Teen Hacker Unlocks iPhone, Allowing Non-AT&T Service

Aug 26, 09:18 PM

Current Headlines: By PETER SVENSSON

By Peter Svensson

The Associated Press

NEW YORK

The last summer before college is full of possibilities. George Hotz, a slight, curly haired teenager in Glen Rock, N.J., spent it taking on two of the largest corporations in the U.S. technology industry, and winning .

Along with a secretive group of online collaborators, Hotz broke the restrictions that make Apple Inc.'s iPhone - arguably the hottest gadget of the year - work only on AT&T Inc.'s cellular network.

The feat took him 500 hours - or about 8 hours a day - since the iPhone's June 29 launch. The equipment used included a soldering iron and a large supply of Red Bull energy drinks.

Hotz said Friday he was using the unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.

While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the United States. Apple plans to introduce the phone in Europe this year but hasn't set a date or identified carriers.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel and Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock said their companies had no comment. Hotz said the companies had not been in touch with him.

The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. Missteps could result in the iPhone becoming useless, Hotz warned. It takes him about two hours to perform the feat.

Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry might spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.

"That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."

He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.

"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said.

The next step would be for someone to develop a way to unlock the phone using only software.

The iPhone already has been made to work on overseas networks using another method, which involves copying information from the Subscriber Identity Module, a small card with a chip that identifies a subscriber to the cell-phone network.

That method does not involve any soldering, but it does require special equipment, and it doesn't unlock the phone - each new chip has to be reprogrammed for use on a particular iPhone.

Both hacks leave intact the iPhone's many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks. The only thing that won't work is the "visual voice mail" feature, which lists voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.

Since the details of both hacks are public, Apple may be able to modify the iPhone production line to make new phones invulnerable.

There is apparently no U.S. law against unlocking cell phones. Last year, the Library of Congress specifically excluded the unlocking of cell phones from coverage under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Among other things, the law has been used to prosecute people who modify game consoles to play a wider variety of games.

Hotz collaborated online with four other people - two of them in Russia - to develop the unlocking process.

"Then there are two guys who I think are somewhere U.S.-side," said Hotz, who knows them only by their online handles.

Hotz has put the unlocked iPhone up for sale on eBay, where the high bid was at $2,900 Friday afternoon. The model, with 4 gigabytes of memory, sells for $499 new.

"Some of my friends think I wasted my summer, but I think it was worth it," he told The Record of Bergen County, which reported Hotz's hack Friday .

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