The bounty for the Quest 2 jailbreak is still up for grabs

It looks like that Oculus Quest 2 jailbreak that everyone got excited about last month isn't happening. It turns out the "successful" bootloader might actually be fake.

The day after Oculus started shipping the Quest 2 VR headset, Robert Long, a developer at Mozilla who's not a fan of Facebook's policies, put up a $5,000 bounty for a proven jailbreak for the headset. Palmer Luckey, the ousted founder of Oculus, matched that offer, bringing the prize to $10,000 for a verified root access jailbreak.

Less than a week later, someone laid claim to the prize, and the VR community has been waiting with bated breath ever since. Within days of the bounty announcement, the XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), which offered to help Long verify the claims, announced that someone had stepped forward with root access to the Quest 2 and the ability to bypass the Facebook login requirement and that their researchers had "validated this jailbreak."

Not what they thought

Now it looks like the Quest 2 jailbreak was not what we were led to believe. UploadVR did some investigative sleuthing after receiving a type from a reliable source claiming that the jailbreak was, in fact, bogus. Since then, someone else made a similar claim on Reddit, and Robert Long told UploadVR that he no longer believes the claim is legitimate.

The problem, it seems, stems from a flaw in the independent verification that the XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) performed before announcing the root access is real. The hacker allegedly demonstrated installing Windows XP on the Quest, which is not possible on an ARM-based processor. It appears the hacker duped XRSI or perhaps didn't understand what they were doing in the first place.

In any case, it looks like the bounty is still available. Certainly, no one has received the payment yet.

Hat tip to UploadVR for uncovering this one.