We told you over the weekend that the untethered jailbreak for iOS devices running iOS 5.1.1 is dropping this week. The hacker who’s been spearheading the upcoming jailbreak, pod2g of the Chronic Dev Team, confirmed that the jailbreak was nearly done and arriving in a “matter of days.”

Coincidentally, the Chronic Dev Team will be presenting at the annual Hack in the Box (HITB) conference this week in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Since the 5.1.1. jailbreak is expected to drop this week, we’re placing bets on a release this Friday during the team’s keynote.

A little background info on HITB:

The main aim of our conferences has always been to enable the dissemination, discussion and sharing of deep knowledge network security information. Our main focus is on new and groundbreaking attack and defense methods that have not been seen or discussed in public before. HITBSecConf events bring together a unique mix of security professionals, researchers, law enforcement and members of the hacker underground under one roof and our flagship event in Malaysia sees over 1000 attendees.

This is only informed speculation, but the Chronic Dev Team will likely release Absinthe 2.0 (the jailbreak tool for iOS 5.1.1) either during or after its two talks at HITB on Friday, May 25th. The conference schedule shows that Chronic Dev members Joshua Hill (@p0sixninja), Cyril (@pod2g), and Nikias Bassen (@pimskeks) will be speaking on the Corona jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 at 11:30 A.M. CET time. That talk will likely be about the history of the jailbreak (released in December of last year for A4-based devices), so we don’t expect an announcement then.

The conference will break for lunch and then Chronic Dev will take the stage again (joined by the legendary David ‘planetbeing‘ Wang) on Friday at 1:30 P.M. CET time to talk about the Absinthe jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1. Absinthe was the flagship untethered package that jailbroke the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 for the first time. The Chronic Dev Team will likely talk about developing and deploying the original Absinthe jailbreak, and such a topic would be the perfect time to transition into Absinthe 2.0. The time of that talk will be 7:30 A.M. EST/ 4:30 A.M. PST U.S. time on Friday.

Absinthe 2.0 will jailbreak nearly all iOS devices, including the third-gen iPad, running iOS 5.1.1.

Providing that things go according to plan and Absinthe 2.0 is ready to go, Friday looks like the perfect day to drop the new software. If complications arise for the Chronic Dev Team, jailbreaks have been known to drop on the weekends as well. Regardless, expect some huge jailbreak news later this week.