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New workaround helps keep Siri running on jailbroken iPhone 4

New workaround helps keep Siri running on jailbroken iPhone 4

Jailbreak hacker “chpwn” has developed a new tool that helps iPhone 4 users run Siri, Apple’s mobile “personal assistant,” on jailbroken devices. His new software, called Spire, claims to avoid copyright issues associated with earlier Siri hacks and improves privacy by allowing users to specify their own proxy server to handle communication between an iPhone 4 and Apple’s servers.

Apple still considers Siri a beta feature, so it’s possible that Apple wanted to reduce the number of variables in testing the service by having it run on a single platform—i.e. the iPhone 4S. Despite this, iOS hackers were able to reverse engineer how Siri communicates with Apple’s servers for the necessary speech-to-text conversion and get it running on an iPhone 4.

Earlier hacks involved possible copyright infringement by using unauthorized copies of the Siri software extracted from the iOS 5 firmware for the iPhone 4S. Spire copies these files directly from Apple’s servers, supposedly skirting the copyright issue (though we’re sure Apple’s lawyers might have something to say about that). Other hacks also relied on a fixed proxy server to communicate with Apple’s servers—a potential privacy hole—while Spire lets you configure your own. Siri still requires authentication keys that are automatically regenerated every 24 hours on an iPhone 4S, however, so Spire still remains an incomplete solution to permanently running Siri on non-iPhone 4S hardware.

[Thanks: http://arstechnica.com]

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