It’s official: the iPod Touch is hacked, and it’s running 3rd party apps. I’ve gone through the process and faced my fair share of issues as well as resolved them. Here I’ll discuss the process and how to get over some of the main problems you may encounter during the hack.

The instructions I used are posted at the iPod Touch dev wiki. They’ve asked the media not to directly link to the site, so if you really want to hack your iPod Touch right now, check out the MacRumors iPod Touch forum. You’ll find that the instructions are linked to quite often there. If you’re unwilling to give the hour to three hour long process a shot, the hacking community is working to release easier instructions/tools for the general public.

There’s something you should know before trying to hack your iPod Touch: While messing with your iPod Touch could cause all sorts of unfixable and fixable damage, if you stay within the confines of the Touch Dev wiki instructions, you should be able to restore your iPod’s firmware through iTunes at any point.

To begin, you first have to point your mobile Safari browser to http://jailbreak.toc2rta.com. Don’t do this unless you’re going to go through with the whole hack as it will make your iPod incompatible with iTunes without further work.

Once complete, jailbreaking the iPod is fairly simple. You have to download a few pieces of software, such as iPHUC and libreadline. I didn’t hit a snag throughout the jailbreaking portion. If you follow the instructions to the “t”, you shouldn’t encounter any problems through the jailbreaking section.

Up next, you have to install SSH. This is where many people encounter their biggest problem. When trying to SSH into the iPod Touch, you may encounter a “Connection Refused” error or a timeout error. The only way I found to alleviate this problem is to start over fresh. Make sure you restore your iPod to the 1.1.1 firmware and delete any modified files you placed on your desktop. Start over entirely! Don’t use anything you used before.

After getting past SSH came the small snag I encountered while attempting to SFTP into the Touch. Make sure you follow the instructions thoroughly, but don’t use the username they tell you to use to connect into the Touch. The dev team instructions tell you to use “root” with a lowercase “r”, but I find I have to use “Root” with a capital “R”. Also, I can’t say why, but, despite the fact that I carefully typed out the password, which is “alpine”, it refused to let me through. I resorted to retyping it in over and over again, and, after some 20 odd tries, it let me through.

If you’ve gotten this far, it’s smooth sailing from here on out. You fix the iTunes synching problem, install Install.app and the SpringBoard hack for third party apps and you’re good to go.

Apple could only keep us out for so long. Good luck!

 

Related:

Updated: iPod Touch hacking: The extremely easy Windows method

Official 1.1.1 iPhone jailbreak method and tools released

Updated: Hacking iPod Touch: the 1 click Windows solution

iPhoneSIMFree: First 1.1.1 iPhone unlock

iPod Touch: Hackers discover new exploit, gain new ground against Apple

Entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 1:57 am under Apple, Media players, Opinion.  Print This Post

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