I'm not sure if this is real, but if it is: this week is unbelievable. I really hope it's not the new normal, but unfortunately I don't believe this myself.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
I think in time (a few years) the gap will close a bit. As AI is used to harden software, it will be harder to break. Software not validated by AI will continue to be vulnerable to it.
So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.
This assumes that it is possible to actually write truly secure code.
Even of that were possible in the abstract, it would also have to be secure when running on hardware.
I personally don’t believe that perfect security can exist or that we will reach that ideal of somehow being ahead of the curve.
Patches will get better and faster, so will exploits. The stakes will grow. There will always be a human or budget issue.
The only way I see to mitigate the impact is to reduce our reliance on connected systems.
If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
People have been paying a premium to companies like Apple for a reason. You've got nothing to worry about.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
yeah it's kind of weird because some old mac laptops I've used were easy to work with and put on third party software (Linux), but the things like ipads and iphones not so much...
The videos sort of imply that these are userland rather than bootrom, whatever payload they have running is getting hit before first unlock, which isn't a lot of surface. They specifically say to not update which pretty much confirms where the attack surface is. Somewhere after the kernel starts but before the main user space is unlocked with the passcode.
Subverting the secure boot/upgrade chain would require a SecureROM exploit and presumably a compromise of the Secure Enclave, so the answer is almost certainly "no" (even prior major exploits from recent memory like usbliter8 are tethered and don't exploit the enclave; the last true untethered Jailbreak was iOS 9 or something.) An upgrade would fix it. The internet reporting claims this break they are showing in this video is untethered though, which is extremely rare on its own.
I want the freedom to install the OS I want on my phone. Now if I install a proprietary OS, I get what the developers of that proprietary OS choose to do. And if that proprietary OS does not give me root access, well, that's life.
I don’t think that hackers would agree to be locked out of a system, or do you mean they want to be locked out as a challenge? In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed, so the parent’s opinion is hypothetical.
> In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed
Of course you do. You can run GrapheneOS, or LineageOS, postmarketOS, or mobian, or many others. All of those are open source, you can modify them as you want before you flash them.
Apparently you do not realise that GrapheneOS and LineageOS are based on AOSP, while postmarketOS and mobian are Linux on Mobile. If you don't understand the difference, I assume you don't understand the difference between macOS and NetBSD, or do you?
PostmarketOS (not even named that anymore) isn’t a serious os, nobody uses it. None of the Linux ones are. Yes I’m sure you’re reading this from w3m in the terminal on your pinephone.
Not GP, but I'm reading your comment on Firefox ESR on my daily driver, a Librem 5 running PureOS, another mobile Debian fork. The OS is maintained by paid contractors, funded by Purism hardware sales and donations from users.
Each OS apparently comes with its own trade-offs, just look at the sheer amount of unhappiness expressed in this thread.
What market share proves is popularity. Which is important in an OS, but ridiculing other people's choices on grounds of market share doesn't seem very convincing to me.
My point is that I think it should be illegal to use technical measures to prevent me from installing whatever I want on the device I own.
And that I disagree with all the whining about having root everywhere. If you are able to install your preferred OS on the device you own, then you can install one that has root, or fork an open source one and add root, or write your own.
I once again am pointing to the sign that states this was never a l33t-hax0r board like you all think; it's always been an arm of one of the leading VC incubators.
“I want root access to my phone” is a nonsensical statement on some level. It’s a device. The fact you have mistaken it for a Unix machine is your own delusion.
Did people used to get like this about pocket calculators or digital watches? “Why am I forced to be limited to only the manufacturer’s firmware?”
I don't disagree. However, I would be happy if the manufacturer of a pocket calculator or digital watch did not prevent me from installing my own system on it.
I guess it is more debatable for a pocket calculator or a digital watch, but IMO when I buy a smartphone, it should not be illegal for me to install whatever I want on it. And the manufacturer should not add technical measures to prevent me from doing it.
That does NOT mean that the manufacturer should implement the features I want (like root access) or go out of their way to give me tools to install my favourite OS. Just that they should not prevent me from doing it (say if I manage to reverse engineer the hardware). Because I own the hardware I buy. At least I should.
If you have to bypass a technical measure that prevents you from installing your software, then the DMCA makes it illegal for you to to sell it, right?
