The iPhone jailbreaking community likes to maintain solidarity within its ranks. After all, while hackers love being the first to discover a new technique or exploit, the jailbreaking community has an enemy — Apple — who would like nothing more than to shut them down for the count.
That threat, in turn, has made the jailbreaking community a pretty tight-knit bunch: at any given time, there are a few working exploits that hackers are sitting on, waiting for Apple to invalidate a currently working jailbreak technique through a software patch before they release the next one. Why? Because the world doesn’t need more than one jailbreak at a time, and if all the known exploits are all in the wild at the same time, Apple can fix them all at once, leaving jailbreakers with nothing up their sleeves.
That’s why the jailbreaking community is so steamed up about the surprise Limera1n jailbreak geohot released over the weekend… the day before the Dev Team released their own highly publicized 4.1 jailbreak that used a totally different exploit. Geohot essentially barged ahead in line by releasing his jailbreak exploit unannounced, which risked alerting Apple to the methodology used in the Dev Team’s exploit.
The result? If the Dev Team had released their jailbreak, Apple could have patched both exploits at once… letting at least one perfectly good exploit go to waste.
Luckily, the Dev Team has had the good sense to hold back their own jailbreak, and to retool the tools they were meant to release yesterday with geohot’s Limera1n exploit… but given how buggy Limera1n is, that’s going to take time. As of right now, the Dev Team is warning users not to jailbreak with Limera1n for right now, especially if you want to retain your carrier unlock.
Yeesh, geohot. Everyone knows you’re talented, but next time, wait your turn.
