Jailbreak fix for iTunes 9.1 on Windows already on the way

There was a wee bit of chaos amongst iPhone jailbreakers after this morning’s iTunes 9.1 update hit. Seemingly out of nowhere, “tethered” jailbreaks (the slightly-less-convenient type necessary for newer iPhones) stopped working. Panic!

Fortunately, the endlessly resourceful army behind the jailbreaking effort has already isolated the problem, and a fix is in the works.

Shortly after the first reports came out that tethered jailbreaks had gone awry, it was determined that the issue was isolated to folks running the jailbreak on Windows. This lead the jailbreak brains straight to the source of the issue: one of the .DLL files required for the hack had been changed. The nature of the change makes it seem likely that the temporary jailbreak-breakage was more of a side effect than a deliberate move by Apple.

While it wasn’t clear at first just how straightforward a fix would be, iPhone hacking team iH8Sn0w (the same team that initially discovered what had gone wrong) has announced that a “quick fix” has been discovered, and is already in the works. It “will require a few hours to code” (and presumably, a few hours to test), so be on the lookout for a patch in the next day or two.