Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » iPhone unbrick (activate w/o AT&T service) hack works; single-step tool for Mac

July 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone unbrick (activate w/o AT&T service) hack works; single-step tool for Mac

TAGS: Design and engineering, New Products, Politics, strategy and culture, Software, iPhone

Update: This page has a one-step downloadable tool for Mac users, and it includes the keys that make the directions in the following link easier for PC users to follow. The whole business in the PC technique about decompiling the .net assembly is to dig out encryption keys embedded in that code. The author of the original crack, Jon Johansen of DeCSS (the DVD copy protect crack) fame, didn't want to make it too easy.

You can now buy an iPhone and "unbrick" it (meaning, get past the globe and the activation nag) using a hack that's not a simple process, and a PC is required, but it is laid out step by step.

It comes down to this. You patch itunes.exe, set Apple's authorization host to 127.0.0.1, and run a mini-server that acts like Apple's activation server.

There are many reports of success and lots of confusion. Once you're unbricked, apparently you stay that way until the next major release. In other words, every time Apple issues a patch, it's very likely that it will undo prior cracks. iPhone may become a brick again if it's activated improperly.

Ideally, Apple would let the unbricking crack stick. It gives users the freedom to use iPhone as an iPod/PDA/WLAN browser without paying $60+/month to AT&T, and Apple maintains deniability because the crack wasn't its idea.

In the ideal ideal, Apple will just ship iPhone unbricked, which would have been the right thing all along. Paying $499 or $599 for a perfect media player, and then having to pay $36, plus committing to $60 x 24 months before you can play a song, is ludicrous.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 6, 2007 07:25 AM

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