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Apple iPhone Update 1.1.1 Has Been Hacked

Faster than a speeding bullet, a pair of hackers who go by the names of "dinopio" and "Edgan" appear to have successfully hacked an iPhone with the 1.1.1 software and firmware upgrade. When is Apple going to give up?

The two hackers in question actually live-blogged their iPhone hack. Here is a look at their hack from The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

10:26 AM: Your iPhone has been updated, and is restarting. Activate iPhone, connect to iTunes.

10:27 AM: Wrong SIM!!!!! Oh man. (Trust me, it's a pure AT&T SIM on a pure AT&T account.)

10:28 AM: I pull the phone out of the dock and then I reconnect to iTunes. iTunes could not connect to the iPhone "Bologna" because of an unknown error occurred.

10:29 AM: Switching to my Intel Mac from my G4 Mac

10:32 AM: I have the full tree. Getting screen shot now. The phone is not activated but iPhuc connects to it without trouble. w00t!

Now, this hack looks really, really hardcore and beyond the expertise of most power-users (including yours truly). But the latest iPhone upgrade already has been hacked. How long do you think it will take until iPhoneSIMfree or some other group makes an easier-to-use hack available? Given that hackers now know the iPhone's guts pretty well, I suspect we'll seen one or two hacks commercially available in weeks.

This latest iPhone proves that one of the maxims of the Web 2.0 era -- networks are smarter than individuals -- applies to corporations, too. The global networks of hackers and Apple geeks are, collectively, smarter than Apple's internal iPhone developer and engineering teams. Frankly, there are just more of them than there are people inside Apple. Isn't it time Apple woke up to this fact and opened the iPhone?

What do you think? How long until there is a more widely usable hack of the 1.1.1 upgrade for the iPhone? And doesn't this latest hack just prove that Apple can't beat the global networks?

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