If I buy a device, I want to be able to install whatever I want on it, and I want it to be legal for somebody else to sell something that I can run on it.
ADB not required you can just install APKs. Or even point something like Obtainium (https://obtainium.imranr.dev/) at the releases page of your vibed app to get auto updates straight from CI. Or have the app auto-update itself.
I run vibed apps on my iphone just fine - you have to register for a developer account and pay the annual fee, but I have an agent app running that can improve itself and push new versions over wifi just fine.
I even have realtime watch complications which no shipping app can have because of apple restrictions - developer mode lets you push complication updates realtime if you want.
I'll probably consider something more open next time I buy but just pointing out that right now with a developer account you're not actually _that_ restricted on iOS, the experience is better than you might think if you're making an app you never intend to ship.
I already have an account so I use that regardless, but AFAICT you can in fact build for your own device without paying at all. I haven't tested this though.
I am not arguing Apple's restrictions are a good thing, if I were in charge I would in fact make allowing installing your own software on your own device a legal requirement of selling hardware, yet here we are.
I know a bunch of people that would use iPhones if iPhones had first class private backup options (the de-iclouding, like the de-googling of androids). Having root on the device would make this an option.
I think we will probably see more and more restrictions on frontier models in the coming months. This is not what behemoths like Apple and Sony want to see.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
If the current frontier allows for this, we can probably expect alternative models to reach the same spot in a matter of months as well. The cat's out of the bag, for better of worse.
The paradox is that if the models are restricted, more exposed software will exist. I'm not convinced you can make a model that allows you to build secure software without it also being able to build exploits.
Do we want everyone who doesn’t know how to program a car to reprogram their car? I.e. I think there should be restrictions on frontier models to ensure safety of others.
Too bad this will be patched instead of allowing the device owner to control their own device.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
I'm for being able to hack your own device to do whatever you like with it, preferably without active resistance from its manufacturer. I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
The point the parent commenter is making is that they want Apple to allow people the freedom to intentionally mod the functionality of their device. Not that they literally want single-click PDF exploits to be a thing.
It’s a mix - for years I wanted root on my iPhones, just like you got on android. In practice, once I had it…? I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
With today’s hardware I might have a different take - the 18 has more than enough hardware to be a laptop so maybe I’d use it for a docking mode. But my gut is I’d probably still want a laptop even then.
To me the upshot is : billions of development, software and hardware, have gone into the platforms - it’s hard to quickly make them significantly better.
When I owned an iPod touch, the advantage of jailbreaking was to give your device certain features that the OS just didn't support. (Hell, I remember early days when iOS didn't even have a concept of wallpaper, the background was just black.)
iOS has come a long way since those days so a lot of the most common use cases of the past are no longer necessary. But the principle is the same - the hardware is a general-purpose computer but the software is locked down unnecessarily in many ways. Jailbreaking lets you do things that are outside of Apple's box.
I agree, and, if you have a developer certificate from Apple, the list of wants I have is ... not that long? zero? I'd love to be pitched on it. In practice, I wanted freedom, but didn't really want to do anything with it.
The value of general computing freedom is like any other freedom: it is needed when it people are trying to express you.
And not just you. Anyone! So evaluating whether a freedom is necessary turns into a much more nebulous question of “would anyone really need this at one point now or in the future? Is this a thing we should protect in general, even if it does seem like we need it exactly now?”
For example, could Apple/Google at one point be strong armed (by any government) into including spyware onto all devices? And listeners to make sure no one ever says bad things about $DEAR_LEADER?
If the probability of yes is anywhere around 10% over the next decade, maybe it’s a good freedom to have.
A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.
I think they wouldn't have cracked down on it so much if there wasn't in-app purchase crackers (IAPCracker, IAPFree) that directly threatened their revenue bottom-line, and forced developers to deal with in-app piracy.
I think, if a deal was struck with Saurik/Cydia Team and Apple to explicitly not do that, there was a much better chance the jailbreaking community would have held.
There's just less reason today for someone like me that liked the utilitarian benefits of a jailbroken iPhone. I used it for gestures, caller mini preview, grouped notifications, etc. All things that are now baked in.
