The Library of Congress has deemed that jailbreaking your iPhone in order to install applications not approved by Apple and/or to unlock is legal under new rules announced today.

According to the Associated Press, the decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works. Every three years, the Library of Congress authorizes such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material. Another exemption will allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.
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Geohot has shut down the iPhone blog he used to announce and release jailbreaks over the past few years.

Visiting the site now says, “This blog is open to invited readers only”.

This comes after his recent announcement of achieving a jailbreak for the iPhone 4 without plans for public release was met with a lot of negativity.

His last update to the blog read:

Sorry, this post was probably a bad idea. Next time I won’t say anything. I miss when this blog was actually about technical things(I’ve been reacting too much to the feedback, which led it to the place it’s in now). I didn’t fully realize most of the current scene don’t care unless they are getting something. Now I do. It’s late tonight, I’ll think about what to do about this in the morning.
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Is this the honest-to-goodness iPhone 4 jailbreak we’ve been waiting for, or just another userland JB? It’s hard to say from here… but either way, don’t expect Geohot to release it into the wild. In a mildly jaded blog post, the original iPhone hacker makes it clear that whatever he did here was for his own amusement, and judging by the title of that entry (“Meh”) the whole breaking-and-entering bit isn’t giving him quite the same chuckles it used to. That’s a shame, but we hear the iPhone Dev Team is making progress apace, so let’s leave Geohot to tackle one of his other promised hacks, mmmkay?

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Before you get excited, this is a news piece, not a notice of release. Patience is a virtue.

It’s been clear these days in jailbreaking land, as far as any new “ra1n” goes. However, that doesn’t mean there is nothing going on. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Geohot has been rather quiet on Twitter these days, keeping to himself, however, behind the scenes, GeoHot has been hard at work creating, what I am starting to think, will be the next, best, jailbreaking tool.

George Hotz (Geohot) has been in France recently, taking part in the Nuit Du Hack conference. Started in 2003 by Hackerz Voice team, and inspired by world famous DEF CON, “Nuit du Hack” is one of the oldest Read the full story

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If you needed any more proof that Apple’s lame cat-and-mouse game with the iPhone jailbreak community has only served to increase the scene’s resourcefulness and creativity, look no further than the iDongle, a slick piece of hacker-made hardware that can jailbreak and activate an iPhone 3GS or iPod touch running OS 3.1.2 just by plugging it into the dock connector. What’s more, it allows a jailbroken iPhone to be rebooted away from a computer, which is currently a problem for Read the full story

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There’s no stopping the eternal tug-of-war between the powers that be and the hackers that will, and for the time being it looks like things are back in the hands of the hackers. As of noon today giddy jailbreakers can take the next step and go full-on with blacksn0w, the unlock for the latest 05.11.07 baseband (with tethering enabled to boot). And if that weren’t enough, it looks like blackra1n RC3 is alive as well, with Mac and Windows support. What are you waiting for? Hit the read link Read the full story

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