iPhone 3GS Jailbroken! A Teenager has Hacked It!

George Hotz, an enterprising teen hacker who goes by the name Purplera1n, won fame and infamy in 2007 when he became the first to free the iPhone from its AT&T U.S. SIM card restrictions.  As a reward, Mr. Hotz won a hot set of wheels -- the Nissan 350Z and a paid consulting job with CertiCell, a cell phone services company.

Now a little older and taller, Mr. Hotz, age 19, has distinguished himself again, becoming the first to publish a jailbreak solution for the iPhone 3G S -- a fix to allow the phone to run apps not approved by Apple.  The first step is to visit Mr. Hotz's page and download the "purplera1n" app.  Mr. Hotz describes the following steps on his blog, writing:

Connect your iPhone normally. Click “make it ra1n”. Wait. On bootup, run Freeze, the purplera1n installer app.

The Freeze installer will install an app called Cydia which allows you to run any application on the iPhone -- Apple approved or not.

Using this newfound freedom, the iPhone's SIM card can be unlocked to run on any network by using the previously released ultrasn0w by the Dev Team.  The Dev Team, not affiliated with Mr. Hotz had published the ultrasn0w app, but had declined to release a fix to jailbreak the iPhone, essentially rendering the app useless (as it was not Apple approved).

The Dev Team had stated that it would release a jailbreak with the OS update v3.1.  Mr. Hotz was frustrated by this, so he took matters into his own hands.  He accuses the Dev Team of delaying the jailbreak release for fear of an Apple patch, chastising, "Normally I don't make tools for the general public, and rather wait for the dev team to do it. But guys, whats up with waiting until 3.1? That isn't how the game is played. We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes. It isn't worth waiting because you might have the "last" hole in the iPhone. What last hole...this isn't golf. I'll find a new one next week."

A Windows-compatible version of the iPhone unlocking tool came last week, and this weekend brought a Mac compatible version.  The Windows version is not compatible with Windows 7, according to Mr. Hotz's blog, and it requires the iPhone to be running OS v3.0 and for the latest version of iTunes to be installed.

[via Daily Tech]

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