And fuck the cellcos and the telcos, because they use their powers as network gatekeepers to lock us into contracts with outrageous cancellation fees for what should be a commodity service. So, excellent news:
A 17-year-old hacker has broken the lock that ties Apple’s iPhone to AT&T’s wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.
Of course, Bush will probably send him to Gitmo, but he’s young…
And I always do like to see smart children outthinking hordes of cubedwellers.
The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes him about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.
Ah, the magic of the marketplace.
There is apparently no U.S. law against unlocking cell phones. Last year, the Library of Congress specifically excluded cell-phone unlocking from coverage under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
I wonder which Beltway Dem will be the first to introduce legislation to close this “loophole” ….
The only downside is that this enable more assholes to shout into cellphones. But maybe the price is worth it.
UPDATE Here’s the site:
Front page
Are there any "good" cellphone carriers?
I’m moving shortly and thinking of dropping my Qwest landline (even though, IIRC, they were one of the few to stand up to BushCo wiretapping shenanigans) and going all cellphone all the time. I currently have Verizon, but just finished my two-year contract and could jump now to someone who isn’t fucking handing over my private phone calls to fucking Bushco.
AT&T is out, on service alone, not to mention all the evil. So is anyone safe?
“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead
FYI
In the US, this only means you can now use iPhones on t-mobile. But it does help Canada, Europe and Asia. It might seriously hurt Apple sales or even a lockin deal with Euro phone carriers who were hoping to get the same B.S. AT&T hardware lock the phone (even though FCC and LOC declared it unlawful to continue to lock phones to a single network)
FYI, this isn’t some great magic, unlocked iPhones for all. What this is entails opening your phone, scratching off the epoxy covering a single hairthin trace of copper, soldering a wire from that to another microscopic surface mount capacitor. Then running some software hacks to rewrite the readonly flash memory that is beyond the capability of most professional hardware engineers.
Then you have an unlocked phone.
(Another solution out there let’s you program a super-SIM to interface between your SIM and the phone and fake it out to work on any network).
Some day in probably six months, someone will work out a way to hack the bootloader and be able to unlock the firmware from a single push button program.
But FYI, that is not today. (Though there will be some good cottage industries showing up that perform the above solder nonsense…)
For you day traders, this could mean thousand of iPhone sales from US to hardware modifiers who sell them in Euro and Asia.. which I imagine sales will a little disappointing for the iPhone launches in those markets.
The Young at Guantanamo
If the 17 year old hacker were sent to Guantanamo, he would not be the youngest ever there. BushCo sent a 15-year old there:
http://dubya.instantspot.com/blog/index….
Age is no bar to Bush’s barbarism.
amazingly, this kid got an interview on NPR
yesterday during prime time. it was a very positive interview, in the sense that it made it sound like unlocking the corporate collar is a good thing.
honestly i was quite surprised.
I worked for AT&T for 5
I worked for AT&T for 5 years in management and just recently left them. You cannot possibly imagine or fathom the disorganization and arrogance in that company. I couldn’t take it anymore. They are a protected monopoly and filled with unmotivated employees that are looking for a “safe” place to work until they retire. They aren’t exactly getting the cream of the crop; this is true from the bottom to the top position. Without the monopoly protection they would go out of business in 12 months. The humorous part is that the management has lulled themselves into thinking that they are really something. No, the federal government has removed your competition whether you want to admit that or not. I would suggest you go elsewhere to find your phone/internet/tv hookups. It would be hard to do worse than AT&T in my opinion.
The correllation between "incomptence" and...
… authoritarian enablers seems to be quite high, from the Republican Partei, to the White House, to the trad press.
Why is that, I wonder?
NTOE Incompetent at everything except looting, and grabbing more power for themselves, that is.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
iPhone unlocked for all
Ok, a real, software-only (and totally free) unlocking for all iPhones has been achieved.
http://www.freeiphoneunlock.com/guide/
First, you have to jailbreak your phone (update phone first to 1.02)
http://cre.ations.net/creation/ibrickr
Then copy some programs over using ssh / scp.
Then run a few commandline commands.
Then you are done and can put in your t-mobile SIM.
Apple has recently said they don’t disapprove and won’t go out of their way to break things for these hacked iPhones.