Live Free Or Die: DVD Jon Release IPhone Patch To Bypass AT&T

Today is independence Day in the U.S. and to celebrate we've got a link to DVD Jon's hack to use the iPhone without AT&T service. It requires a Windows machine with the MS .NET Framework installed and bit of hex editing (if I'm understanding it right, for obvious reasons Jon doesn't exactly give detailed instructions), but users report that it does seems to work.

If the comments on the thread, Jon notes that there's an even easier way to activate the phone sans AT&T, provided you know someone who has an activated phone and is willing to risk it:

If you know someone who has already activated their iPhone, borrow their SIM. Insert the SIM in the non-activated iPhone. Then cradle the new iPhone in the dock with iTunes. iTunes then quickly activates the new phone with ATT. This only took about 2-3 min. Now.. the only possible issue is that it might disable the original phone? But I have nothing to base this on, this is more or less a warning. I did not have access to the original phone after the process was done.

Another poster in the thread raises an interesting question, if you apply the hack, activate the phone and then decide you want to go ahead and legitimately register with AT&T will it work? So far no one seems to know the answer to that question.

There have been several articles around the web about how Apple might live to regret it's exclusive deal with AT&T, however, given the nature of these early hacks it seems that AT&T might be the ones that end up regretting the deal. Certainly if nothing else they're seeing a heap of bad press with countless reviews repeating the manta iPhone good, AT&T bad.

And who better to release the first iPhone unlocking patch than DVD Jon — given that he's already unlocked DVDs, iTunes tracks and host of other DRM measures?