The Full Story
In mid July, pod2g and westbaer came across an exploit that allowed us to write to 0×0 while iBoot was running. We develop upon it for awhile and finally get it working and able to execute code. We toss it in the backburner and start looking for more, occasionally working on the greenois0n payload.
This month comes around with release of ipt3 and we go into overdrive. We wanted to make greenpois0n perfect and easy to use, not to mention fast like purplera1n. I didn’t have the money for an ipt3 at the time so I had a chipin to raise funds. I got about $200, and had enough in my bank account to cover the remaining $100. Headed down to Best Buy on Saturday of release week and picked one up, then the testing started. As I have said before, we wanted to make this perfect and bug-free, so it was taking awhile. Soon, people started commenting and emailing me complaints about it taking so long. I can handle this.
Then, I start getting ppl threatening to file a dispute with PayPal to get a refund. This is an issue, not because they don’t realize that these were donations, but because PayPal usually sides with the “buyer”, as I have heard in many PayPal horror stories. I have heard of them freezing peoples accounts and even dipping into the person’s bank account to refund people. Naturally I start to worry, and I can’t exactly do much more than devote more time to GP. So I start spending more time on the payload, no problem. We have decryption keys @ this point, other’s are close to getting bootrom, all is well. Then geohot came in the private IRC room, I believe last night, and suggested something that I won’t name now since it’s still his workaound that he might have wanted to keep under wraps, but it was a sly solution to a certain roadblock that may have made things more annoying for the user on release. We put it on the to-do list. All is well. Hours later, he posts the “Meet The Family” blog post, and joins our room saying that he just picked up and ipt3 and he was going for the jb.
At this point I should probably mention that we have given him the password to our private development room and welcome him there. We had told him sometime in August about this, and he said “yeah, I saw that when researching usb put stuff”. That is what the truth is to this tweet. Although there is no hash, due to his prior trustworthyness, we all believed him. Again, we had found and implemented this all on our own, the only thing that geohot did, which we are trusting that he is telling the truth about, was find the vulnerability on his own, totally seperate from us. I would like to believe that the tweet was misworded, but the way he said it make it sound extremely like he was saying we stole it form him and were taking credit.
Anyway, back to the “story”. Some people started saying that I was an all out scammer and when geohot released first they would dispute their donation because it “seemed like it was all an elaborate hoax to get a free iPod touch”. This concerned me more. We weighed our options, talked to some people, and many agreed that it might be a good idea to wiki the exploit. This was for a few reasons:
- We knew that we could not get greenpois0n completely finished in time. We needed a perfectly safe NAND write, a ported over 24kPwn, and more to make it totally stable.
- Geohot would release in a few days anyway, so “hiding the exploit from Apple” was not a concern at all.
- We had done a lot of research on the exploit, how it worked, and why it worked, and had everything written up. If Geohot would release in a few days, and we knew we couldn’t do anything, why not share what we already knew with the community? Geohot usually writes up short descriptions and gradually adds on when it comes to exploits, while we already had a nice write-up already made.
- Again, Geohot said a few days, so the idea that we were giving anything to Apple is false, since they would have had it in “a few days” anyway.
- This would cause people to stop hounding about progress + threats to dispute their donation, because it would show that their money went to good use.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out too great. Geohot claimed credit for some reason, and now we are a lot of flak for this gross misconception. And here we are, now trying to get across the situation to the angry mob that has seemed to form.
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