Apple might be adamant that Siri remain exclusive to the iPhone 4S,
but that doesn’t mean that developers aren’t still trying to get the
app running on other iOS devices using unofficial and unsupported means.
Back in October, we wrote about attempts to get Siri running on an iPad.
Since then various hackers and developers have tried to solve the Siri
puzzle. Most of these attempts are thwarted when it comes to actually
getting Siri to communicate with the backend server that is required to
answer and serve queries.
iDownloadBlog reports
that a group Chinese hackers have come closer than anyone to getting
Siri running on a device that is not the iPhone 4S. The catch? The hack
violates copyright and sends user data to unknown servers.
Called H1Siri (“Hi Siri”), the package is available in the
third-party iOS app store, Cydia. Cydia is only available to users who
have jailbroken iPhones.
Additionally, the repository that H1Siri is in is custom and contains cracks, illegal software and pirated code.
iDownloadBlog managed to show off the app running on an iPhone 4, but it doesn’t connect to a server and thus, is useless.
Prominent Jailbreak developer chpwn
discussed the app on Twitter, noting that it is using copyrighted
binaries from an iPhone 4S (and thus, is illegal to distribute) and that
the app works by connecting to servers run by the CD-Dev Team. Those
servers have since gone offline, presumably from the load of end-users,
but any information that would normally be securely transferred to Apple
using Siri is also presumably transferred to these servers.
In a world of Carrier IQ paranoia, the penalty of using Siri on an unsanctioned iOS device — assuming it even works — is likely not worth the price.
We’d steer clear of this and any similar hacks.
