Siri - Apple's voice activated personal assistant feature that is exclusively available for iPhone 4S users has been so popular that hackers are either busy porting it to non-iPhone 4S devices or creating plugins using Siri Proxy to add new functionality to it.
However, until now they've made it quite clear that it was not possible to publicly release the port without illegally porting the system files from an iPhone 4S.
However, iPhone hacker and developer - Steven Troughton-Smith along with chpwn (developer of jailbreak apps such as Infiniboard, Infinidock,Infinifolder, ProSwitcher, VoiceActivator) who had figured out a way to get Siri working on a jailbroken iPhone 4 and iPod touch by bypassing the authentication issues had explained that if it was possible to decrypt the iPhone 4S files then Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices can become a reality:
Anyway, I hope that clears up some of the technical and legal reasons why distributing a build (or instructions) to run Siri on older hardware isn’t possible at the moment. When we have the ability to decrypt the encrypted iPhone 4S firmware file — to extract the Siri files legally, without the need for an iPhone 4S — and we have an iPhone 4S jailbreak to obtain the other nececssary information at a mass scale, hopefully this can become a reality and everyone can try out Siri on their older devices. Until then, showing you a video that it is possible is the best we can do.
Apple may have given non-iPhone 4S users who are waiting for Siri an early Christmas gift as the tweaked iOS 5.0.1 for iPhone 4S that was released yesterday surprisingly comes with decrypted ramdisks, making it possible to extract the necessary files for a Siri port without infringing on Apple’s copyright.
MuscleNerd revealed it in a series of tweets:
Huh...today's 4S 5.0.1 bump (9A406) has wide open main fs
@AndrewKeezer it's the first public 4S ipsw where the main filesystem keys are obtainable (due to non-encrypted ramdisks)
(to clarify: wide open for inspection from a Mac/PC...not wide open security wise :) Can get Siri files and such without piracy)
The iPhone dev team is currently busy working on the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 and iOS 5.0.1 and a jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2, so it remains to be seen when they will release a tool to allow non-iPhone 4S users to port Siri to their iOS devices from the tweaked iOS 5.0.1 firmware file for iPhone 4S.
As always, we'll let you know as soon as we have any further updates, so stay tuned here at iPhone Hacks or join our Facebook Fan page or follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.
[via MuscleNerd]
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