Click to viewHere's a video of the iPhone Firmware 1.1.3, with confirmation that the leak is real from Natetrue, famed iPhone hacker. Like before, the update breaks unlocks and third-party apps, patching previous vulnerabilities at the same time. The video shows how to move icons around in the Springboard, wobbling to indicate they can be dragged and dropped around, which is kind of an Apple-meets-Nintendo touch:


Click to view

We had some doubts, but now we can tell you we are sure: the new firmware 1.1.3 is real. Or as Nate puts it: "if it is a hoax, they did a buttload of work." The fact is that it installs normally and it works perfectly. For those not familiar, Natetrue is one of the most respected and veteran iPhone hackers and the author of the popular app iBrickr.


Nate goes on to say that "it installs on the phone no-questions-asked and for that you need to have Apple's private key, which i can confirm that the iphone hacker community does not have—as much as we would love to have it." Indeed, Apple's private encrypted key, used to authenticate all accesses to the iPhone most-private guts, hasn't been uncovered yet by anyone in the world.

In other words, no firmware upgrades can be installed without the knowledge of this key. Furthermore, the idea that someone would have access to this key and spend months to create a fully functional firmware update, with key new features and without any documentation whatsoever seems just absolutely silly.

Effects on unlocks and Third-party applications



The update breaks AnySim's unlocks. Logically, you can't unlock this update using AnySim and there's no alternative to iTunes for activation. If you want to activate, it will only work using iTunes and a standard AT&T account. Nate says, "that is the only way we have been able to activate so far." Nate tried to upgrade an AnySim 1.2u iPhone and it failed. Even while he was able to force it to boot, the phone refused to activate even with a normal AT&T SIM card. "I suspect it's due to the fact that the baseband could not be upgraded to the 1.1.3 'required' version", he says.


Other updates remain untested, like iPhone Sim Free or any of the hardware-based ones, like TurboSIM. In theory, these should work just fine, but jailbreak and activation would be absolutely impossible for the time being. We would have to wait until the update gets released in the open to try new alternative activation methods.


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Your favorite third-party apps will be gone too, with no possibility of return for now. The update fixes the bugs which allowed "the jailbreak method we were using for 1.1.2, locking us out again, as expected."


Other effects



Like previous firmware upgrades, whatever is in the user partition remains unchanged. Only the Apple-owned part is affected by 1.1.3. So for those of you who claim that this is a fake because it says "Nate" in the network instead of "AT&T," that's the reason. He changed the network name in 1.1.2 using a program by Erica Sadun, of TUAW, called Make It Mine.


New features and future releases



The list of new features are confirmed too: all are correct, but he couldn't confirm if they are the only ones or not.

Many of you would be wondering how this could have happened, knowing the extremely tight security around the iPhone firmware updates. We don't know, but apparently the leak has occurred because "someone wanted to help the unlock effort." The source of the leak is completely anonymous, even to the people who have had access to the upgrade.


Why the update hasn't hit Torrent yet? The code could be watermarked to catch any leaks "so for now it's screenshots and videos." Also, distributing it won't make much sense at this point: according to Nate the iPhone 1.1.3 Firmware update could hit as soon as next week.

Stay tuned for more updates. [Cre.ations.net - Thanks Nate for your insight and Markus for the tip]