Just short of four months after its initial release, Apple's iPad 2 can now be safely jailbroken. Comex's long awaited JailbreakMe 3.0 was finally made available to the hacking public. Earlier this morning, users going to JailbreakMe.com from their iDevice were not greeted with the usual "It's been far too long" and instead were shown a link to begin the jailbreak process. It's dead simple to install and requires the iPad 2 to be running version 4.3.3.
Cydia developer Jay Freeman, popularly known as Saurik, tweeted earlier today that users may want to wait a week before performing the jailbreak because the process Comex has posted includes a weak iOS kernel. A tweet by Comex also points out that JailbreakMe may be down periodically due to web caching issues, and no major problems have been reported with the jailbreak itself. Users of iOS 5 beta will have to restore to 4.3.3 in iTunes before they will be able to Jailbreak. Other than these minor issues, jailbreaking an iOS device is now as easy as pointing mobile Safari to that web address and clicking the install button.
Users of all iOS devices that plan to, either now or in the future, jailbreak should take this opportunity to save their SHSH blobs before iOS 5.0 Gold Master is released, especially the iPad 2 3G. It's been reported that Apple has closed a loophole that would allow users to restore to an older firmware in iTunes using old SHSH blobs presumably in order to jailbreak the device. The general consensus is that once iOS 5 is officially released, iTunes will only allow users to restore to the latest official Apple-approved firmware by checking the SHSH blob and the jailbreak method would be blocked. Windows software iFaith is an easy option for most users to capture their current SHSH blob and save it locally to a disk in case it is needed in the future to restore jailbreak friendly firmware. iOS enthusiast site HermanBanken has a great FAQ that outlines all of this more thoroughly.
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