Half-Million iPhone 4S Owners Flock To Jailbreak Hack

Almost half a million iPhone 4S users took advantage of the freshly-released jailbreak for the latest Apple smartphone in the first weekend of availability, it's reported, with over 300,000 iPad 2 owners also hacking their device. The pent-up demand for a jailbreak for Apple A5-based gadgets expressed itself in almost one million new jailbreaks in just over three days, the iPhone Dev Team says, using stats culled from the hack process itself.

That number also includes over 150,000 iPad 2 units that had previously been jailbroken running iOS 4.x. According to the Dev Team, newly jailbroken devices automatically check in for available SHSH blobs when the unofficial Cydia app store is opened, keeping a log of how many hacks have been performed.

GreenPois0n Absinthe was released on Friday, a team effort between the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev, taking on the challenge of Apple's tweaked security in the newer A5 processor. There's also a reminder for owners keen to keep their jailbreak not to update to a newer version of iOS, until at least there's a jailbreak solution in place for it. Apple enjoys its cat & mouse game with hackers, working to close off previously exploited loopholes with each successive iteration.