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Last last week, Chronic Dev Team hacker Joshua Hill announced the release of greenp0ison RC5, the long-awaited untethered jailbreak for Apple’s iOS 4.2.1, which was released for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in November of last year. Hill indicated that the release of a Windows version of the Mac-only jailbreak was imminent, and his team delivered on that promise Saturday evening.
The jailbreak is functionally identical to previous greenp0ison versions. You plug in your iDevice, close iTunes and fire up the software. You then follow on-screen instructions which tell you to press the device’s Home and Sleep buttons in a specific time and sequence combination. The jailbreaker takes over from there, spitting reams of scary-looking code onto the screen before rebooting to a freshly jailbroken iThing. Installing Cydia is the next step, accomplished easily enough with the jailbreak-provided Loader app. It was here, however, that jailbreakers ran into problems over the weekend.
Cydia was running slower than usual yesterday and into today, with intermittent access to several of the app store’s most popular “sources.” Put simply, Cydia “sources” are where the content that you download comes from. Two of the app’s default sources in particular — apt.modmyi.com and BigBoss — were coming back with error messages indicating they were non-functional. Since many of the apps available from those sources must be paid for, you can start to see where this might be a problem.
It seems that the influx of fresh jailbreakers may have been the root of the issues. The ModMyI twitter feed offered the following update: “To rephrase the last tweet – TON of traffic coming from the new jailbreak. We can patch, not “fix” – repo will be hit and miss today.” So fear not, brave jailbreakers. Especially you first-timers who don’t necessarily understand what’s going on. Things are wonky right now because of the newly released, highly anticipated jailbreak… and it’s all your fault.
