Hacker Jon Lech Johansen, a.k.a DVD Jon, became a living legend by defeating the CSS copy protection of the DVD video discs. It seems that DVD Jon has been attracted by the Apple iPhone hype and he has been working on the iPhone activation scheme. US telecommunications operator AT&T has an exclusive distribution agreement with Apple for the iPhone, so the device is locked to AT&T SIM cards as requires an online activation done via Apple iTunes. DVD Jon has managed to activate the device without the telephony capabilities, but the WiFi and iPod features are already working. He has even released the activation tool on his website. Another hacker using a nickname ‘gj’ said to PC World magazine that he expects the cracking to be easy, and describes the hacking as a one week job.

Cracking the activation process brings hackers one step closer to their goal of unlocking the iPhone. The phone requires iTunes to activate functions such as its camera and music player. But the process also requires signing up for a two-year data plan with AT&T.

“Activating the phone really just makes the device more ‘usable’ for those who want to use it as a Wi-Fi device, for instance,” gj said.

With the activation process cracked hackers turned their focus to unlocking the iPhone, a challenge that is expected to be easier than cracking the activation process.

“Unlocking is a function of the radio and the radio’s interaction with the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) logic, and these are mostly standards based,” gj said.

Source: PC World

.

While Apple has once again managed to create an enormous hype around the iPhone, people are somehow forgetting that it is not really that superior device. Sure, the design looks good and Apple seems to have implemented a good user interface for the touch screen. But the fact is that the iPhone lacks many standard features of the competitors. It does not have a GPS for location services, it doesn’t support Java for 3rd party applications, it doesn’t support multimedia messaging (MMS), you can’t use your music files as ring tones and the connection method is a rather slow 2G with EDGE.

Based on these obvious technical flaws, Apple Corp. has received a lot of commentary in the YouTube: iPhone vs. N95