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New Firmware Fixes Previously Bricked iPhones
drcagn writes "Ars Technica reports that Apple's new 1.1.3 firmware update unbricks iPhones damaged from unlocking and updating the firmware months ago. In September, users who hacked their iPhone's firmware to unlock it found their iPhone bricked when they updated to new firmware, creating a massive upset and internet furor. Although Apple claimed this was not an intended effect of the update, it held the stance that it is not their responsibility to ensure that updates work with users' warranty-voiding hacks, and many cried foul. This update, which provides new features Jobs showed off at Macworld, while not officially unbricking the iPhone, has restored iPhones from Gizmodo and a reader of the Unofficial Apple Weblog."
And how nice of Apple to give out the update for free, instead of charging $20 to unlock the new features on an iPod Touch. You have to buy that even if all you want to do is rearrange your icons on the home screen or use "Webclips" in Safari, an application already included on the Touch.
The ridiculous thing is that the 1.1.3 update for the Touch includes all of the applications & updates to the iPod, but they just sit on the Touch, wasting space until you give Apple $20. And then they send you an 8 kilobyte PLIST file that unlocks them. So even if a Touch user doesn't buy them, the apps are sitting on the drive, wasting space on that teeny flash drive. Awesome.
This just gives Touch users further excuse to Jailbreak their iPods.
As for the iPhone, the previous firmware bricked some iPhones that weren't even hacked. They probably should have released a revised firmware a lot sooner than they did.
I should have gone with BIN on that ebay auction!
welcome our unbricked (undead?) overlords.
This strikes me as very good news. But undoubtedly, some people will complain anyway.
If a iPhone can receive an update that unbricks it, then it was never bricked in the first place.
If you can recover a device to a full operational state without opening its case or attaching a jTag cable, it wasn't bricked.
Flashed with a messed up firmware, or a bad flash, sure, but not bricked.
If you have to use a boot wait feature to load a new firmware over a network, it isn't bricked either because it was able to access a network and run a tftp server.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
"held the stance that it is not their responsibility to ensure that updates work with users' warranty-voiding hacks, "
They shouldn't be held liable. You buy a product and modify it the manufacture can't, and shouldn't, be held responsible for the results.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you look at http://www.hackint0sh.org/ (forums for the anysim iPhone unlock method), you'll see that some iBricks don't get fixed using this trick. So while this method may work for some, it isn't the cure all for all iPhone hacking mistakes.
Save yourself some frustration and realizer the term brick changed when it hit the mainstream market.
Like 'Hacker'. You can't stop it, just sigh and go on, otherwise your just screaming into the wind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dempsters releases update for bread that will turn toast back into bread!
Just wanted to drop a reply because I accidentally modded this redundant.
;)
I was aming for Insightful, but the new discussion system sure makes it easy to kinda 'miss'
I "unbricked" my phone back in October. The iPhone development community built a utility that rebuilt your lockstate tables way back then. Welcome to the party Apple.
Unlocking is stealing from the service provider who is footing half the bill for the phone. Unlocking phones is protected by law in the United States. Nor is it stealing, as 1) no contract is required to purchase the physical hardware (and once you own it, you can do pretty much whatever you want with the hardware -- but not the firmware/software), 2) apparently apple makes a fair amount of money from the sale of the hardware too, and 3) there is no difference for AT&T if you buy the hardware or just a different phone and then never activate with AT&T or even at all (all legal), in any event AT&T would get $0.
Until this firmware update was released, the bricked phones were "irrevocably" useless. The only ways to fix them were:
a) Travel into the future to some unknown date when Apple might issue a fix
b) Write your own OS from scratch, and get it into the flash memory by methods unknown to science
c) Grind the device down into it's component atoms and reassemble them in the original order
d) Find the universe's 'undo' button or
e) do some other practically impossible thing.
The fact that now method a) has now been found to have worked doesn't mean that method a) was previously a realistic enough option to count as an exception to the brickishness.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Yay yay! I'm a moron. Yay! That's great!
You were scared away from buying a product because you might break it if you try to modify it yourself? Do you accidentally hack firmware in your sleep or something?
I am not quite sure if Apple is actually looking for particularly perspective customers... They seem to be mostly after the pro-consumer sector. You know, people with a rather narrow perspective.
