Progress Report
Update: we got confirmation that prepaid cards using the AT&T network worked. At least it has been confirmed for 7-11 cards

We wanted to get some confirmations before announcing it, but it seems nearly impossible to find people to try what we wanted to try.

So, as many people already noticed, using iASign, you'll be able to activate existing AT&T and Cingular Sims without signing a new contract. We think it should work with virtual AT&T operators as well (i.e. the ones using the same network code), but we couldn't find someone to actually confirm it yet. You can get a list of those virtual operators at http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/usa.html. Please note that TracFone and Net10 won't work due to some technical details. If anyone could try it out on one of those prepaid cards, that would be great.

By the way, for those of you looking for this "DeviceID", on a Mac (so on _your computer_) it's the name of the .plist file in ~/Library/lockdown. We'll probably release a more automated tool later, once we find some time for those tasks.

As a side note, we'd like to clarify that we are not even close on giving up the full unlocking, as reported on some websites. We're still up and running, but we won't comment on a possible time line. If the unlocking is possible we'll eventually find it, so stay tuned.

Have fun,

-- the dev team


New release: iASign

We are releasing a small tool called iASign (click for more details) to generate a valid activation PLIST file based on the Device ID, IMEI and CCID of your iPhone. You can upload the generated PLIST to the iPhone using our activation tool. Note that in order for the iPhone to accept this PLIST, you must first replace the iPhoneActivation.pem on your iPhone with the one provided. See the README file for further details. We have had it working for quite a while, but we wanted to release it with a Windows binary, which apparently seems to be a problem to get. So we're releasing the Mac OS X binary and the source. Hopefully somebody will get us a working Windows binary.