How Jailbreaking Works

of cigarettes. It's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it. Hey, guys, we're gonna talk today about something that we received tons and tons of requests for. Um. We received requests for this through email, through Twitter, through Facebook, through singing telegram. UM, there was I think someone hired a plane to write this across the sky above the house stuff works dot com headquarters. But here's here's just a quick list of some of the people who wrote in to ask us

about our topic today. They include Daniel, Jack, Jaden, Josh John, Miguel, Trey, Mark Nicholas, and Tom. That's just a selection. And we're going to talk today about jail breaking. Yes, And I don't believe that any of the people that you've listed. Uh, we're actually writing us from jail, so we must not be talking about prison cell know what we are talking

about specifically. Really, jailbreaking can can be a fairly general term, but it tends to focus more often than not on Apple products, and jailbreaking is all about how uh people who buy Apple products. You know, Apple has a very specific way that they like to to design their products. They want to design very beautiful, useful, uh, user friendly products that quote unquote just work well. In order to do that, they have to have control. Yeah, Apples kind

of big on the control thing. Yes, not necessarily what you say and do under normal operation, but really the they want control of the experience for you, which is why if you want to buy something for your iPhone, iPod or i've had, uh, you should be buying it through the iTunes store according to Apple, because that means that they have had someone look at it and say, yes, it works as advertised, and we approve of this. Here

it goes, and they put it in the store. Theoretically, it also helps them keep out things like malware, right it would it would prevent them if they have verified that it is not dangerous for you. To run that on your eye device. Um, you know they should be able to you should be able to buy something from the the app store and go, I know that this is safe and not going to cause any harm or make a brick out of my iPhone, right, So it's all about that's their argument. Yeah, exactly, that's one of

their arguments. But that's a big one, that's the main one they use. Yeah, So if we're going to make a comparison, let's say that you go to a an electronics store, specific kind of electronic store, so you know, we'll just call it OWLS Electronics, and you go to

OWLS Electronics and you buy a stereo. IL cut you a deal, by the way, and you take that stereo home, and then you want to play music on it, and then you discover that Owl's the stereos from Owls Electronics will only play music that was purchased from OWLS Electronics. That's why I'll cut you such a deal. So you can't go buy music anywhere else. You have to go back to OLS Electronics if you want to be able to play it on your stereo. And not all the

artists are are are carried by OWLS Electronics. So there's some music you're just not going to get to listen to, no matter what. Same sort of thing here, except instead of music, we're talking about apps, applications. Little well, minish your applications if you prefer. But these are the various games and and uh and and apps that you can

run on iPhones certain well iPod touches in the iPad uh. Now, normally, if you just go to an Apple store and you buy one of these products you taken home, the only apps that you have at your disposal will be the ones that are carried in the iTunes store. You can't go and find them anywhere else. Right, as long as you don't jail break your device, you are limited to what is in the app store. Now, there are plenty of apps in the app store. Here's another one of

Apple's arguments. So whyever would you want to go outside the app store? Well, part of it is that control system we were talking about. Apple has a very um it's hard to say if it's strict, because it's so it's not understood very well. Apple's policies about what can and cannot go into the App Store seem to at

least be somewhat veiled in secrecy. You'll see some apps getting an approval and go into the app store and everything seems to be fine, and another app that, as far as you can tell, meets the same criteria as the first one will get denied. And sometimes app is forthcoming about why a particular app did or did not make it into the store, and sometimes they're not. So

that's this can be a very frustrating experience. And if you're the type of user who does not want to have which apps you can and can't use dictated to you by the manufacturer, you may be tempted to find a way to get around that. And that's what jailbreaking is. I mean, we've that was a roundabout way to get to it, but jailbreaking is essentially hacking your device so that you can put whatever apps it is capable of

running on there without it being dictated to you by Apple. Yes, and um, it's a very very low level system hack, so I mean it's not you're you're not messing with the very top layer of software. You're getting into the system software to do this, which means it could be dangerous. Yeah, there's actually, uh, here are the arguments that Apple puts forth as to why you should not jail break your phone.

