Jailbreakers Finally Crack iPhone 4S, iPad 2 with iOS 5.01

Tom and Jerry would be proud. The cat-and-mouse game between Apple and jailbreak hackers just went another round, with Apple’s only two A5-devices getting a jailbreak for iOS 5.01. The jailbreak  for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 was long-awaited, considering the jailbreak for iOS 5.01 for non A5-devices came a month ago already. Here are some quick details …

The Chronic Dev Team announced the iOS 5.01 jailbreak for A5 devices is finally here. So what took them so long? The Chronic Dev Team blog explains it wasn’t exactly a “walk in the park” this time, thanks to Apple’s A5 processor, which proved more difficult to circumnavigate via traditional exploit methods.

The Chronic Dev Team would also like to thank you — that is, assuming you helped out. Remember when Chronic Dev Team asked the Internet to redirect crash data away from Apple and off to them for analysis? That wild idea actually worked.  More than 10 million people agreed to donate their diagnostic information for jailbreaking purposes, which, combined with the aforementioned hacking “dream team,” made this hack possible.

Hacking the iPhone may not seem like a large accomplishment, but it proves two interesting things: First, the jailbreak community is large, thriving and impressively unified. Second,  Apple is getting increasingly more protective over its devices. Considering Apple has made it so prohibitively difficult to put Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Apple makes it equally impossible to jailbreak through an encryption chip or something similar. In the meantime, head on over and download the jailbreak application now. It’s Windows- and Mac-compatible, with Linux coming soon.