Teenager claims to have easy iPod Touch jailbreak

A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class.

AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn’t work for the iPhone, and it’s only available for iPod Touch owners that are using Intel-based Macs. I don’t have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I’m unable to test whether it actually works, but some users on MacRumors.com reported that it worked.

Ever since Apple released the 1.1.1 software update for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch in late September that broke older third-party application installers, hackers have been hard at work searching for a new way to bypass the restrictions. A preliminary jailbreaking application was released last week, but it required a great deal of expertise to get up and running. Erica Sadun, a writer for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, installed that iPod Touch jailbreak Friday evening but warned, “This is not ready for prime time, kids. Don’t do this at home.”

If a 13 year old can do it why can’t the dev team do it?