$100,000 bounty on free iPhone unlocking

Methods for unlocking the iPhone seem to be coming out of the fake wood paneling around these parts, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for more. A anonymous group of donors has offered up a $100,000 bounty for the code to unlock the iPhone, as long as said code is released for free by midnight Wednesday (no timezone was specified).

The donors are said to be open source advocates who believe that releasing the code for free is the only solution to avoid issues with AT&T and to benefit all users. Whether or not doing so would be legal is hard to say. While the DMCA exemption allows you to unlock a cell phone in order to use it on a network, money complicates everything.

As if that’s not enough, a couple more groups have published claims that they’ve come up with ways to unlock the phone. Gizmodo reports on a trio of Israeli programmers and a Swiss hacker. Finally, a movement is also underway to fund a free unlock solution by the iPhone Dev team that has done so much work to hack the iPhone already.

Update: Turns out the Israeli hackers did not come up with a new unlock method, they just used the existing hardware hack.

[via Business 2.0]

Category: AT&T, News

Posted by Dan Moren on Aug 28 2007, 2:24 PM ET

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