iPhone Partly Unlocked

Looks like the walls around the iPhone are beginning to crumble; the clever hackers at the iPhone dev Wiki have just created a new tool that they claim allows the iPhone to be used with a non-iPhone AT&T SIM. The hackers also speculate that this should work with virtual networks which use AT&Ts network, but they have not tested that yet. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is a significant step on the way to unlocking the iPhone.

Their new tool is called iASign, and what it does is to create a special file that helps to activate the iPhone, based on some details that the user supplies to the tool (such as the unique Device ID and the IMEI code). however, the process is complex, and shouldn't be approached lightly; as we found when we tried adding ringtones, it is rather easy to cause problems by making mistakes when you are hacking the internals of a complex device like the iPhone.

What the iPhone hackers are now investigating is the routines within the iPhone that control the radio. These are locked so that the iPhone will only work with the AT&T network; that's called a network personalization lock as it locks the iPhone to AT&T by specifying the MCC (Mobile Country Code) and MNC (Mobile Network Code) of the network that the iPhone will work with. For ATT, the MCC is 310 and the MNC is 410. The iPhone will quite happily see other networks, it just won't connect to them. If you look at the screens from our analysis of the iPhone Field mode, you'll see that our iPhone could see cell towers from other networks, but it won't talk to them because of the network personalization lock.

The hackers have found out a lot about how the radio is controlled, but they haven't managed to work out how to get past this lock yet. However, there is still some way to go; as the hackers themselves wryly note: "we are not even close on giving up the full unlocking, as reported on some websites. We're still up and running, but we won't comment on a possible time line. If the unlocking is possible we'll eventually find it, so stay tuned :P"

[Via Gizmodo]