Apple will sell unlocked iPhones in France next May to comply with a French law that prohibits a mobile phone from being tied to an exclusive wireless carrier for longer than six months. (…)
Owners of unlocked iPhones are rightfully nervous after Apple said yesterday that it “has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs … will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.”
Worse, if your unlocked iPhone breaks, Apple will not fix it under the warranty, which they say becomes void if you tamper with the iPhone software. (…)
Hacker Jon Lech Johansen, most famous for his work decoding copy-protected DVDs, has discovered how to activate the iPhone “without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T.”
The process involves downloading his Phone Activation Server v1.0, but Jon says that the application “will not do anything unless you understand the magic numbers as well as add the hosts entry.”
Most of us probably don’t understand what that means, but there are a bunch of comments on his blog asking him to elaborate, so if you’re interested in this, you might want to keep an eye on that post.
