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Chinese hackers jailbreak iOS 9 despite Apple’s best attempts to stop them

It has only been 19 days since iOS 9 emerged into the world.

 

Patrick Howell O'Neill

Tech

Posted on Oct 14, 2015   Updated on May 27, 2021, 7:41 pm CDT

One month after the release of iOS 9, Apple‘s newest operating system has been jailbroken.

Chinese hackers known as Team Pangu released the jailbreak early on Wednesday morning, and it quickly spread from China across the English-speaking Web. The jailbreak, said to work on all stable versions of iOS 9, is now available on Pangu’s jailbreak page.

People have celebrated the jailbreak’s release in a variety of language, attesting to the widespread popularity of jailbreaking iOS devices.

Jailbreaking iOS removes the considerable limits and rules that Apple places on its operating system, essentially breaking iPhones, Apple Watches, and iPads out of the company’s walled garden. It’s legal in the United States and most of the rest of the world, but Apple does its best to fight it. iOS 9 was rumored to include new security measures that would combat the practice. Apparently, those measures didn’t work.

Today’s jailbreak came at breakneck speed, just 19 days after the release of the iPhone 6s, the first phone to carry iOS 9. By comparison, jailbreaks for the iPhone 5 only emerged after more than three months.

The pace of jailbreaking has picked up considerably with each release since the fifth-generation phone, but it’s still not as fast as the jailbreaking of the original iPhone, which took place just days after its release.

H/T Forbes | Illustration by Max Fleishman 

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*First Published: Oct 14, 2015, 8:16 am CDT