Serious Dev Group Produces 'Absinthe' Jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1

Ready to jailbreak your iOS device? Great! You're in luck – a brand-new update to a popular jailbreaking tool was just released yesterday and, with it, you'll be able to perform the most elegant of the jailbreaking techniques: The fabled "untethered" jailbreak.

Gibberish? Gotcha. We'll start from the beginning. The Chronic Dev Team, prolific iOS exploiters that they are, released their updated Absinthe 2.0 tool yesterday. The software couldn't make it any easier for owners of a wide list of iOS devices (detailed on the official Green Pois0n website) to jailbreak them, so long as they're running the latest 5.1.1 update for Apple's iOS.

What does jailbreaking allow you to do? First off, you can tap into third-party app stores (like Cydia) to grab apps and games that you wouldn't otherwise be able to find on Apple's App Store. Additionally, a number of these apps allow you to use your device in ways Apple wouldn't allow: For example, IntelliScreenX jacks up your Notifications Center with all kinds of crazy new options, whereas Gridlock allows you to set exactly where you want your icons to go on your home screen (no automatic alignment!)

Convinced yet? Here's one downside to jailbreaking your device: Installing new updates from Apple can be a pain in the butt, as they might very well jack up your device or revert it back to its normal, unjailbroken state. Tread carefully. Also, any problems you have with your iPhone or iPad that might be taken care of by Apple's Genius Bar could be yours to deal with exclusively – jailbreaking does void your Apple warranty, for what it's worth.

On the plus side, the Absinthe tool simplifies jailbreaking down to a (nearly) one-click process. To start, you'll want to connect your device to iTunes and back everything up – a step that's not to be overlooked, trust us. Because once you've done that, you're going to want to wipe your device back down to its factory defaults using the "Erase all Content and Settings" option found within your device's Settings menu.

After that, make sure your device is still connected to your computer via its USB cable and run Absinthe. Click on the big "Jailbreak" button. Make a sandwich… and don't disconnect your device until Absinthe is done.

Once finished, go back to your device in iTunes and restore all of the content you previously backed up. Ta-da! Your iOS device is now jailbroken, your information has been placed back onto your device, and you're free to fiddle around with the grand new (jailbroken) world you've opened up.

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Blizzard Says Diablo 3 Compromised Records Are Incredibly Small

The latest news on the Diablo III fallout sees Blizzard issuing a much longer, more in-depth statement regarding accounts being "hacked" or infiltrated, as well as how secure gamers are while playing Diablo III online.

CVG picked up on the latest post from a Blizzard community manager on the official Battle.net forums, where the post states that...

"...the number of Diablo III players who've contacted customer service to report a potential compromise of their personal account has been extremely small,"... "In all of the individual Diablo III-related compromise cases we've investigated, none have occurred after a physical Battle.net Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator app was attached to the player's account, and we have yet to find any situation where a Diablo III player's account was accessed outside of "traditional" compromise methods (i.e. someone logging using an account's login email and password)."

Some gamers have claimed that even though they had an authenticator activated, their account was still hacked. Blizzard says that's not the case, as stated above.

There have been huge debates over the way Diablo III players have been hacked, with some self-proclaimed hacking enthusiasts saying that gaming websites are getting it wrong and that what's really happening is that there is a measure of session spoofing going on, which is basically a hacker using a very complex measure of tools and methods to take over another gamer's session ID, and thus, gain access to their account. This is also known as a "man in the middle attack".

Plenty of other gamers have come out to shoot down the idea of session spoofing, saying it's just "scare tactics" and "rumor mongering" to spread misinformation about the severity of the accounts being infiltrated. Both are claims based on speculation, and until actual evidence surfaces it's Blizzard's word against the hack victims.

What's more is that this has turned into a raging debate over always-on DRM. Across the interwebs there are discussions going on right now about whether people would even have to deal with this if there was at least an offline mode with the restriction of keeping offline characters, well offline. However, we all know that the always-on DRM for single-player is to enforce everyone to have access to the Real-Money Auction House, Blizzard's pride and joy for Diablo III, which has been delayed again.

Even more than that, this furthers the debate of how much anti-consumer abuse gamers are willing to take before they finally say "enough is enough". I know there are some people already saying that you should be saying "enough is enough".

Removing the consumer option to own the product like traditional game media is something many top publishers within the industry would probably love to standardize.

The idea of consumers paying retail prices to lease a service for single-player titles is a mouth-watering concept for most big publishers. Right now it's looking like that's a future that might become a real possibility, especially with how many people are willing to brush off the hassle of always-on DRM as well as the "extremely small" amount of hacked accounts that inevitably follow, just so that they can play their favorite game.

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