Argument number one that you pointed out that the app store already has thousands of apps in it which have passed presumably have passed Apple quality control, so they are going to do what they're supposed to do and they're safe to use, so you don't have to worry about it screwing up your phone. That's argument number one is safety. Argument number two is uh not you know that the the experience is going to It's not none of the apps that you're going to get in the Apple Store

going to affect the other apps you have. Whereas if you jail break your phone so that it does stuff that it's capable of doing but was not meant to do, um, one app could screw up another app so that you end up with essentially a broken device. That's that's where you're getting towards the bricked version. UH. Argument number three it violates warranty. Yes, so if you were to try and circumnavigate this whole UH system that Apples put in place that restricts you to the apps in the iTunes store,

you violated your warranty. And if something goes Apple is not obligated to help you. So, uh, that's another issue that's putting the fear into the user. And the fourth one I think I'm on number four now is that until recently, Apple also said that it was a copyright violation, which no longer necessarily no no longer applies in the United States. In the United States, that's not the issue anymore. But it used to be that Apple would say that if you were to jail break your phone so that

you could access unauthorized apps, you were violating copyright. And we currently specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, yes, d m c A. But section twelve oh one A one, Title seventeen of the United States Code on Copyright now says, and this this is a direct quote, persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls until the conclusion of the next rulemaking. And then it lists

the six different classes. The second class is computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications. When they have been lawfully obtained with computer programs on the telephone handset, which is a long way of saying, if you if you create a software program that allows you to break this this restriction on

a handset device, that's okay. It is not violating copyright. There is a word in there that I would like to point out, what's that lawful? Yeah, that gets tricky, I mean, And it's essentially what this does is help take some of the teeth out of what Apple tells you, and that Apple's saying, hey, this violates copyright. Therefore it's against the law. Therefore you are breaking the law if you jail break your phone. This makes it a little muddier where it's it's like, well, now it doesn't sound

like it's legal. Now Apple can still create a a user agreement that states that you do not jail break your phone, and if you violate that, then Apple can still deny you your your support, you know, and still said that it violates warranty. It's not like it's a get out of jail free card for jail breaking. It's just that you're not going to get prosecuted in a in a in a legal system for creating distributing a jail breaking program. Well, there's another aspect to that as well.

What's that? Um? From what I understand, if you jailbreak your eye thing that it will used eye device earlier. UM. If you if you do decide to jail break your your device, UM, it could allow you to pirate applications. Um. Because see what's going on when you buy something from the app store is uh, there is an embedded layer of rights metadata involved with that that says that you own the license to run this on your I device.

And uh, you know, once you have removed, once you have jailbroken that and you have freed it from Apple's control, then you can install stuff from other people's that other people have bought on there as well. So one of the things that I have seen in doing research for this podcast and comments on on blog posts and articles is, you know, from developers who are you know, the upside being hey, you've got a lot more freedom now, the downside being, hey, don't copy our apps by them. You know.

That's that's the that's the thing is so you jail breaking is not a a It frees you to use whatever you want to on your device, but it doesn't give you a right to go around and pirate apps. Right, you can't go you can't just go and steal stuff that's that's legitimately for sale. Um. What you can do is you can go to various directories that have apps that were never included in the in the store to begin with, and access those and in some cases you

may be purchasing them. In some cases it may be a free download, kind of like it is in the iTunes store. It's just it's just that in this this case, these are applications that, for one reason or another were never approved or perhaps were never even submitted for approval. It's some some developers, you know, may not want to

go through the uh the process, the approval process. And uh, you know you've got to remember also that the customers who have iPhones that you know they've just put through the jailbreaking process, that's a small number compared to the overall number of of iPhone, iPod and iPad users. UM. So, I mean, it's it's not like if you are a developer and you decide to create an application and you're going to offer it up for people who have uh

use jail break to free up their phones. Uh, you do that knowing that you're hitting a smaller audience than you would if you went through the quote unquote legitimate process. Right. I'd also like to point out that jail breaking is not unlocking, and it's not the same thing as unlocking. Yeah, Unlocking your phone means that you have you have enabled it so that it will work on multiple carriers or on a different carrier than the one that was associated

with your phone. So, United States, the iPhone is exclusive to a T and T. Uh. If you were to unlock your phone, you could theoretically have it run on T Mobile because T Mobile uses the same general technology. Now granted it's same technology, but different frequencies. So some of them are they don't they There's a couple of them overlap. I think one or two of them overlap. But at any rate, the you know, you couldn't have it run on Verizon or Sprint just because you're talking

about two different cellular technology. Yeah, G S M versus C d M A So uh, Yeah, unlocking is different from jailbreaking. However, if you do want to unlock your phone, you pretty much have to jail break it first. So how do you jail break your phone? Well, it all depends upon or or really your eye device to use your phrase. It depends on which device you have, and it depends on which version of the iOS you're running.

