Yikes, illegal H1Siri hack could kill your iPhone

The hunt is on for a way to port Apple’s voice assistant Siri to other iPhones beside the iPhone 4S. We’ve been following the development of one such hack over the past few months, but a recent project dubbed H1Siri now claims to be the first to enable Siri’s full suite of features on the iPhone 4.

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The only problem? It’s illegal, it could put your data in danger, and it could kill your phone.

The Siri assistant is currently only available on the iPhone 4S. The H1Siri app, available on a custom repository for the Cydia jailbreak app (which is used to find and download jailbroken software), uses Apple-owned files to trick Siri into working on the iPhone 4. In October, we reported that hacker Steven Troughton-Smith was able to get his Siri hack to communicate with Apple’s servers, but he wouldn’t release it to the public because it required distributing Apple’s copyrighted files.

H1Siri’s developers, the Chinese hacking group CD-Dev Team, don’t seem as concerned about those pesky legal issues.

The hack also requires you to send your Siri commands through CD-Dev Team’s proxy servers, which gives the shady group direct access to your contacts, calendar, e-mail, location, and more personal data.

If those red flags weren’t bad enough, reports from multiple early adopters show that H1Siri can cause a variety of problems on your iPhone — including settings malfunctioning, difficulty booting, and even completely killing (bricking) the phone.

I can see why so many desperate consumers are eager to get their Siri on, but this hack doesn’t seem like it’s worth all of the headache. Either hold out for a more functional hack (which may take a while, since those copyrighted files will remain an issue), or save up for an iPhone 4S or next year’s model.

Via iDownloadblog