for sale on its App Store. It’s the full version of XBMC, too, not a “mobile” or “lite” version or anything like that. The handy embedded video shows the App running on an iPad.

To install, you have to add “http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/ios” to your list of approved Cydia sources list. Presumably if you’re down with Cydia you know how to do this with your eyes closed.

Lest anyone forget, XBMC is the open-source media playback software suite that has its roots in the old Xbox Media Player (in turn based on mplayer and FFmpeg), which, if the user interfaces on so-called Smart TVs are anything to go by, was many, many years ahead of its time.

Xbox Media Player is also the progenitor of Plex and Boxee, so anytime you look at either of those two, take a second to pay your respects to the granddaddy of them all.

Oh, to hang out all day in #xbins all over again!

Sony’s trying its hardest to erase the PS3 Jailbreak hack from the Internet, but we all know that’s folly. Two seconds on YouTube turns up not only links to all the necessary files, but detailed, how-to videos describing how to hack the system. The scary thing for Sony is that we’re long past the point where hacking a video game console requires soldering knowledge and a hard-to-find modchip. Today all you need is a small USB flash drive and the ability to follow along with a low-res instructional video, and even our most attention deficit disordered youth can pull that trick off.

The worst part about this hack—again, I err on the side of being able to do what you like with hardware you’ve purchased, but not at the expense of community integrity nor just so you can pirate Cool New Game—is that it appears to be hurting legitimate gamers more than anyone else.

A quick YouTube or Google search turns page after page of results on how, after having Jailbroken a PS3, you can then hop online with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops and basically run amok, ruining legitimate gamers’ fun in the process. Aim-bots, super jumping, infinite running, you name it.

As someone who’s been on the wrong end of many a Halo match ruined by hacking (this was during the Halo 2 days, mind you), I can tell you there’s nothing quite as discouraging as having your game ruined by hackers. Phantasy Star Online, back in the Dreamcast days, also had its problems with hackers, and there was no quicker way to get me to stop playing than to run across a Pelican Code Breaker-using hacker.

In short, hackers in online games ruin everything.

Given that it takes next to no effort to hack a PS3, and then to start pirating and hacking games left and right (full game rips are hardly difficult to find online; so much for that “piracy is only a problem on the PC” yarn), perhaps Sony should frame the debate like this:

hacked PS3s endanger your ability to legitimately enjoy your favorite games, hence our efforts to mitigate the damage caused by Jailbreaking.

DMCA finger-wagging may be sufficient as far as the law is concerned, but why not reach out to gamers and explain to them why they should care about Jailbreaking? A sort of, “We’d just thought you’d like to know that your hobby is at risk.” Don’t tell gamers that Jailbreaking their PS3 will cause the Sun to explode or anything silly like that, but rather be honest with them.

Be honest? What a novel concept!

All of that said, there will always be anti-social degenerates online who derive pleasure from ruining other people’s good time, and there’s but so much Sony can do to change their mentality outside of permabans and the like.

To think that all of this could have been avoided had Sony not decided to remove the Install Other OS option. Oops.

Well look at that: it’s now legal to sell, advertise, and own any sort of PS3 Jailbreaking product in mighty Spain, the current European and world champions. A court in Barcelona made the decision, and it has much to do with Sony’s decision to eliminate the “Other OS” option of early PS3 firmwares, which allowed people to install Linux.

This is only the second most talked about story in Spain today, the most talked about story being that Cristiano Ronaldo apparently hates Iker Casillas. Team spirit, etc.

Worse for Sony is that it now has to pay all the associated legal costs of the retailers it targeted for selling Jailbreak devices up until this ruling. Terribly constructed sentence, yes, but the point is that Sony now has to pay other folks’ legal bills. That’s not fun.

Please note that the decision can be appealed, and Sony has two days left in which to appeal the decision. After that, Sony’s out of luck.

Of course, PS3 Jailbreaking products are ostensibly sold to give people the ability to back up their legally purchased software, but we all know what it’s really used for.

(I don’t know why that font’s “K” is so weird in the picture. Beats me, folks. It’s called Phatboy Slim, by the way.)

Apple TV users are reporting massive slow downs in video rentals and streaming over HDMI, resulting in “3,000 minute” waits for some media. In related news, the new Apple TV is currently jailbroken and you can basically knock out the Apple TV iOS software and run Plex, instead.

What’s in the beta?

