"SHAtter" Will Jailbreak iPod Touch 4G, iPhone 4, and iPad

That's right, you read that correctly. In the recent flurry of the iOS 4.1 release, there has been some great breakthroughs in regards to jailbreaking your iDevice. posixninja and pod2g have discovered the first exploit of the S5L8930 chip, aka, the A4, which allows the use of unsigned code execution in order to create a tethered jailbreak, which as far as current hardware released is concerned, a jailbreak for life. This particular chip is used in the iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod Touch 4G. This same vulnerability is the one that was discovered independently by geohot, who abandoned the community a few months ago. However, his name lives on through new jailbreaks today, including the Playstation 3.

Respected members of the Dev Team, like MuscleNerd have also confirmed that this new exploit does indeed work on all of the currently available devices, and works with the newest iOS 4.1. He says on twitter, "That latest exploit from @pod2g confirmed to work beyond iPhone4...also on at least iPad and yesterday's iPod4G too ", which is a great confidence booster for the skeptical.

One should note however, that not everything is publicly available yet. These guys are hard at work trying to get everything ready. So if your thinking to update to iOS 4.1 assuming there is a jailbreak, you should slow down, as things take time and need to be released properly. Remember, what they are talking about here is a Tethered jailbreak, but that doesn't mean an untethered one will follow suit, as this exploit is an initial starting point for all new untethered exploits to come as well. My guess would be that when a release does come around, it will include the ability to be untethered, otherwise it would be much more ideal to stay on iOS 4.0.1.

Using this method means that Apple cannot fix this exploit without updating it's hardware first, just as they did with the iPhone 3GS bootrom exploit. So until they update the hardware, there is hope for all of us. Does this mean you should go out and buy your new iDevice before they fix this? It's not going to be any time soon that Apple will be doing hardware updates, so don't get too worried just yet.