Because here's here's how this works is that you have hackers who examine the code that is in this operating system and they see the way to to create shortcuts and workarounds so that you can uh circumvent the whole

iTunes exclusivity part of owning these devices. Um. Once they find a way of doing that, they create a program that again kind of creates this shortcut for you, and then, uh, what will happen is Apple will take a look at and see that people have found workarounds, and then when they start updating the OS, they will patch those holes, which means that you start all over again. The hacker has to find a new route to accomplish the same thing.

And you've got dozens of different people working on this independently of each other. So there are many, many, many versions of jailbreaking software out there, written by different people for the various operating systems. And I'll by the way, if you do jail break your phone, one of the downsides, um, because we some of the stuff. Apple says, it's absolutely true, right,

like you could download an app that's harmful to your phone. Theoretically, yes, I mean there are two different viruses that have come out for the that that we're designed for the iPhone, but would only affect your phone if you had a jailbroken iPhone, so you could get a virus. You could break your phone, which is where it freezes and it becomes unresponsive. I'll tell you a little bit about how you can fix your phone, by the way, if it is bricked. UM, it's pretty In most cases, it'll work

and it's pretty simple. It does mean that you'll lose some data though, UM. But another downside is that when Apple updates its operating system, you're left out. If you've decided to jail break your your device, be haus you can't. If you update your your OS, it's going to UM, it's going to remove the jailbreak feature on your phone,

or it's going to break it one of the two. Um. But there's a good chance we'll do is they'll just wipe all that off your device, so you'll lose all the apps that you have and you won't be able to download apps independent apps anymore. Until someone comes up with a new way to jailbreak and again you have to just start all over again from scratch. Yeah. That's one of the sort of weird things about this is once your phone or or pod or pad is unlocked,

I'm sorry, jail broken. Um, you can unjail break it. Yeah. Um. Actually, and returning to the original thing, the thing is that when when you when you do this, you're going to lose your data. Yeah, so it's it's always a good idea if you're gonna mess with this, to back up your your data before you jail break it or unjail break it if you need to, because say something goes awry and it's just not your device is not working well,

but it's jailbroken. If you take it to Apple and ask them for help, they will say no because they will say that you violated or if they if they don't know, what they'll do is they'll immediately reset your phone to factory settings end up deleting all that stuff. Anyway. Um, I assume that it probably has still a lot to do with the humor of the person who is talking to you. Yeah. Yeah, Some some people, like disgruntled Apple

employees might think it's funny. Uh. Still, if you're gonna get your phone fixed, there's a good chance that you're not gonna keep the jail breaking stuff. You'll have to fix it or they will do it for you. Yeah. Yeah, so you'll have to start over if you want to

go back that route. Um. So Yeah, if you don't mind the fact that you're not going to get updates from Apple on their OS, you can just keep your device the way it is forever and you can go and download whatever apps you want from whichever independent sources there are, um and just not worry about it. But most people, I think, when they find out there is a slightly better version of whatever it is they have and it's available to them, um, they jump on that.

So like when the new OS comes out and a new feature is added, I think most owners want access to that feature. So it becomes a battle of well, do I resign myself to the fact that I'm going to have to start the jailbreaking process all over again and I may have to wait for someone to find those shortcuts for me um, Or do I go ahead and uh and and ignore the update and just keep my jail broken phone and realize that I'm not going

to have some functionality that other people do. That's true. Well, and in some cases Apple has actually followed a jail break and app um basically the functionality provided by those to the operating system itself. Um. An example of this, I believe is theming where you can actually, you know, put a different skin on it and you know, now it's part of the OS, but before it wasn't and if you wanted to do that, you needed to jail

break your your device. Yeah, things like um, you know, uh, running multiple applications at the same time would be another good example. Or tethering or cut and paste. These are all things that the phone, the hardware was capable of doing. But for one reason or another, and there are different reasons depending upon which which feature you're talking about, Apple did not implement them right away in the earliest models. In many cases it was a battery issue. In some