Surf the Web – Experience the web in all its glory and stream HTML5 video from many popular sites (note: not all HTML5 sites supported yet).
Discover New Music – Find new artists you’ll love by accessing Last.fm radio stations, artist bios and slideshows.
Plex Client – Stream media from Plex Server running on your Mac. (big thanks to quiqueck for putting this together)
Info on Demand – Keep track of current weather and news feeds on your AppleTV.
One-click Updates – Install, remove or update plugins in a snap through the native AppleTV interface.
What’s coming soon?

Go Beyond iTunes – Enable playback of additional media formats.
Access Media Anywhere – Stream media from most NAS devices.
Much, much more…

via AppleInsider

WinPho7 retail units have only been out for a few days, but a proper jailbreak isn’t that far off now that some devs gained root access to the system. It’s not like anyone really thought Windows Phone 7 would be locked up forever, right? It was only a matter of time.

Developers swarm high-profile platforms with fun and profit in mind. Microsoft can’t be that upset. A good chunk of Winphone7 sales will come just because the owners will be able to use the device how they want. Hackability was one of the reasons the first Xbox succeeded. Creating a garden with impenetrable walls sounds great in boardroom discussions, but can ultimately hurt sales and hinder 3rd party developers  – which again, hurts sales.

via RedmondPie

Upon closer inspection, (hounsell) documented some interesting characteristics of the application that gave it its native capabilities – most notably a DLL called “Microsoft.Phone.InteropServices”, which if poked the right way provided COM access.

This explote came after one dev, hounsell from XDA-Developers, noticed that a Samsung app used a different code set than usual 3rd party apps. Instead of being based on Silverlight, it ran on the native WP7 code. Bananas started falling from trees and then came access to the root. It’s only a matter of time now before a rough jailbreak hits, followed up by a simple GUI-based version. Nice.

The iOS 4.2 Gold Master for all iOS devices is floating around along with iTunes 10.1, the only version of iTunes that supports the new version. What does this mean? It means you can try iOS 4.2 on your iPad today, as we speak, and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be extremely happy.

4.2 adds real multi-tasking and folders to the iPad, two features that make the device truly shine. I spent an hour yesterday just dragging little icons into each other to organize my extensive Crush the Castle clone collection (including Angry Birds). The update also adds a better keyboard and a few other tweaks that make the iPad really hum. You can also wait a few days to get the real update, but there’s no sport in it.

That said, how can you get to the goods? I got my links from Gumball Tech but their page is currently down so you’ll have to be a clever girl to figure it out. You can also find these on your favorite sharing services, presumably. You will need to download the proper IPSW file and the new version of iTunes.
N.B.:
Do not perform this update if you have a jailbroken or unlocked iPhone.
I repeat:
Do not perform this update if you have a jailbroken or unlocked iPhone. While nothing should happen, there is the possibility your jailbreak/unlock will disappear.

To update your device:
1. Find the following files using your favorite search engine:

iTunes 10.1 Beta 2, Mac OS X – 68.05MB
iTunes 10.1 Beta 2, Windows x86 – 70.9MB

IPSW files (8C134 is the version you’re looking for):

iOS 4.2 GM (IPAD) – 549MB
iOS 4.2 GM (IPHONE 4) – 624.27MB
iOS 4.2 GM (IPOD TOUCH 4G) – 608.65MB

2. Plug in your device and back it up.
3. Install iTunes 10.1.
4. Run iTunes. Click “Update” while holding down Option on OSX or Shift in Windows.
5. Select the IPSW file you just downloaded.
6. Update.
7. ????
8. Profit.

Update: now you can even jailbreak it!

Is there really any doubt the Mac App Store will be anything other than a huge hit when it debuts in 90 days? Seven billion downloads on the current App Store would suggest that Apple knows what it’s doing (and that people really love to slingshot cartoon birds into buildings). And the benefits of the App Store are clear: it’s an easy-to-use, one-stop source of safe, tested software. Usually. Maybe not all of that software is worth your time—how many fart Apps do you really need?—but the platform itself is sound, and Apple is keen to make sure it stays that way. But the platform is closed. Only with Apple’s approval (not to mention its 30 percent cut of the action) can your App find a home on the App Store.

But is that scenario ideal when it comes to desktop operating systems?

When Apple rolls out the Mac App Store in three months’ time, it will have created a new “class” of Mac software: Apple-approved and App Store-certified. All of a sudden software that isn’t from the Mac App Store looks a little less… official. New Mac users—and there’s sure to be plenty given Apple’s year-on-year growth—will be trained from Day One to look to the Mac App Store for software. What happens to software developers who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be a part of the Mac App Store? Why would a new Mac user visit third-party sites like MacUpdate or VersionTracker to find software when they know they can always pull up the Mac App Store to find Apple-approved, App Store-certified software?

