Couple of days back, iPhone hacker and developer – Steven Troughton-Smith along with chpwn (developer of jailbreak apps such as Infiniboard, Infinidock, Infinifolder, ProSwitcher, VoiceActivator) had figured out a way to get Siri working on a jailbroken iPhone 4 and iPod touch by bypassing the authentication issues.
This had raised hopes that they would eventually release the Siri port for non-iPhone 4S devices. But we have some bad news at least for the time being.
chpwn has just written a blog post to explain why they won’t be able to distribute the port or the procedure they had used. He starts of by explaining the fundamentals of how copyright laws work:
Apple owns the copyright on the software, images, and data used inside iOS: they created them. Because of that, they have the ability to decide what other people can — are licensed to — do with them: copy, distribute, adapt, modify, or any number of other protections of their works. Pretty simple. But this does lead to one important, if somewhat counterintuitive, fact: just because a piece of data is available freely on the internet does not mean that you have the rights to redistribute that data (or any part of it) without an applicable license. In practice, that means that just because certain files are freely available on a device or inside a firmware (.ispw) file freely downloadable from Apple’s website, it does not imply that those files can legally be distributed by anyone else.
He then goes on to explain what does the copyright law mean in the case of enabling Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices:
In the context of Siri, this means that the resource files, images, and code that makes up Siri cannot be freely shared. These frameworks and plugins that work together to build Siri are not included on other iOS builds besides the ones running on the iPhone 4S. Therefore, these files must be copied from a running iPhone 4S, or from the iPhone 4S’s firmware (.ipsw) file. The first method requires you to own an iPhone 4S to copy the files from, so it is not useful for most people: if you already own an iPhone 4S, you already have Siri. The issue with the second method is more technical: the firmware files are distributed encrypted, and we do not yet have the decryption key to access the Siri files inside of the iPhone 4S firmware file.
Just from that, you currently must already own an iPhone 4S to install Siri on it without a blatant copyright violation. But even that’s not all: if you do all of that, there’s still a few more reasons why Siri won’t just work.
He also goes on to comment on people claiming that they have managed to port Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices:
Many people have managed to display the Siri UI on the iPhone 4; it is, in fact, reasonably trivial with access to the files copied off an iPhone 4S (as explained above). But only Steven and myself — yes, I know there are others that claim to have: I’ll tell you this, they haven’t 😉 — have managed to make Siri successfully contact the Apple servers and receive responses. Why? Here, the answers become slightly more murky. Partially this is because I don’t want to reveal too much about the procedure to try and ensure that you all will be able to use it in the future, and partially because it requires a jailbroken iPhone 4S, something which is currently not publicly available. Anyway, the general gist of it is that you almost certainly need the access provided by the a jailbreak to extract all of the information necessary to get Siri working on another device, and that’s not yet availble. (And, no, I don’t know when it will be. You can follow along with me while we wait, though!)
But he goes on to explain that if they manage 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.
As always, we’ll let you know as soon as it is available in the App Store, 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 chpwn’s blog]
