Want Siri on your iPhone 4? Legal, less painful method discovered

Thanks to Apple’s mobile operating system update,iOS 5.0.1, anyone with a little technical knowledge and desire can now put Apple’s voice assistant Siri feature to use on their iPhone 4.

The update leaves the phone’s RAM disks unencrypted, which allows you to write a script to extract the files needed to enable Siri on the iPhone 4, according to iPhone hacker MuscleNerd. To implement this hack, iPhone 4 owners must download the iOS update, if they haven’t already done so. If you currently have the update, you must download the revised update from Apple’s site.

The new Siri hack is much less painful than previous methods, which required an iPhone 4S unique identifier and validation tokens to fool Apple’s server running Siri. The new method is arguably superior, since “borrowing” someone else’s unique identifier raises security and legal questions.

While hacking the iOS files is (mostly) legal, Apple probably won’t like it. Until the company rolls out another update, however, you can enjoy Siri on your iPhone 4 without having to purchase a new device.

[Via Cult of Mac]