cases it was a security issue. Yes, And I would like to add that my use of tethering there was not is still not approved by Apple, nor is it approved by a T and T, So it is not It is something that has been enabled by jailbreaking, but is still not part of the true Apple Os right. And in case you're you don't know what tethering is, that's when you are using your your device as essentially

a WiFi like a moodem. You're using it like a mootem. So, um, you might have your laptop and you're not at a WiFi hot hotspot, so you use your iPhone to get data over the three G network and transfer you act as a modem to your computer. That's what tethering is. And you can do that either by you know, some will do it through a Bluetooth connection or a WiFi connection or even a physical connection like a USB cable. Um, So tethering doesn't have to require a physical tether. Just

so you know. The two ways that you generally jail break your phone, because we've talked a lot about what it is, but not about how you do it. Um. And now, assuming you're not a programmer, so assuming you're not someone who's doing this him or herself like going in and physically looking at code and creating hacks to get around it. You just want to quicken and easy

solution to jail break your device right there. They're generally two different methods depending upon uh where you're getting your your jail break software from UM, and there are tons. Like I said, there's dozens and dozens of hackers who are working on this, so there are lots of different variations. One of those would involve going to a website on your computer and finding the jail break software, running it on your computer, and then hooking up your phone and

UM and putting it into recovery mode. And instead of recovering the normal OS the way it would in UH if it were just a regular recovery UM, it's going to pull the jailbreaking software onto the phone and allow you to access uh those those apps. So that's that's one way of doing it. And the way you put your device and recovery mode is generally you hold the home button down and then you dock it with your

computer as while you're holding down the home button. In some cases you may have to hold down a power button too, but that's what allows it to load that information. It's almost like you know, you're you're booting it directly from the the application that's on your computer. Yeah, again, back it up before you do this, right. Yeah, you can use iTunes to back up your iPhone for example, But the other way you can do this, which is actually even easier because I mean that's not hard really.

You go, you find the right website. You've pretty much automated. Yeah, you find the right website, you find the right application, you download it to your computer, and you run it while your phones and recovery your set. But there's one that's even easier than that, which is, um, this is what jail break me uses. Uh. You can you can use Safari on the device to navigate to a website that, like jail break me, that has the jail breaking uh software designed as a an app that can run on

your device through the web. Before you pause the podcast and do that, listen to the rest of what we're going to say at any rate, So you can go directly to this website and uh and run the thing and it'll it'll install the jail breaking software on your phone directly. You don't have to hook it up to

your computer first. UM. Yeah, okay. So one of the things you need to know before you do this is buy or be ware, UH you never you need to make sure if you are going to jail break your phone, do some research on the various uh, the various options you have out there UM try and find some message boards find out whether or not this is a reliable

way if people have experienced problems UM if UM. You know, it may be that in some cases that the hack code it just isn't up to snuff, because not everyone's a great hacker, you know, the people who design these things have varying levels of skill. And in some cases it's an elegant solution that works very well, and your phone is not gonna behave oddly and everything should still work properly, and you'll still even be able to get apps from iTunes. You know, you'd be able to purchase

them through their ideally without any issues. But that's not necessarily the case with all of them, so a little research goes a long way. Yes, and UM I should point out that what's going on with jailbreak me is is not and and this is not to implicate them in doing anything uh dirty other than you know, jail breaking, but they are the The developer who created jailbreak me found a security flaw and the Safari browser, which is

how he's able to do this. As it turns out, it's it's the way that UM the iOS handles UM pdf files and UM. This is the thing. As it turns out, you need to be aware if you are using um iOS three or four. UM. You know, they're

they're basically two different vulnerabilities. One of them is the way that the Safari browser UM runs pds when it runs across it, So be careful when you download PDFs with uh uh with Safari as actually anything that comes from a site that you're not familiar with UM and uh, you know that's just apparently that that has to do with what's going on. But he's fooling the computer into doing or i should say, the device into doing something

that it normally wouldn't do through a security vulnerability. And that's why you're you're able to do it, and you can do it right now at least as of the recording of this podcast. But I'm sure it won't be long before apples fixed. Well, I mean, it's a security flaw. It should be patched regardless, but but yeah, it's it's it's probably once they patch that up, they'll have to find a different way to do it. Yeah. Yeah, and