I jailbroke every iPhone I had for many, many years. Most of the time it was silly skins/tweaks but there were a number of things that were huge QoL improvements. I remember BiteSMS and using it as a way to reply to a text directly in the notification instead of having to leave the app. This was before iOS had that feature and before multitasking, back when if you left the game you were playing the app would quit. Also had folders before stock iOS, things like Control Center, and a whole slew of little tweaks for other apps I used.
The downside to jailbreaking was often the instability but that was also back when the phones were way less powerful. Today, armed with LLMs, I would love to have root on my iPhone again. I'd love to rip out Siri and replace it with Claude Code or something like that.
You can do that already without jailbreaking with a-Shell[1]. It includes a wasm compiled ffmpeg binary and you can install (Python only) pip packages.
The equalizer is easily 20 years old, and is restricted to presets. Presets! A parametric EQ is the only thing that can make Apple's own Powerbeats Pro sound good. And for several golden years (despite lots of Apple's work against it) we had a really good jailbreak equalizer that worked with Apple Music. Eventually I just gave up on the whole thing. But I remember going out for trail runs with good sounding music without worrying about losing my earbuds.
This is one of several things I'm considering for an Apple Music client I'm writing (they are one of the few streaming services that actually allows such a complete level of API integration, via MusicKit). Apple Music as an app is pretty mediocre, but with a 3rd-party app you can add custom EQ profiles, and even detect the type of device when it connects over Bluetooth and apply the EQ profile automatically on the fly when it is connected, to add it to the DSP processing path.
What in these videos is so much cooler than what you can do on an Apple approved one? Other than, "As a programmer, I can do anything", I just personally don't see any capabilities unlocked that I can't have with an app or whatever. But I might be missing something.
The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.
I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.
This is one of the strongest arguments for why ordinary users need the ability to do this. Not only because they would actually benefit from it (e.g. better ad blockers), but because things like that have a network effect that you can't get from the four people who root own their iPhone with a PDF being the only ones able to install a third party browser engine.
One of the primary markets for cracked phones is for spying on partners.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
I watched the “Can your iPhone do this?” video, assuming that was the coolest one. The others seemed like they’d just be showing the exploit.
It seemed like a silly party trick with no practical purpose, and required the terminal to reset things back to normal so the phone was useful again. Why does anyone want this? Surely there are better uses than what was demoed?
I used to jailbreak during the first few years of iPhone. I remember being able to drag out from the bottom right corner of the screen to have a launcher, similar to the Dock, but with more stuff. But over time, the iOS got more features and the argument for jailbreaking became less compelling. This is especially true now that so much sensitive information is in our phones… so I trust all this stuff that effectively has root?
Is it an exploit around the library that handles PDF parsing/opening? Can someone explain how files / attachement are open on a mobile device ( android/iPhone).
I don't understand how in 2026 this is still a thing, we have many safe languages to parse/deserialize data. Why is it complicated?
I'm pretty sure not even the safe languages would help you here. PDF allows you to pretty much run arbitrary code since it supports javascript, images, and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, and you can't not implement javascript support or otherwise be selective about what you support with it because then all the end-users will complain when they get that one PDF that they need to fill out but it needs JS because... Nobody knows.
Noob q: Does this(and most) hacks like this on the iphone likely rely on some kernel module — or what it talks to for executing code — being compromised to run arbitrary code execution? I dunno about ios but it seems from the videos that something that reads imessage attachments was compromised for privilege escalation.
Like what im mean is an attack vector shaped similar to https://pepsipu.com/blog/2026-10-switch2-jailbreak-ns2jb/ i.e. they compromised `fs` module that did not protect against a buffer attack(in memmov)? My understanding is that most core kernel modules are difficult to attack directly because of XOM, PAC and CFI like protections make it impossible for anyone/thing, so most likely only indirect attacks like above can work in such situations — there is a lot of incentive for teams like apple to do everything possible to improve security so i assume only these kind of difficult to find vectors remain.
hacks like these, where you go from a PDF to full persistence, require a chain of exploits. Pegasus, the iOS malware that made the news awhile ago, used a chain of 3 exploits like this:
My dream is to release an iOS app that self-installs and not say anything special about it other than having a "Download for iPhone" button on my website. If someone asked me, I'd answer: "Huh, what do you mean? It's our app for the iPhone."
