First of all, the the people behind the project had a sudden change of heart and decided to work only with so called resellers. No end-user deals whatsoever. The prices start from $1800 ($36 per license with 50 license as minimum order) and end with $125000 (5000 licenses at $25/each).
Those willing to have their iPhone unlocked will have to contact the reseller and agree to have an application installed on the device. The app will then contact the server and unlock the phone…for the time being. The app is known to work only for current firmware versions ( 1.02 included) and it’s common sense to assume that Apple will be more than glad to cripple it as soon as possible via a new update. Therefore:
“We will naturally try to provide our resellers an updated version of our software for each firmware update, it is in our interest, but we do NOT guarantee that we will be able to do so.”
And now, for the middleman: why is he necessary in this picture? According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is fully legal for the user to unlock his phone. However, those doing business with the necessary means fall into another category and the law doesn’t offer any explicit protection from lawsuits. Having another one do the work might take some legal heat off iPhoneSIMFree’s back and allow it to stay afloat long enough to get its back account to a nice round figure.
When AT&T and Apple begin to gain some serious ground in court, the shady company will most-likely vanish or go bankrupt. In the mean time, middlemen will be left to carry on the legal fight and eventually pay the damages to the afore-mentioned companies.
In the mean time, the users will be left with no technical support, a broken iPhone and an installed app which pretty much looks like spyware.