>>It's garbage that company and its products. Only complete morons buy Apple.
If only morons buy apple products, then what are windows userrs? As apple products are generally used by the the smartest people out there.
Somehow the link to the story appears to have gotten lost.
Apple's continued stance that they know what's best for their customers and that their products are 'perfect' as-is prevents what could be revolutionary products from ever reaching that potential. No matter how good, how cool, how well designed a product they release, it's their attitude toward the people who invest in those products that will ensure that Apple will never achieve Microsoft's level of success.
They can innovate to extraordinary levels in many ways, but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Your insightful commentary has led me to re-evaluate my attitude to Apple and its products. DO you have a newsletter I could subscribe to?
Insightful and informative. Thank you!
I bricked about this happening to "meme" a couple years ago, then bricked the solution, so I'd like to brick some words of encouragement to anyone who feels bricked by the loss: brick your vengeance. If you can't brick "brick," then nobody can.
Heretofore, "to brick" can brick anything. You can brick a beer; you can brick a pizza. You can brick a computer; and you can brick your girlfriend. You can brick your hat, except in Soviet Russia, where hat bricks you.
Go brick something, and then brick somebody about it in the hopes that they'll brick someone else. Brick the word, so the whole world will brick that they bricked "brick." Hopefully after that, maybe they will have bricked that some words are better off left unbricked.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, nothing indicates that these users updated the firmware by any abnormal method. The phone would be bricked if there were no way to get into recovery mode or whatever lets you update the firmware.
You are lying.
iphones don't have the structural strength of bricks and are useless for construction use.
But... the future refused to change.
The TUAW reader who got his iPhone unbricked? Perl guru Randall Schwartz. He posted the info on his Jaiku microblog.
I also hear through Chicago Sun Times writer Andy Ihnatko that he's been able to unbrick a phone.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Brick you, geekoid. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In Soviet Union, Brick is phone!
If the phones were 'bricked' how is this new firmware getting put onto them? Is there a jtag connector and it's easily connected to by to all the people with these 'bricked' Iphones??
I swear the level of ignorance about what 'bricked' means is staggering.
Son of a Brick!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Any company that installs firmware on a system in an unknown state "unintentionally" are morons. They've never heard of checksums? Don't trust your expensive iphone to them for updates because they're obviously not performing due diligence. I they can't detect a hacked phone before blindly installing, they will be unable to detect other problems/conditions which would break the phone when patched. As a matter of fact, were there not also
a small number of non-hacked phones which got bricked as well?
... even bricks phone home.
I'm an infovore...
good grief, listen to yourself!!!!
"irrevocable" is an absolute term, just like "bricked". By very definition, if something is eventually revoked, it wasn't irrevocable.
Please, go back to grade school. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Unless they make a determined effort to render the product unusable as a form of retribution or punishment. For instance, you take your automobile to the dealership. They see it has a non-factory radio unit or non-factory wheels and tires. They may not deliberately damage the engine, rendering the vehicle useless.
Of course the burden would fall upon the owner of the damaged phone to prove in court that Apple set out to render the hacked iPhones inoperative, but that's what discovery is all about.
Ultimately it may be an issue for a jury to decide.
Like 'Hacker'. You can't stop it, just sigh and go on, otherwise your just screaming into the wind. What you said is true when talking to the general public. But with how these "bricked" articles keep popping up, one can only assume that the slashdot editors are TRYING to piss off it's readers (perhaps to get more comments and indirectly more ad revenue.) When talking to other specialists about their specialty, you don't go around purposely misusing words. I'm looking at you slashdot, home of news for nerds, stuff that matters. Commander Taco and company might just have some atomic wedgies in their near futures.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
This isn't flamebait, I'm just saying this scared me away from buying an iPhone
Why, because you have uncontrollable urges to modify anything you buy in ways not supported by the manufacturer?
Remind me not to be within a mile of you starting your car - or your blender.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Crap! I managed to brick my iPhone into a firewall. But I didn't think that Windows CE-ME-NT would dry so quickly all over it! Seriously, the 2000 grade formula drys in XP amount of time. Please, feel free to brick me now with your brick iPhone that I know you think are now just useless bricks now. Mwa ha ha ha ha. Score.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
>userrs
>by the the
You don't use Apple products, I take it.