A couple of PDF exploits from iMessage and Signal leading to code execution, and an app that roots the phone. Also, they seem to have managed to make their malware survive a reboot, which is difficult. That's another reason why automatic reboots are considered a security feature: exploits leaving malware in-memory are a lot easier to build than malware that survives a full reboot, passing all stages of signature checks and validation.
Yes, why don't they just say it instead of posting videos. Opening a sinister PDF in iOS can give them access to what exactly? anything/everything? What iOS versions or devices, etc?
Someone correct me please if I’m wrong but is this because iOS doesn’t sandbox their processes? I think I read Safari in particular doesn’t, but wonder if this is system-wide issue.
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
iOS does sandbox their processes really well, that's why this hack was as difficult as it was. The Safari thing you're talking about is JIT - iOS disables all runtime code generation across the system except in Safari (for JavaScript), but this is a completely separate thing from sandboxing.
iMessage's attachment renderer is also sandboxed, actually. You might be talking about this vulnerability: https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero..., but the second half of the vulnerability exploit chain was finding a way out of the CoreGraphics (Apple's image rendering library) sandbox to hack the rest of the system.
It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware…
I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
- Increasing volumes of increasingly sneaky security exploits on one side
- A phone with your 2FA apps, your banking apps, your email apps on the other
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.
If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.
Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.
> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically
Come on. You know very well what we're talking about. This whole discussion started about software. Can I can load any app I want? Can I remove any app I want? I can remove their ads from my phone?
No of course not. I can put my app on my phone only if they bless it. I can't sell an app to another iPhone user and have them use it without apple's blessing. I can't remove the ads they keep spamming me for iCloud, or whatever service they release this month.
And please don't tell me it's because I get a license rather than a purchase since that's exactly my point. You wouldn't accept a license agreement for your table, and there would be outrage and major public backlash if any they tried; "Here's your made in china table, you are not allowed to place an American flag on it".
But because it's sprinkled with magic software dust, we have people in comment threads simping for the right of companies to do this to their customers.
If you have the skills to do it you can do everything you ask for there. If you don't then you should buy or make a device that suits your preferences. Vote with your wallet. Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone.
Would you buy a Honda Civic and cry that Honda is not permitting you to get the functions you wanted from it? If you have the skills, you can do whatever you want with your car physically and Honda won't stop you. If you don't have the skills, you have to buy a car that suits better your preferences. Whether that's hauling logs, having more horsepower, removing seatbelts, or whatever you like.
Nobody is stopping you from taking apart your iPhone and using AI to reverse engineer it and run custom software. Apple has made it as difficult as they can, but they haven't made it illegal, and they haven't even made it impossible, so from the law's perspective there is nothing to fix here. The law just sees yet another thing that nobody's bothered to do yet. The law wouldn't pass a regulation requiring Apple to make it easier to reverse engineer an iPhone any sooner than it would pass a regulation requiring Coca-Cola to make it easier to reverse engineer their formula.
Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.
> Hacking isn't a human right.
Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".
> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.
It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
Where would you point said wallet? Google isn't far behind Apple on this from, ahead in some ways, and many (all?) of the FOSS Linux powered phones cost even more than iPhones do.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
That holds only as long as people can afford the unsubsidized prices or do without. I'm not sure that wither are tenable given modern life at least in the US.
Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.
For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.
If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.
Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".
As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
An iOS jailbreak is trying to use an Apple device like a Linux device, with access to the filesystem and private APIs.
A Hackintosh is more like emulating the APIs (and an actual Apple serial number, which I guess they use to gate access to iCloud and iMessage) required to boot and run macOS on an Intel PC.
No, I get it, but it's still somewhat fallacious to say Apple doesn't care about "unauthorized" access to devices or services (whether or not you agree that such authority is reasonable or not).
I considered getting another pixel with grapheneOS or calyxOS a couple years ago. It's definitely an option, and you can get used-but-still-supported pixels for like $100.
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
I’ve never used iCloud. I hate Apple but I hate Google more. Instead of iCloud I use WebDav, CalDav, Bitwarden and NextCloud. Contacts, calendar, passwords and photos that I control. I recommend the same to others but I can count on one hand who has actually gone away from iCloud into such a setup.
