In the first days of being available to the public, the iOS 6 jailbreak by evasi0n was used 1.7 million times, according to Jay Freeman, who runs the Cydia jailbreak app store.
It was just late last week that a lot of anticipation went into the launch of the hack for the new Apple mobile operating system, with an announcement that the jailbreak - a tool used to allow non-Apple approved applications to be installed on mobile devices running Apple's operating system - would be finished and available by Super Bowl Sunday.
That's an incredibly fast turn-around time, since iOS 6.1 was only released earlier that week. Evasi0n, the team behind the jailbreak, eventually released the hack one day late, early on Monday this week.
In its first six hours, the jailbreak had already been used at least 800,000 times, according to a "conservative estimate" told by Jay Freeman to Forbes. By the next day, after rebooting his server which had crashed due to massive demand, the numbers had reached 1.7 million.
There are risks to installing jailbreak software, which, according to evasi0n.com, takes about 5 minutes to work its magic. That's because this is non-Apple approved software meant to bypass elaborate software security measures put in place by Apple in order to allow unapproved, 3rd-party software to run on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
Jailbreaking, or "Unauthorized modification of iOS" according to Apple's warning page, which was updated on Sunday, coincidentally enough. Apple says jailbreaking can result in instability, including unexpected crashes and freezes of built-in apps and loss of data. Apple also warns that jailbreaking leaves your device more susceptible to hackers looking to steal data. Most importantly, it can lead to the inability to install future operating system updates, leaving your device useless, sometimes referred to as "bricking" your phone.
via CNet
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