You can also be sure that Apple will leverage the Mac App Store to sell its own software, further boosting the status of all software found on the Mac App Store. During yesterday’s demonstration, Apple showed how easy it is to buy, download, and install Pages, the word processor component of its iWork suite, using the Mac App Store. (Not showed, of course, is just how easy it is to download and install software using the decade old apt-get system, but let’s leave that alone for the moment. Steam also says hi, perhaps gritting its teeth a little bit.) What Mac user is going to go out of his or her way to find and download software when they can just as easily pop up the Mac App Store—safe, tested, secure—and browse away from there?

And perhaps bordering on the conspiratorial, why would you want Apple granting or denying its seal of approval on the software you run on your computer? I thought these were called personal computers? Who’s to say, somewhere down the line, that Apple doesn’t decide that the Mac App Store is the only place where new software can be acquired? For your safety, dear Mac user, we’ve eliminated the ability to launch .app bundles not delivered by the Mac App Store. We hope you understand that this is being done with your best interests in mind. Thank you for choosing Apple.

Do I expect that to ever happen? Obviously not—that’s ridiculous, even for Apple—but let’s not pretend that’s not exactly what happens on the iPhone and iPad. How many times has Apple warned us not to jailbreak our iDevices, citing security and stability concerns, not once mentioning that jailbreaking is the only way to install “unapproved” software?

My concern, I suppose, is that an over-reliance on, and an over-veneration of, the Mac App Store could lead to an unnecessary, if not dangerous, homogenization of Mac software.

Again, to expect that the Mac App Store won’t be anything other than a smashing success is pure folly, but let’s at least be cognizant of just how dramatic a shift the Store may well represent.

/me ducks

The Dev-Team blog reports regarding the release of Pwnage Tool 4.1:

AppleTV 2G users: Welcome to the JB family! Right now, about all you can do is command-line stuff via ssh. You also have afc2 available, so you can use tools like ifunbox to move files around. These are the *very* early days of AppleTV 2G jailbreaking, so it’ll take some time for JB app developers to come up with methods to use your AppleTV 2G from the remote, versus the command line. PS: Your ssh password is “alpine”…please change it when you can

Sounds good. Of course, the only thing you can do with it right now is access the command line, but I bet there will be further developments before the end of the day. Depending on how accessible this thing is, it might make a nice little hacker box. A hundred bucks isn’t a lot for an A4 and a few gigs of internal flash storage — more than enough to set up your own style of home theater gadget, complete with emulators and unfettered file playback.

We’ll keep you updated with further developments, of course.

After a bit of baby-mama drama surrounding its launch, the iPhone hackin’ extraordinaries over at the Chronic Dev Team released their iOS 4.1 jailbreaking tool, greenpois0n. Alas, due to some last minute technical issues, the initial release was Windows only.

This morning, one more platform joined the fray.

Just a few hours ago, the download link for the Linux port of greenpois0n went live, opening the doors to Jailbreak-topia for another big ol’ group of people. That just leaves one platform: OS X.

Fret not, Mac-fans; the OS X port is still on the way. When? When it’s done, of course. Here’s what the team has to say on the matter:

Mac release is being worked on. Some technical difficulties must be resolved.

We have no ETA for the Mac release besides “soon”. Bad things seem to happen when we give ETAs.

The job of finding iOS exploits and building them up into jailbreaking tools can be a pretty thankless one. There’s always another update around the corner, another operating system to support, another bug or two acting up for a small subgroup of people… and for each of those, there’s a handful of people publicly blasting you for not doing enough to make their handsets better for them. To all the dudes and dudettes who sit around burning the midnight oil for the sake of all of us who wouldn’t even know the first step for something like this, let us say: Thanks for all the hard work.

I’ve been using VLC for iPad, and while I’ve come across some interesting bugs (mainly related to audio), it seems to work quite well. The app will only work with a 3GS or better iPhone, though, or an equivalent-generation iPod touch, and they say that 720p videos may not play smoothly due to hardware limitations. Not a big deal, I think. SD files look pretty decent.

[via Gadget Lab]

It appears the Chronic Dev Team are ready to launch GreenPis0n, a jailbreak for iOS 4.1. This isn’t an unlock, mind you, but a jailbreak that cannot be undone by Apple through updates, only hardware changes.

via Gearlive