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
369 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadhttps://xxcancel.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
Even of that were possible in the abstract, it would also have to be secure when running on hardware. I personally don’t believe that perfect security can exist or that we will reach that ideal of somehow being ahead of the curve. Patches will get better and faster, so will exploits. The stakes will grow. There will always be a human or budget issue.
The only way I see to mitigate the impact is to reduce our reliance on connected systems.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
God I hope this is sarcasm.
More recently: iPhone Duo Jailbreak vid https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50206680)
Like we did on HTC G1s in 2008
I want the freedom to install the OS I want on my phone. Now if I install a proprietary OS, I get what the developers of that proprietary OS choose to do. And if that proprietary OS does not give me root access, well, that's life.
Of course you do. You can run GrapheneOS, or LineageOS, postmarketOS, or mobian, or many others. All of those are open source, you can modify them as you want before you flash them.
What is your goalpost for a "serious OS"?
What market share proves is popularity. Which is important in an OS, but ridiculing other people's choices on grounds of market share doesn't seem very convincing to me.
Doesn't make you right. PostmarketOS and LineageOS are very much NOT the same OS in a different shirt.
Don't try to be provocative just because you were wrong, it doesn't help.
And that I disagree with all the whining about having root everywhere. If you are able to install your preferred OS on the device you own, then you can install one that has root, or fork an open source one and add root, or write your own.
Stop expecting differently.
Did people used to get like this about pocket calculators or digital watches? “Why am I forced to be limited to only the manufacturer’s firmware?”
I guess it is more debatable for a pocket calculator or a digital watch, but IMO when I buy a smartphone, it should not be illegal for me to install whatever I want on it. And the manufacturer should not add technical measures to prevent me from doing it.
That does NOT mean that the manufacturer should implement the features I want (like root access) or go out of their way to give me tools to install my favourite OS. Just that they should not prevent me from doing it (say if I manage to reverse engineer the hardware). Because I own the hardware I buy. At least I should.
If I buy a device, I want to be able to install whatever I want on it, and I want it to be legal for somebody else to sell something that I can run on it.
Probably your problem is that you have no phones, only someone's thin clients.
I even have realtime watch complications which no shipping app can have because of apple restrictions - developer mode lets you push complication updates realtime if you want.
I'll probably consider something more open next time I buy but just pointing out that right now with a developer account you're not actually _that_ restricted on iOS, the experience is better than you might think if you're making an app you never intend to ship.
I am not arguing Apple's restrictions are a good thing, if I were in charge I would in fact make allowing installing your own software on your own device a legal requirement of selling hardware, yet here we are.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
Hope you understand the difference.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
With today’s hardware I might have a different take - the 18 has more than enough hardware to be a laptop so maybe I’d use it for a docking mode. But my gut is I’d probably still want a laptop even then.
To me the upshot is : billions of development, software and hardware, have gone into the platforms - it’s hard to quickly make them significantly better.
iOS has come a long way since those days so a lot of the most common use cases of the past are no longer necessary. But the principle is the same - the hardware is a general-purpose computer but the software is locked down unnecessarily in many ways. Jailbreaking lets you do things that are outside of Apple's box.
The value of general computing freedom is like any other freedom: it is needed when it people are trying to express you.
And not just you. Anyone! So evaluating whether a freedom is necessary turns into a much more nebulous question of “would anyone really need this at one point now or in the future? Is this a thing we should protect in general, even if it does seem like we need it exactly now?”
For example, could Apple/Google at one point be strong armed (by any government) into including spyware onto all devices? And listeners to make sure no one ever says bad things about $DEAR_LEADER?
If the probability of yes is anywhere around 10% over the next decade, maybe it’s a good freedom to have.
I think, if a deal was struck with Saurik/Cydia Team and Apple to explicitly not do that, there was a much better chance the jailbreaking community would have held.
The downside to jailbreaking was often the instability but that was also back when the phones were way less powerful. Today, armed with LLMs, I would love to have root on my iPhone again. I'd love to rip out Siri and replace it with Claude Code or something like that.
[1]: https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/
Watusi was great, it let you disable the blue checkmark on Whatsapp. (Since been added as a setting)
I also used a tweak that let me auto-block certain phone prefixes that spammers used. Quite useful.
Was also useful that it allowed you to install multiple copies of an app (such as whatsapp), though no longer a need for that either.
I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.
