New Unlock Works for All iPhones, All Firmwares

It saddens me to see people pay a lot of money for a device just to fight the manufacturer tooth and nail for every update and extra functionality.<p>As for the carriers who lock these phones, it's as if your bank wouldn't let you put holes in the walls until you finished paying off the mortgage. All this does is frustrate customers who paid for that device and who are anyway locked into a contract. Pointless anyway, since it was always possible to pay a guy $20 to unlock any available model out there.<p>I'd like to see device manufacturers and carriers focusing on their core business (better hardware/software/service) instead of how to cripple more features to squeeze a few extra dollars today.<p>Even more importantly, I'd like to see people grow a spine and just say no to buying devices if what they intend to do with them is prohibited by the manufacturer. Do that for a while and you'll see them start sweating and advertising their new open product.

This is a neat hack - basically, Apple's SIM activation server doesn't validate that the ICCID sent to it matches the asserted carrier - only that the carrier matches the phone identification and that the phone isn't blacklisted.<p>The SAM tool lets you fool iOS into sending a valid carrier to the activation server, and the activation server happily sends back the material necessary for the OS to associate the baseband with the SIM.<p>To make things even better, the material sent back from Apple's servers isn't time-sensitive and hence the attack can be replayed forever - once you have the "baseband ticket" for a given phone and SIM, it can be unlocked forever across all current known versions.

Title is somewhat misleading, as this requires "any jailbroken iOS device", which at this point doesn't cover all/models firmware revisions - specifically, iOS 5.1 on A5 and A5X powered units:<p><a href="http://jailbrea.kr/" rel="nofollow">http://jailbrea.kr/</a>

In my opinion hardware unlock (via turbo sim or gevey) is still the best solution, it leaves your iOS intact.

This was a lifesaver - I've been stuck in a foreign country carrying around two phones for the past four months.

This is pretty cool, I wonder how they realised this was possible. I can only assume they monitored a lot of activations to realise it.