It’s never a dull moment for the jailbreak community, and this week, the spotlight isn’t so much on jailbreak tool releases as it is on a series of baseless DMCA takedowns that appear to be targeting jailbreak-oriented software and iOS security research.
The nonsense began with a Tweet shared by respected community hacker @siguza, who shared a special key comprised of a string of random letters and numbers that would look like gibberish to anyone who didn’t know exactly what it was they were looking at. Shortly after the Tweet fell victim to one of these requests, postings on the popular /r/jailbreak subreddit regarding checkra1n and unc0ver became victimized by similar activity:
Jailbreaking is 100% legal under an existing DMCA exemption, and for this reason, the events that have transpired in the past few days are particularly peculiar. It is true that Apple frowns upon the jailbreak community and that it does everything in its power to squander the community’s success, but even this type of behavior seems far-fetched for a company like Apple — especially given jailbreaking’s legal protections (thank you Saurik).
Instead, alternative theories have begun to surface, such as the idea that a third party unrelated to Apple could be trolling the internet and triggering these takedown requests. Unfortunately, the removal of postings on /r/jailbreak doesn’t include a record of who requested the takedown request, and so the source of this unexpected attack on the jailbreak community remains anonymous at the time of this writing.
Admins caring for the /r/jailbreak message board have since suspended jailbreak tool release threads on the platform until a resolve is met. Prominent hackers including axi0mX, Jay Freeman (Saurik), Luca Todesco, Pwn20wnd, and Will Strafach (chronic) are currently aware of the issue, with many denouncing the situation. Some are even threatening to be ready to get the EFF involved if need be.
The most recent update regarding the circumstances is available on/r/jailbreak here.
It’s worth noting that Apple released iOS 13.3 to the general public yesterday, and that the checkm8-based checkra1n jailbreak can jailbreak iOS 13.3 out of the box on handsets ranging from the iPhone 5s to the iPhone X. This surely puts Apple in an uncomfortable position, but it seems unlikely that it would compel Apple to stoop to this level.
It should be interesting to see how this pans out, but it should be noted that jailbreakers can still download and use their favorite jailbreak tools. As always, we advise downloading them from the official websites only for security reasons (especially in this time of apparent sabotage), which we’ve linked for you below:
How do you feel about the current circumstances? Discuss your thoughts in the comments section.