iPhone Dev Team's Pwnage Release Delayed

The highly anticipated iPhone hacking/unlocking/jailbreaking/and more tool, Pwnage, scheduled for release yesterday by the iPhone Dev Team, has been delayed. According to the Dev Team, the release has been delayed in order to clarify potential legal issues with the release. Despite inquiries to the contrary -- which suggested the new iPhone 2.0 firmware beta (recently made available to Apple-authorized iPhone developers only) would be released with Pwnage -- the Dev Team is stressing the fact that materials copyrighted by Apple (or otherwise) will at no time be included in software released by their team. The team has also decided to delay the release in order to further add features to Pwnage.

Pwnage is a new piece of software in a long line of iPhone jailbreaking, hacking, unlocking, and customization tools released by members of the "unofficial" iPhone development community. Each of these tools attempts to more completely alter the iPhone in order to provide the user the most freedom with their device as possible.

What is unique about Pwnage, is that once "pwned", a pwned iPhone will be able to be updated through the normal iTunes upgrade process and remain in a jailbroken/hacked state, unbeknown to iTunes. This marks, by far, the easiest method of maintaining a "hacked" iPhone yet. Pwnage works on iPhone firmware version 1.2 and is expected to support 2.0 as well.

• The software is a self contained application (for MacOS 10.4.x and 10.5.x) that allows all current models of the iPhone device to be “Pwned”. This term (in relation to this software) refers to the patching of the stock bootloader so that it will allow the execution of unsigned code and circumvent code-signing checks. “Pwnage” only needs to be performed once to allow the additional features on the iPhone.

• The application also processes and modifies existing Apple archives so that unique, custom rolled firmware bundles can be installed onto the “Pwned” iPhone directly from iTunes.

• These ”.ipsw” files can be created and patched by the application to allow third-party modifications such as activation, application installation, baseband modification, custom phone graphics etc.

• The tool works automatically on box-fresh (OTB) 1.1.3 and 1.1.4 iPhones and requires minimal interaction from the user.

The iPhone Dev Team has not indicated exactly how long e release of Pwnage will be delayed, stating only that the software will be released "sometime this week". Rumors floating around the web suggest that release may come as early as today.

When released, Pwnage will be available for Windows, OS X 10.4.x, and OS X 10.5.x.