Although this article attempts to address as many issues as possible, it is still likely that you may encounter a completely new and unique situation with your iphone. Luckily, the internet is full of great resources that can help you determine a solution to the problem.

The big problem is that iphone hacking is, by deinition, unoficial and mostly unauthorized. and even when hacking is tolerated, or even privately encouraged, it is unreasonable to expect a large corporation to support not only its own software, but the broad scope of possible hacked variants of that software. Thus, it’s necessary to go elsewhere for support. Fortunately, support is available in fact, the organized support available for iphone hacking surpasses that of most software companies, and is free.

For those unfamiliar with the open source software movement, it is quite a cultural shock to ind that they can often contact the real author of a piece of free software and get courteous and helpful email support. in an age of self-help forums and pay-per-incident support calls, the accessibility and, for lack of a better word, the humanity shown by open source software developers is legendary. the community

Although there are hundreds if not thousands of websites, forums, portals, and blogs dedicated to the iphone, the actual core of hackers who do the real work are few in number. perhaps several dozen key contributors do the intellectually stimulating but long and painstaking work of discovering the exploits, creating stable, well-tested software to open up the iphone and ipod touch, and packaging it so that anyone can use it.

In the lurry to monetize the iphone phenomena in every way possible, some application vendors have taken open, free work and software from a core iphone hacking team, wrapped it in a proprietary application, passed it off as their own work (or given perfunctory acknowledgement) in order to make money through licensing, advertising, and “please Donate” online tip jars. arguably, these carpetbagging “script kiddies” have added some value perhaps in packaging up hard-to-use command-line tools into a friendly “click here to jailbreak” application.

But as they did not develop the original hacks themselves, they are not necessarily capable of ixing the bugs, or reversing any damage that their one-trick applications may cause.

The best people to support a hack and to accurately represent what it’s capable of doing are the authors themselves.

The iphone dev team

We keep speaking about the iphone hacking community. speciically, the iphone hacker community consists of several dozen core individuals who have enabled or created most of the innovations you will see in this article. The largest group has associated under the banner of the iphone Dev Team. Their website and blogs have moved around a bit, but at the moment their main portal can be found at http://wikee.iphwn.org and their blog at http://blog. iphone-dev.org.

Hackint0sh

The hackint0sh forum (www.hackint0sh.org) is a huge community of more than 80,000 members and covers a wide range of apple hacks including ipods, iphones, apple TVs, and Mac os X in general. This is the primary forum for support on iphone Dev Team hacks and an excellent resource for new and experienced hackers.

The iphone Wiki

Another fantastic, ad-free, real-deal site is www.theiphonewiki.com, started and maintained by GeoHot (George hotz), who was irst to unlock an iphone and who continues to make major breakthroughs on iphone hacking. The wiki has the clearest, most concise, just-thefacts analysis of all the known exploits on the iphone and ipod touches. although sometimes hard to read for nonengineers, this is a warm respite from the biased shilling and link posting that pervades the gadget blogosphere. hotz’s own very technical blog can be found at http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com.

real-time tech Support: irc

sometimes the wikis, forums, and step-by-step tutorials just don’t have the answer. and no matter how much searching you do, sometimes it helps to have a human being point you in the right direction.

if you still can’t ind what you’re looking for on any iphone hacking websites, then this is your solution: iRc (internet Relay chat) connects users from all over the world. iRc servers provide chat rooms called channels where you can get help day or night.

To start chatting, you must irst install an iRc client on your computer or iphone. Mac users can download colloquy from http://colloquy.info. pc users can download miRc from www.mirc.com.

To get an iRc client on your iphone, you can search for iRc in cydia or installer; Mobile colloquy and iRcm are two applications available as of this writing.

Once you have your iRc client running, add this server: irc.osx86.hu with the port set to 6667. if you already have iRc properly conigured, you can just type this URL into your browser: irc://irc.osx86. hu/iphone.

Although this is by no means a minitutorial on iRc, you can get a list of channels to join by typing:

/list

And you can join a channel by typing /join <name of channel>, such as:

/join #iphone

Several useful channels are #iphone, #iphone-dev, and #itouch

if you’re not familiar with iRc, the basic rules are: don’t post too much; don’t harass; be polite; follow the directions you see when you join the room. once you’ve joined one of the channels, you can ask your questions. You’re likely to get your answers, as many of the iphone Dev Team developers inhabit these rooms whenever they’re online, which is most of the time.