iUnlock, the first free, open source iPhone SIM unlock app, was released to the underground just 74 days after the iPhone's release. Developed by the iPhone Dev Team, it's not (yet) for the faint of heart and it takes a little longer to do its magic than iPhoneSIMfree's method, but it works.

The story behind iUnlock.
It all started Monday when iPhoneSIMfree was finally released. Hackers immediately bought up licenses and started looking into how the thing ticked, and found something rather surprising: the app flashes to the baseband chip -- something the iPhone Dev Team had originally said couldn't be done at all without hardware hackery, diverting effort away from such attempts.
But instead of just swiping the iPhone Dev Team's method, hackers started looking for different ways to achieve the same results now they knew a baseband flash could be done, and a certain Zappaz finally struck gold after working on it all Monday night and well into Tuesday. But that was only the beginning.

While Zappaz was at work doing the hack from scratch, there were other efforts underway to spoof iPhoneSIMfree's software. Hexxeh was attempting to do it with an external server, while Geohot got in on the action and purportedly managed to pull it off by tricking the software to do its thing even if the server returned a negative. However, Geohot decided to put his hack on hold and use the Zappaz method, which was decidedly less sketchy, since it wouldn't take advantage of iPhoneSIMfree's work and application to perform the hack.

When Zappaz eventually logged off due to fatigue, Geohot was preparing to build an application to wrap around the Zappaz script so it'd be ready for distribution. That's when iUnlock.zip showed up on the iPhone Dev Wiki and the iPhone hacking scene came to a standstill.

Apparently the iPhone Dev Team's HaRRo had been working on the same method as Zappaz the whole time, but managed to finish first, and prep and post a usable solution. Another hacker named Draken tossed the binary from iUnlock together with couple other files necessary to complete the unlock, thus assembling the first easily distributable, (relatively) easily executed, and completely free and open iPhone SIM unlock software anyone laid eyes on.

Naturally, some folks immediately started in on documentation alongside Draken, while official documentation was popping up from the iPhone Dev Team; before you could say "that's the end of the road for iPhoneSIMfree sales," there were people unlocking their iPhones in droves -- free at last after 74 days on the market

[via Engadget - iUnlock released & The Story Behind]

THE UNLOCK GUIDES:
http://www.freeiphoneunlock.com/guide/
http://iphone.unlock.no/

Following the news: http://www.pqdvd.com/blog/iphone/category/unlock-iPhone/

Unlocking your iPhone via iUnlock, unfortunately, is quite a lengthy & complicated process, & is to be done only by advanced users (who know what they are doing). The iPhone Dev Team are currently working on an all-in-one unlock app for Windows that will do everything from the Jailbreak to the unlock.
Let’s hope Apple doesn’t take a leaf out of Nokia’s book & change the locking system in iPhone 2.0! While it took only 74 days for iPhone Dev Team to release a free unlocking solution, the BB5 locking system took 3 years to crack! & it still doesn’t work on some models (N95, N93i, etc.).