Bad news, jailbreakers. Apple has stopped signing iOS 8.1.2, the last jailbreakable version of the iOS 8 operating system. That means that unless you already have iOS 8.1.2 installed, you won’t be able to jailbreak using existing methods until another exploit comes down the pipeline.
If you’re not familiar with ‘signing’, it’s basically a technique Apple uses to tell iTunes, iPhones, and iPads that a version of iOS is up-to-date. Think of it as something similar to the expiration data on the side of a carton of milk: when Apple stops signing a version of iOS, it’s effectively saying it has expired.
A few weeks ago, Apple released iOS 8.1.3, in which they thanked jailbreakers for helping them patch a hole that made jailbreaking possible. However, iOS 8.1.2 was signed up until yesterday, allowing jailbreaking to continue. But the expiration date has finally come down.
Here’s how the game of iOS cat-and-mouse jailbreak works. A team releases a working jailbreak for the most recent version of iOS to the public. Apple moves to eliminate the exploit that made the last jailbreak possible, releases a new version of iOS, and eventually stops ‘signing’ previous jailbreakable versions of iOS, meaning they can no longer be installed on devices. Rinse and repeat.
So here we are, and the cat has caught the mouse, for now. How long until another jailbreak comes down the pipeline and has the cat scrambling all over again?
Source: iDownloadBlog
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
3 responses to “So long, iOS 8 jailbreak: Apple stops signing iOS 8.1.2”
Any idea why Apple has continued to sign 8.x for so long after a new release? In the past it was usually stopped within a few hours. Why the change?
You can thank the government for that. In the beginning, Apple was seeking government contracts, but the only concern the government had was that Apple claimed they were hack proof…Oh really, so jailbreaking is what? Our imagination? So Mr. Jobs set out to get those contracts and in turn was constantly killing jailbreaking every chance he got. Before he passed away, he got a good number of government contracts, jailbreaking became something of an annoyance rather than a threat so that’s one theory of the lag in time with this cat and mouse game. Honestly tho, the same government officials that claimed to be so afraid to have a device that is hackable, jailbreak their own devices too.
this news was yesterday