The People Crazy Enough to Think They Can Change the World Are the Ones Who Do. (Until We Change It Back With iPhone 1.1.2.)

The sputtering outrage over the firmware update that disabled third-party iPhone applications and bricked iPhones uncoupled from AT&T’s network became a cry of victory yesterday when the iPhone dev community said it had found a way to again implement third-party applications on the device.

According to Engadget, the iPhone Dev Team, an unofficial group of programmers who developed the jailbreaking tools that opened up iPhone 1.0.1, have crafted a second set of tools that exploits a vulnerability in Mobile Safari to open iPhone 1.1.1. They’ve not yet released a general-use version of the tool, but one is surely on the way.

That said, there’s no telling how long it will work once it’s released. As Engadget notes, these newer jailbreaks aren’t nearly as robust as their predecessors. “… Unfortunately, it sounds like most (if not all) of these new hacks rely solely on that single TIFF exploit in Mobile Safari, meaning that everyone’s back to square one the moment Apple beams v1.1.2 to the public at large.”