I Bricked My iPod Touch
It’s now ridiculously easy to jailbreak your iPhone. I tried ZiPhone, and found that it involved about four clicks, including the download.
What happens is that the jailbreak installs a tool called an Installer. The installer smells strongly of Linux, which is a very good thing: there are “sources” of applications, and you get lists of interesting applications. I found and installed two excellent HP calculator emulators: a 12C (financial) and a 15C (scientific), which gave me great joy.
Plus it’s always great to stick it to the man.
I found, to my further delight, that the jailbreak process also installs a ssh daemon. So you can use your favorite ssh file-transfer client (I like cyberduck) to rummage about in your little machine
Great!
But there’s a huge security hole: the root password, with which you authenticate (as user “root”) is “alpine”. As any cleaning lady can tell you, default passwords are a massive security risk.
So I used the standard UNIX command-line utility passwd to set it to my standard, which is the string “GWBushStinks,” interleaved with the hex representation of the CRC of the page in question.
Worked great.
For a while.
After about a day, I found, to my horror, that my little machine had entered a freakish loop: terminate whatever application you’re in, and go to the home screen. Pop up an informative message explaining about rearranging the icons. I’d click “dismiss,” and find that all was well. For about ten seconds. Then the loop restarted.
Well, that’s OK, I’ll re-boot it: hold down the power button and the home button and count to ten.
That got its attention! It reloaded… but then went back into its idiot loop!
Horrors like this make one want to consider a reset, from iTunes. So I plugged it in, to see what was what.
NOT RECOGNIZED. My machine was too involved with re-starting its home screen to communicate with its master.
Bricked!