It's another step on the road to unlocking the iPhone to work with carriers other than AT&T; the hackers at the iPhone Dev Wiki have managed to gain access to the code that runs the radio baseband chip. This is the piece of silicon that communicates with the cell phone network, and somewhere in this code are the instructions that tell the iPhone to refuse to talk to any network other than AT&T, so this is a huge step on the way to unlocking the iPhone. Once they understand how this works, they can start to look at ways round it, hopefully eventually leading to a way to unlock the iPhone.
The hackers haven't released the code itself; they are concerned that it might contain identifiable data that could be traced back to an individual user. Instead, they have released the code that dumps the data from the chip, so you can look at it yourself if you're interested.
NOTE: Looking for links? At the request of the people behind the Wiki, we don't link directly to them; they don't want the Wiki to be overwhelmed by people looking for a program that can unlock their iPhone. You can find it pretty easily by
Googling it, though. The hackers also run an
IRC channel where they encourage people with questions to go.
