#zibri

Studio Zibri

That’s a name I hadn’t thought of in a long time.  And yet up it pops, unbidden from the ether.

Last week, italian iPhone "hacker" Zibri found evidence of Qualcomm processors by decompiling iTunes.  Wait, really?  Does no one remember what a dick this guy was back in 2008?  Didn't we already know that Qualcomm was going to produce the baseband chips for iOS devices based on articles like this, this, and this?  So Zibri finds two files in iTunes, partition.mbn and AMSS.MBN, that means Qualcomm, and suddenly the world trusts him again.

A little back story:

The original iPhone was easily jailbroken in it's first revision, and it wasn't long after that it was unlocked as well.  When the OS was upgraded to 1.1.1, the then newly formed iPhone Dev Team found and exploited a jpeg bug and you could jailbreak your phone from MobileSafari.  iPhone OS 1.1.2 dropped and was defeated with a symlink - you ran a prep script on 1.1.1, upgraded in iTunes, and re-jailbroke.  If anything went wrong and you wanted to restore, you would have to downgrade to 1.1.1, jailbreak, prep, upgrade to 1.1.2, jailbreak.  Already this is annoying.

Then 1.1.3 dropped, and things became even more complicated.  iPhone OS 1.1.3 closed the holes that were previously used but there was a definite desire in the community to upgrade as the features were new and flashy.  The Dev Team released a "soft upgrade", a package you downloaded and ran on your 1.1.2 device that would provide the features from 1.1.3.  It worked, but it was still the 1.1.2 substructure.  If anything went wrong, you would have to downgrade to 1.1.1, jailbreak, prep for 1.1.2, upgrade to 1.1.2, jailbreak, perform soft upgrade to 1.1.3 and hope things stabilized.  Supremely annoying.

Zibri arrived on the scene by releasing Ziphone, which jailbroke your stock 1.1.3 device, unlocked it, and was complete in two minutes.  Hallelujah, cried the community.  Phones sold with 1.1.3 pre-installed were vulnerable, and recovery from problems was quick and easy.  Many people downloaded, many people donated to Zibri, and then the bad news started to roll in.  It seemed that around 5% of the phones unlocked by Ziphone were getting bricked - that's a huge number.  Bricked in the sense that a restore in iTunes wouldn't help, in the sense that it wasn't even possible.  Zibri revised Ziphone a couple times, but there was still a relatively high failure rate.  Ziphone also had some lasting bugs in the substructure, breaking important binaries like passwd.  Zibri was known to delete comments on his blog that accused him of bricking phones, and he continued to take donations for a faulty product.  The icing on the cake was when accusations surfaced saying Zibri had stolen the ramdisk exploit used in Ziphone from the Dev Team.

Eventually the better tools arrived and things were smoothed over, but I personally never got that bad taste out of my mouth.  I deleted the zibri.org bookmark and forgot about him.