iPhone 3G Unlock Officially Announced - Code Name: Yellowsn0w - Release Date: News Years Eve

By Aaron Besson at 16 December, 2008, 9:12 am

‘Tis the Season to be Jolly!

Now that you guys have got used to the sunburn and blindness caused by the glare of the Dev Taems new blog template, we can get back to normal business. We’ll give you some updates and also tell you our schedule for the festive season.

Over the Christmas break some of the Dev Team members will be talking at the Chaos Computer Club’s 25C3 Congress. This talk will be a juicy technical talk relating to iPhone platform and their previous exploits. You can see more information about the talk “Hacking the iPhone”. There is even a super-cool TeamPwnapple T-Shirt

The Dev Team have been working hard on a few other things. The main one being the 3G unlock codenamed “yellowsn0w”. This is now completed and is currently being packaged into a user-friendly application with the simplicity that you see in QuickPwn or BootNeuter.

* The target release date for the unlock is New Year’s Eve 2008.
* This unlock method is available to iPhone 3Gs that have 2.11.07 baseband or earlier, they did warn you.
* The unlock requires a jailbroken 3G iPhone.

DFU Problems

Lots of users have been experiencing problems with the use of DFU mode after applying yesterday’s 10.5.6 system update.

The Dev’s believe this behavior is due to a kernel bug not a specific countermeasure by Apple. Possible fixes are (try at your own risk!) -

1. Replace the following plugin kexts from within IOUSBFamily.kext with the ones from 10.5.5 and then rebuild kextcache (if you don’t understand this, then you shouldn’t attempt it!)

/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBHub.kext

/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOUSBCompositeDriver.kext

2. Use a USB hub in-between the DFU device and the Mac and insert/reinsert the iPhone’s USB cable.

3. Use a PwnageTool created .ipsw on Windows! Oh the irony!

iPod touch 2G

Currently the Dev Team are not investigating the iPod touch 2G. Other people outside the Dev-Team are looking into this, but they are not at the moment. Please don’t hassle them with comments and requests about this, they’ll just be deleted and ignored. If they do look at this device it will be sometime in the New Year and they’ll inform you guys if and when they commence this work.

The Dev Team would like to reiterate that this is not because -

1. They are mean
2. They are turning our back on the iPod touch community
3. They have been paid off by JFK, Princess Diana or Elvis

This is because -

1. They have been busy with the 3G unlock.
2. They have been busy with the CCC talk.
3. Only one of them has a iPod touch 2G (but we’ll see what Santa brings)
4. Their employers don’t get as excited as us about hacking expensive pretty devices
5. Unfortunately their partners, parents and pets need occasional attention too.

Great news!!

[via DevTeamBlog]