Jailbreak Firmware 3.1 on iPhone 3Gs: Understanding The Problems

You already know that when it comes to jailbreking the iPhone 3Gs, you wont have nothing but headaches. ECID file, IBSS and IBEC files… omg the pain!!! To tell you the truth i wasn’t quite sure what all this means , but i had a vague idea. I asked around, and decided to pass the informations to you guys, as simple and clear as possible.

As you know, i dont have a 3Gs yet, and if this BS will continue, and jailbreaking will continue to be such a hustle, i will pass this model and ill wait for the next model: 64 gigs. I really can live without upgrading ( the only feature that excites me, is that 3Gs can (natively) video record ). Anyway, all the information you will find in this article is related ONLY to the iPhone 3Gs. If you own a EDGE/3G you can chill and just read this for your own knowledge.

First of all you need to understand that Apple knows everything you do with your iPhone and iTunes. Yeah, not such a major privacy invasion as it sounds but still… No matter if you do a upgrade, recovery, downgrade of the firmware, the entire process starts to communicate with the Apple servers via iTunes. In case of the iPhone 3Gs, iTunes sends to Apple a certificate in order for the phone to be verified. If, during this “test” , the certificate fails to respond clearly , the server tells iTunes to return an error. If the certificate responds as it should, the firmware is installed flawlessly

With the release of the new iPhone firmware 3.1, Apple thought it would be cool to check for certificates for this version, and forget about the old ones. That’s cool, ok Apple do as you please, but … by taken this decision they make impossible to do anything that implies the old 3.o firmware. So the only thing you can do is to install the new 3.1 and most probably mess up your chances on jailbreaking your device.

Saurik, like a true gentleman and pedagogue that he is, will provide a full tutorial on how to downgrade from 3.1 to 3.0. Oh, what a joy. Yeah not so fast punk. The tutorial can apply ONLY to those that listened to FSMdotCOM and others (serious) iPhone sites out there and saved their iPhone 3Gs’s ECID on his server via Cydia.

So what does all this mean? It’s simple: if your momma thought you to listen to good advice and saved your ECID file you can go back from iPhone firmware 3.1 to 3.0 ( if you upgraded ), and not loose the privilege to jailbreak. Also if you saved your ECID, and didn’t upgrade you can jailbreak. If you didn’t save your ECID and was in a hurry to upgrade , well… you pretty much screwed at the moment.

So what can you learn from all this:

• i understand you (might be ) are paranoid. I am extremely paranoid when it comes to technology and privacy. But (sometimes) listen when somebody tells you to do something. We do it for you, not to steal shit from you. If you don’t understand what im saying, let me explain: got a lot of emails asking me if its save to upload the ECID file on Saurik’s server. What its his purpose? Can he steal something from us by doing this? Im not telling you to to trust everybody from now on. Just telling you to sleep with one eye HALF open, thats all.
• DO NOT panic!!! This BS is not definitive. What is made by human hand, is broken by (other) human hand. The iPhone Dev-Team can always come up with a solution. And im sure they are working very hard. The downside is, that this is all the info that we have right now.
• DO NOT fuck around with iTunes and firmwares. The smallest mistake can upgrade your 3Gs to 3.1 and… well just dont do it. Patience is a virtue.

[Via FSMdotCOM]