panicLock: Lock all apps on your iPhone via an Activator gesture

Are you concerned about your privacy when you want to hand in your device to a friend? If yes, you should check out a new jailbreak tweak known as panicLock that allows you to protect the private data on your iPhone.

With panicLock, you can secretly lock all the apps on your iPhone via an Activator gesture. This means that after invoking the tweak, when you try to access an app, it will not open no matter how many times you tap on it to launch.

Along with locking all the apps, the tweak also disables Notification Center and Control Center, prevents opening the App Switcher or reading your notifications or any other functionality of iOS that you want to access. It ensures that all the private data on your iPhone are completely secure from intruders.

Once you activate panicLock via an Activator gesture, to disable it and gain access to all your apps and other stuffs, you simply have to invoke the gesture again.

There’s also a pro version of the tweak, but it supports iOS 7 only. The pro version allows you to choose the apps and parts of iOS that you want to lock. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support iOS 8 currently as the developer has only updated the free version of the tweak which restricts access to everything when you activate it.

Check out the demonstration of the tweak in the video below by the developer:

Once you install panicLock, a new preference pane will be added to the stock Settings app dedicated to the tweak. From there, you can set an Activator gesture that allows you to invoke the tweak and lock all the apps, notifications, Control Center and other parts of iOS on your iPhone.

I noticed that once you enable panicLock, you can still access apps if you open them from Spotlight. This is a major issue that the developer should definitely fix otherwise it negates the whole purpose of the tweak.

If you have nosy friends who sneak into your private apps frequently, you should consider checking out panicLock. The tweak is available for free on Cydia’s BigBoss repository for free. Let us know what you think about paniLock in the comments section below.

iOS Hackers Have More Exploits For Future Jailbreaks

There was quite a long lull in the jailbreaking scene after the release of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5, until recently when the evad3rs team released evasi0n, the first untethered jailbreak for all iOS devices running iOS 6.

The prolonged lull gave rise to fears that jailbreaking was dead, and these fears continue to exist as Apple continues to make iOS more secure version-over-version.

But there's some good news, David Wang aka planetbeing, member of the evad3rs dev team in a conversation with Forbes revealed that they still have few more exploits, which could be used for future jailbreaks:

"Even if we could only find another one or two more [bugs], we'd still have at least one more jailbreak left in us. It's getting harder. But there are still a lot of vulnerabilities left."

Although recent releases of iOS have really tightened security, Wang says that combining a number of seemingly harmless bugs can lead to a jailbreak:

"It was just a question of being able to cleverly chain all these [bugs] together. These small bugs demonstrably can lead to compromise of the entire operating system."

For instance, evasi0n uses 5 different bugs, and out of which, the one that executes unauthorised code in the kernel was critical. The others were "redundant," that is the team has backup bugs that establish the same functions if the current ones are patched. In fact this is the reason the team delayed the release of evasi0n - to replace the critical bugs with less valuable ones.

Famous iOS hacker Charlie Miller had notably said a few days ago that evasi0n could be the last public jailbreak, reasoning that exploits are getting harder to find, and even the ones that are found can fetch as much as $250,000 when sold to law enforcement agencies.

Over the last few years we have seen famous hackers like comex leave the jailbreaking community after they were hired by Apple. But thankfully planetbeing has no such plans:

"If you go work for Apple, you'll be on the defense. And playing defense in this game is always much more difficult and much less fun than playing offense."

Hopefully the donations and the goodwill the evad3rs team get from the community, would be high enough to give them enough incentive to continue researching into iOS security, and releasing iOS jailbreaks in the future.

If there’s one thing that evasi0n’s shown us is that there’s definitely a huge demand for a jailbreak. As we reported earlier, evasi0n has been used to jailbreak nearly 7 million iOS devices in just four days, making it the most popular jailbreak ever.

With the imminent release of iOS 6.1.1, and iOS 7 later this year, the cat and mouse game between Apple and iOS hackers is all set to get a lot more interesting.

How to Fix Endless Reboot Loop Problem on your Jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch

Now that the evasi0n jailbreak for devices running iOS 6.1/6.0 is out, a lot of you folks are experimenting with your iOS devices by installing tweaks, changing themes and doing all sorts of tinkering. Unfortunately due to the lack of a jailbreak since such a long time, developers haven’t got a lot of time to ensure their tweaks work without any glitches on iOS 6.x, which means that installing certain tweaks could result in undesirable behaviour like crashes or even endless reboot cycles.

In this post, we tell you a few ways to solve these problems.

Hard Reboot

If you’re an iOS user since sometime, by now you’d know that most problems (even on non-jailbroken phones) can be solved by a hard reset. Press and hold the Home and Sleep/Wake (or Power) button simultaneously for a few seconds till you see the Apple logo again. This should get you out of any app that’s in an unresponsive state. There are times when my iPhone becomes completely unresponsive to not only touch inputs, but the Sleep/Wake button as well, in such cases the hard reboot comes in handy.

Endless Reboot Loop

If your jailbroken iOS device is stuck in an endless reboot loop, it is most likely caused by a broken or incompatible jailbreak tweak that you’ve recently installed. In such situations the hard reboot solution also doesn’t work since the tweak tries to run again when iOS boots up. To solve this, when your iOS device is booting up, simultaneously keep the Volume Up button pressed and you should be able to see your Lock screen again. Now you can open Cydia, and uninstall the tweak that you think is creating problems.

If the Volume up button is not working on your iOS device then use the Clicker (not Volume up) button on your headsets or earphones.

If you’re interested in reading what exactly happens when you hold down the Volume Key, read on.

Most system tweaks depend on a framework called Mobile Substrate. The framework was developed keeping in mind that when you’re messing with system internals, things could go wrong. By pressing the Volume up button, Mobile Substrate gets disabled entirely, and doesn’t let the problematic tweak load, allowing your iOS device to go past the Apple logo. saurik had added this safe mode feature for Mobile Substrate last year to fix horribly broken jailbreak apps and tweaks.

Check compatibility before installing tweaks

Many developers are still updating their tweaks to work on iOS 6, so before installing anything from Cydia, ensure that iOS 6.1/6.0 is supported. So it is recommended that you check the compatibility of the jailbreak apps and tweaks before installing. We’re maintaining a list of iOS 6.1 compatible jailbreak tweaks here.

Let us know how it goes in the comments. If you have any other issues, please head over to our forums and let us know about the problem so we can help.