In the words of the sainted Professor Farnsworth: "Good news, everybody everyone!" The iPhone/iPod touch dev team has decrypted the iPhone 1.1.1 and iPod touch ramdisks. So what does this mean, loyal TUAW readers? It means that you're getting really close to free, non-commercial 1.1.1 unlocks put together by a cadre of dedicated hackers who are doing all of this for your benefit, for fun in their spare time, and for free.

To all of you cynics who roll your eyes and add "does that mean we're getting really close to free, non-commercial bricks for the next firmware upgrade", the for-pay SIMFree 1.1.1 unlocks are now on sale. For those of you who would rather wait and save the $60-$100, it doesn't look like it will be long.

Update: Yes, they are working on unbricking as well as unlocking, saying they are "dedicated to getting a free and workable solution out to the general public. At the very least, a baseband downgrader should be possible. We understand your frustration, and please don't think for a second that we've forgotten you."

Thanks xorl, mjc, Edgan, netkas, pumpkin, asap18, NerveGas, tE_gU

No news to report yet but since I'm being bombarded by email, here's a status report:

iPhuc. Recompiled and working. I've created a hacker version that I'm using to send requests. So we've moved a little closer. Now I'm getting "unrecognized request" messages in GRestore mode instead of request not founds.

Recovery mode. Achieved both by hand and by software. The old restore commands do not work. iTouch uses a new restore protocol. Instead of pushing data from iTunes, the iTouch pulls data via request. It used to be that iTunes sent a request, and the iPhone returned results. Now iTunes starts a restore mode and waits for requests from the iTouch and serves the requested data.

File read/write from disk. Achieved. Pretty much all the normal inside-jail stuff works.

File system mount. Not there yet.

GRestore. Partial success.

RAM disk decryption. Not yet. No luck yet on finding the key, which may be getting served from Apple.

Shell mode. Maybe.

Normal mode debug access working

State. Arminius: Cranky; Pumpkin, tE_gU, Kroo, Roxfan, BloomFilter: Exhausted. Martyn: Bits of his ipod scattered about his workbench. Me: Frustrated. Jailbreak seems increasingly unlikely at this point.

Update: I've gotten the iTouch not to barf at two requests: QueryType and Goodbye. Now I've got to see if there any other requests that I can find and also to figure out how to provide parameters to QueryType. Goodbye takes no arguments and just pretty much ends the session. Update 2: I'm calling it a night (morning). I've restored my iTouch software now almost a dozen times. Just as a rule: make sure to go into recovery mode by hand, not through iPhoneInterface or iPhuc because you can't get back without restoring. The goal of this whole exercise is to get access to disk mount and ditto--neither of which happened today. Once those are solved, you can put in the fstab and Services.plist files and get access to the whole disk. We're not there yet. Or really not that close. Once we get the disk, we're golden. All hacks flow from full disk access with read & write. Without Jailbreak, there's no way to install applications or really do anything else.