A sect of hackers has split from the iPhone Dev Team and claims that AnySIM and iUnlock both had critical flaws that led to the bricking of hacked iPhones during the update to 1.1.1. They place the blame on poorly written hacks by the iPhone Dev Team and have splintered off into their own "elite" team. Fight! Fight! Fight!I think the discussion over who is to blame for bricked iPhones (user, Apple, AT&T) has run its course on this blog, but The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and Wired are reporting some new and interesting developments.

Apparently a core of hackers has split from the iPhone Dev Team (IDT) amidst some personal and technical conflicts. One of the hackers, Zibri, was banned from the IDT's IRC channel, and this is what led to the split. The splinter faction has distanced themselves from the IDT and say that AnySIM and iUnlock were flawed because of some Google wiki code buried in the hacks.

The new iPhone Elite Team was harsh in its criticism of the IDT. It said:

No, it wasn't Apple's fault. Rather than figure out how to fix this themselves, the iPhone Dev Team would rather work on jailbreaking the new 1.1.1 and keep accepting your donations. We want this fixed -- we want them to take responsibility for their bunk code.

While it is certainly possible that the hacks were not perfect, I agree with TUAW's stance that since so many unhacked iPhones were also bricked, that the 1.1.1 update wasn't exactly perfect, either.

In the meantime, 1.1.1 has been hacked and a "jailbreak" system is likely to be available to iPhone modifiers imminently.