

New Unlock Works for All iPhones, All Firmwares - israelyc
http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=21503

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tga
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.

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.

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.

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.

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Someone
_"it's as if your bank wouldn't let you put holes in the walls until you
finished paying off the mortgage."_

Well, don't they? My mortgage has a section about needing permission to do
renovations. I do not know how things are in the USA, but given that one, in
some states, can walk away from a property without repercussion, I would be
surprised if things were different. Would be a nice way to increase the price
of one's house: buy a house in a different neighborhood, burn it down, turn in
the keys.

Back to the subject: with iPhones, the argument that locking takes away
functionality is less strong than for other phones. You will get updates.

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bri3d
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.

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.

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.

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zdw
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:

<http://jailbrea.kr/>

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

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delackner
Tried a gevey sim and the phone randomly lost unlock once every few days.
Totally unusable. Maybe they have improved since last year...

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

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tvh2k
^^ this is exactly why the carrier lock is bullshit. Then again, most carriers
will give you unlock info if you're headed overseas and have been with them
more than a few months.

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dubya
Not AT&T, unfortunately. They're just starting to unlock at end of contract,
but as far as I can tell won't unlock for overseas travel. And AT&T has sold
most international-cable phones in the US, by far.

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sthulbourn
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.