2. run linux
3. run emulators
4. run VMs
5. install steam
6. make it a media server
etc
I’ve seen and used terminal applications from the App Store that seem to run a Linux VM locally, which would check off items 2 and 4.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
It seemed like a silly party trick with no practical purpose, and required the terminal to reset things back to normal so the phone was useful again. Why does anyone want this? Surely there are better uses than what was demoed?
I used to jailbreak during the first few years of iPhone. I remember being able to drag out from the bottom right corner of the screen to have a launcher, similar to the Dock, but with more stuff. But over time, the iOS got more features and the argument for jailbreaking became less compelling. This is especially true now that so much sensitive information is in our phones… so I trust all this stuff that effectively has root?
The evidence of hack is the feature.
I don't understand how in 2026 this is still a thing, we have many safe languages to parse/deserialize data. Why is it complicated?
Like what im mean is an attack vector shaped similar to https://pepsipu.com/blog/2026-10-switch2-jailbreak-ns2jb/ i.e. they compromised `fs` module that did not protect against a buffer attack(in memmov)? My understanding is that most core kernel modules are difficult to attack directly because of XOM, PAC and CFI like protections make it impossible for anyone/thing, so most likely only indirect attacks like above can work in such situations — there is a lot of incentive for teams like apple to do everything possible to improve security so i assume only these kind of difficult to find vectors remain.
We've also been working with closely with the Signal Foundation to help them reduce the attack surface.
It's not true that we don't want to make devices more secure. We do and it's why we do this research.
We also do want our name out there because we're having a lot of fun and want to share that with our friends and the rest of the world.
We're gonna publish more in the coming weeks. Writing these blog posts take time, and we've been busy with another PHP thing.
oh man...
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
4) The release schedule is laughable at best.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
You’re literally proving my point. This is built for yourselves not others.
You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
But what are the options?
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.
Come on. You know very well what we're talking about. This whole discussion started about software. Can I can load any app I want? Can I remove any app I want? I can remove their ads from my phone?
No of course not. I can put my app on my phone only if they bless it. I can't sell an app to another iPhone user and have them use it without apple's blessing. I can't remove the ads they keep spamming me for iCloud, or whatever service they release this month.
And please don't tell me it's because I get a license rather than a purchase since that's exactly my point. You wouldn't accept a license agreement for your table, and there would be outrage and major public backlash if any they tried; "Here's your made in china table, you are not allowed to place an American flag on it".
But because it's sprinkled with magic software dust, we have people in comment threads simping for the right of companies to do this to their customers.
Would you buy a Honda Civic and cry that Honda is not permitting you to get the functions you wanted from it? If you have the skills, you can do whatever you want with your car physically and Honda won't stop you. If you don't have the skills, you have to buy a car that suits better your preferences. Whether that's hauling logs, having more horsepower, removing seatbelts, or whatever you like.
Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.
> Hacking isn't a human right.
Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".
> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.
It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.
Running local models is getting -cheaper- every month in spite of rising hardware costs due to intelligence compression innovations like Bonsai2.
I build operating systems for a living using only consumer GPUs at home.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.
For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.
If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.
Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".
As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
An iOS jailbreak is trying to use an Apple device like a Linux device, with access to the filesystem and private APIs.
A Hackintosh is more like emulating the APIs (and an actual Apple serial number, which I guess they use to gate access to iCloud and iMessage) required to boot and run macOS on an Intel PC.
To be fair, Apple says the same thing about jailbreaking and how it may void warranty.
[0]https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
Why is that? Android being open source, GrapheneOS could fork if it became big enough?
> GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms
Official partnership with Motorola doesn't count as "other platforms" for you?
> "security" features
Your using quotes for "security" probably explains why you're fine with Murena.
> Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
I don't understand that. Do you believe GrapheneOS locks you out of your own OS? GrapheneOS is open source, you know that?
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
The procedure is quite straightforward.
https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk
https://magiskmanager.com/
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
Does this actually happen? They did not do that in the good old days.
I do know that some apps try to detect jailbreaks and annoyingly refuse to let people log in. Banking and such.
There was a website jailbreakme you simple slid a slider and you were done.
From Wikipedia
August 1, 2010, exploited a vulnerability in the FreeType library used while rendering PDF files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
https://calif.io/company
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219