that case they're aware. In that case, it may go back to the point where the only real way to do it is to to download the application to a computer first. Um, and that and that like again, like again, I say, uh, um, jailbreak me is not not up to anything no good, So don't don't worry about them. Other people, however, could be could be yeah, so and and just for you to get an idea of what kind of stuff could be no good. Uh, it's not

just that they could maybe screw up your phone. It's that they could perhaps mine data from you over your phone. So not just your information, but any information that might be transferred over that device through various means, be at email, instant messenger, web browsing. Uh. You know, just think about that. I mean, think about anything that would that you would transfer over your phone could theoretically be intercepted with the

proper uh malware app out there. Um So, once you, once you have jail broken your phone, you're gonna need a directory for those apps that we've been talking about, these these independent apps. UM. I think one of the most popular ones is Sidia. Just see why d I ah, it seems to be the one that I think most people prefer. Now. I don't own an iPhone, so I

have no need for this jail breaking business. Um So I can't tell you about Sidia from a personal standpoint, but that does seem to be the one that I think is favored by most of the writers I read from what I from what I've seen there, it's probably the most popular. And again it doesn't it's sort of like an alternative app store, but it doesn't prevent you from using the actual Apple App Store. Right. So I did mention the possibility of breaking, and that it's not

that hard to fix most of the time. Here's so let's say your let's say you've jail broken your phone and it's frozen, it's become unresponsive. You don't want to take it into the Apple Store because you've already violated your warranty. Yeah, one thing that you might try, and this will work in most cases, is again hold down that home button. And then once you've held it down and it's uh, you know, the little screen comes up.

You you connected to the dock, connected to your computer, and what will have is iTunes will see the phone and they'll see it'll see it that it's in recovery mode, and it will then load the latest version of whatever the firmware is for that phone or other device, iPad or iPod and then that will reset it. You'll you'll lose some data, it won't be jailbroken anymore. Um, but it will work, which is probably more important anything else. I got that, by the way, from Digital Trends. I

should say Digital Trends had that specific fix listed. And uh so if you have experienced that problem, that is one potential solution. And the other nice thing about that is that unless um, unless the Apple workers are particularly vigilant, uh, if you have cleared that, if you've got into recovery mode that way and reset the firmware, uh, there's a good chance they won't know that you've violated your warranty.

Not that I writ not that I'm condoning that, but that there's a there's a pretty good chance no one would ever know that you had jail broken your phone in the first place. So if if you have come to the conclusion after that rains that maybe it wasn't worth it, Like maybe the apps you saw weren't really your thing in the first place. Um. You know, most users I think would be satisfied with what's in the

iTunes store. It's really kind of power users and hackers, those type of people who really want to have more freedom with their devices, who are more interested in h in jailbreaking. Um, So if you do decide that's not worth it, you can recover your phone and there's there's a good chance that it's going to be safe enough so that you know, nobody's the wiser. Um. Not guaranteed though, So don't don't be standing at the Genius bar yelling.

But Jonathan Strickland said that you wouldn't even notice because you're stupid, because, uh, that's not cool, dude. Don't bring me into it, man, don't I don't even own an iPhone, doesn't know. I have Android, which has a totally different set of problems but doesn't need to be jailbroken. Now, it doesn't need to be jail broke in, but it has its own issues. Uh. No, no system out there is perfectly. You just have to decide which one is

best for you exactly. Uh So, anyway, that's our jailbreaking podcast. I'm sure some of you are out there kind of wondering why we didn't talk specifically about the steps you need to take to jail break your phone. And that's again because each one is different, and in most cases there's someone out there who has done all the work for you. You just have to find the right the

right solution for the particular OS you are running. Um and most of you are probably running the latest O S anyway, so that's not that hard unless you're running an old device that can't run the latest OS. Case you're probably running the latest one that is possible on that device. Yeah what what I put touch? Do you have? That would be the first generation? Yeah? Okay, so there's no I OS four? Does that? Things? Playing music? Anyway?

If you guys have any questions, concerns, comments, you have some topics you want to suggest to us so that we can get yet another huge avalanche ship requests and finally given, if you could write us our email addresses tex stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text stuff hs wsr handle and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash text stuff h s W. For more on this

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