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28th August - A New Jersey teenager has unlocked the iPhone,
opening the way to Apple's iconic mobile telephone being used
by non-US networks.
The Associated Press news agency confirmed George Hotz, 17,
had unlocked the iPhone and used it on T-Mobile, a rival to
its sole US operator, AT&T.
The hacker says the unlocking takes about two hours and involves
some soldering and skill with software.
AT&T and Apple have not yet commented on the news.
Hackers and security researchers have been poring over Apple's
much-coveted phone since its launch in the US in June in an
effort to discover vulnerabilities in the handset.
Top of their list has been cracking the code that ties the
phone to AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive network.
Before George Hotz's announcement on his blog, the iPhone
was made to work on overseas networks using another method,
which involves copying information from the Sim (Subscriber
Identity Module) card.
However, special equipment was needed and the actual phone
was not unlocked, with each Sim card having to be reprogrammed
for use on a particular iPhone.
Analysts believe Apple may still have time to modify the
iPhone production line to make new phones invulnerable to
the hacks before the iPhone's expected European launch later
this year.
Collaboration
The young hacker says he hopes phone-owners can eventually
unlock their phones by themselves, and that he hopes his discovery
will not be exploited for commercial gain.
"That's exactly, like, what I don't want... people making
money off this," he told AP.
The next step, he said, would be a non-solder solution: a
way to unlock the phone using software alone.
Technology blog Engadget said on Friday that it had successfully
unlocked an iPhone using a different method that required
no tinkering with the hardware. The software was supplied
by an anonymous group of hackers that apparently plans to
charge for it, AP reports.
The agency notes that both the Hotz and Sim techniques leave
the iPhone's many functions intact apart from its "visual
voicemail" feature, which shows voice messages as if
they are incoming e-mail.
The New Jersey hacker says he collaborated online with four
other people, two of them in Russia, to develop the unlocking
process.
He spent about 500 hours on the project since the launch
on 29 June.
"Some of my friends think I wasted my summer but I think
it was worth it," he told US newspaper The Record of
Bergen County.
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