I think you Apple's dream customer.
You never have any complaints, and you really appreciate the special trouble that apple is forced to go through for their *very* complainy customers.
I'll bet Steve Jobs every morning comes in, sits down at his desk and says "thank heavens for Lucious. At least HE doesn't complain. These customers drive me nuts with "fix this" or "this feature doesn't work". "
Marklar.
I wish someone could do something to recover the iPaq 3670 I half-installed uCLinux on that bricked it.
--
make install -not war
Inconceivable!
whatever sort of recovery mode these phones could go into was of no use without the existence of the new firmware. Phones with no ability other than to potentially install future software yet to be written are exactly as useful as a brick, hence the correct usage of the term 'bricked' to describe them. With no means in existence to revoke the changes, the phones were (at the time) irrevocably bricked. If your definition of irrevocable extends to all concievable future technological breakthroughs, then it's use would barely ever be justified by anyone other than theoretical physicists.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
So a Ford truck only accepts Ford Fuel from Ford gas stations?
Nope. A ford works anywhere.
However, what if someone built a hydrogen car that got 100x the milage of gas cars, and partnered with the only chain of hydrogen stations there were. Would you still refuse to use it? Or instead would you support a better idea in cars?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This wasn't some magical unforseen technology, like a flux capacitor that allowed users to go back in time and prevent themselves from unlocking the phones, it was some software to run on the device, which was apparently perfectly capable of installing and running whatever you gave it. It was obvious from the initial reports that the problem was not irreversible. So, again, "(at the time) irrevocably"?? In response to that Princess Bride quote?
If I had some old weird computer like an Amiga with the optional hard drive, and one day I corrupted the OS and found I'd lost all my disks for it, it wouldn't be "bricked" just because I personally couldn't find anything to run on it, even if such software seemed impossible to find anymore.
Why do we have this "it's fun to waste shit" culture? That phone could have been used for years. Instead he stuck it in a blender and set it on fire. Now all the bad stuff in the battery is released into the atmosphere or a landfill somewhere, and all those chemical processes required to manufacture that thing are for nothing.
I swear, sometimes I am ashamed of my country.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Or perhaps they just trust their customers not to be morons? After all, what would you call somebody who installs an update on a modified phone in defiance of a prominent warning IN ALL CAPS that the update will damage modified phones? And then complains about it when that happens?
Will this convert any brick to an ipod touch? Does it have to be a full-size house brick?
They can't be held liable, because they can't support a different product than the one they sold. If you break your car yourself, why should the carmaker be held liable.
/. was made up of a crowd of exactly those people. And they have every right to be furious at Apple. After all Apple uses a lot of code in their products that was written by those hackers.
/. just "do as Jobs says".
BUT: Apple knew that a lot of people used a specific hack on the phone to "unlock" it. And while testing they found out that their upgrade would "brick" those phones.
They could have changed the upgrade so it wouldn't "brick" the unlocked phones, but they chose not to. Now they were even able to "unbrick" those phones.
To me this looks more like a plan. Apple wanted to communicate to their users: "Only use our products as we intended or we will simply break them." And now that the users got the message they play good cop and "unbrick" them for the users, so that the now "good" users will keep on purchasing Apple products, but will never try to use them in any way other than the intended one again.
Many people define hackers as people that use products in other ways than the producers intended (and/or find more/new ways to use a certai product by playing around with it). It used to be that the overwhelming majority on
I guess now many people on
... has to be different ... I'd choose the fake Apple bricking method(tm) ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Funny, it seems to me, that it's an example of Apple fixing phones that third-party unlocking (not unjailing, installation of other apps, but unlocking - modifying the firmware of the cellphone section of the iPhone) caused. The 1.1.2 firmware changed how the OS interacted with the radio - the 1.1.3 firmware made it so phones that worked on 1.1.1 but stopped working on 1.1.2, would now work in 1.1.3. In other words, they _fixed_ those phones, despite having no compelling reason to do that. Yet people like you now claim that proves they're evil somehow.
This is what Apple wanted to do... put bricked iPhones back into service. They have been having a support nightmare with this.
This stuff cannot be done! Apple has locked you out and now you must buy a Zune!
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