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He hacked AT&T away from the iPhone

A teen's work raises the possibility the hot gadget could become available to a larger market.

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology
Published August 25, 2007

Armed with a soldering iron and a large supply of energy drinks, a slight, curly-haired teenager has found a way to make the iPhone, arguably the gadget of the year, available to a much wider audience.

George Hotz of Glen Rock, N.J., spent his last summer before entering the Rochester Instutite of Technology figuring out how to "unlock" the iPhone, freeing it from being restricted to a single carrier, AT&T Inc.

The procedure, which the 17-year-old laid out on his blog (iphonejtag.blogspot.com) Thursday, raises the possibility of a cottage industry springing up to buy iPhones, unlocking them and then selling them to people who don't want AT&T service or can't get it, particularly overseas.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the United States.

In a video post, Hotz demonstrated an iPhone running on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.

The hack is complicated and requires skill with soldering and software, and missteps may result in the iPhone becoming useless, so it's unlikely to become a household procedure.

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

The iPhone 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.

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

Both hacks leave intact the iPhone's many functions.

Analysts said it's unlikely Apple would overhaul the iPhone's wiring to thwart the hack because the difficulty of the procedure is likely to keep it confined to hard-core hobbyists. The company has said it plans to introduce the phone in Europe this year, but it hasn't set a date or identified carriers.

There is apparently no U.S. law against unlocking cell phones. Last year, the Library of Congress specifically excluded cell phone unlocking 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 people, two of them in Russia, to develop the process.

Hotz spent about 500 hours on the project since the iPhone went on sale. On Thursday, he put the unlocked phone on eBay, where the high bid was above $3,000 on Friday afternoon.

[Last modified August 24, 2007, 22:41:32]