TA_Mobile extracts bootloader 5.8 from iPhone 3G - Unlock Soon?

Posted by:Aaron Besson
July 22nd, 2008

TA_Mobile is a Vietnamese iPhone hacker and has been hard at work taking apart his new 16Gb white iPhone 3G and has managed extract bootloader 5.8 from the hardware. Although this itself is not a unlock, it does give dev’s like ta_mobile, the Dev Team, GeoHot and others one step closer to unlocking the iPhone 3G baseband.

The bootloader and baseband are critical to both software and hardware unlocks. Ta_Mobile hopes that the new Bootloader 5.8 can be used to create a soft unlock like that mentioned by the Dev Team on their Wiki:

Simple Unlock

“From the S-Gold’s perspective, here are the fundamentals of unlocking basebands. A simple byte sequence search combined with a neutered baseband are all you need. (The s5l8900 CPU imposes other restrictions beyond this discussion.)

The secpack is at ICE*.fls offset 0×1a4 (0×800 bytes long)
The baseband is at ICE*.fls offset 0×209a4
The baseband length is at ICE*.fls offset 0×20 (subtract 0×20000)

Due to gray’s initial RCE of the baseband, and combined with a neutered bootloader, unlocking recent and future basebands has been reduced to a simple byte search. “