Unlock

Due to a ruling by the Librarian of Congress, come tomorrow it will be illegal to unlock a new, on-contract iPhone -- or any phone -- in the U.S. If you bought your iPhone before tomorrow, or if you bought a factory unlocked iPhone straight from Apple, or off-contract, full priced iPhone from carriers, or your contract is over, you shouldn't be subject to any restrictions. Doing it on your own via Jailbreak, however, will be strictly verboten, and likely subject to prosecution by law enforcement and the Batman.

Some preliminary tests are showing that users can pop an AT&T or T-Mobile SIM card into a Verizon-branded iPhone 5, and you can get HSPA+ service as normal (assuming, of course, the GSM SIM is active). This is great news for T-Mobile customers that worried about having to unlock the SIM slot on their shiny new iPhone 5, as well as frequent flyers that regularly swap out SIM cards for local service. You can always shave down your own nano SIM cards, though it's generally not recommended.

AT&T has just launched a new webpage that allows you to request a SIM unlock for an out of contract iPhone. AT&T has always made it reasonably difficult to unlock a device on its network but now it seems to be softening its approach and actually trying to make it easier for iPhone users. The form is fairly simple to fill in and if you meet a few simple requirements you can have your iPhone unlocked in 5-7 days.

If you've been around the iPhone scene for a while, you've no doubt already heard the story of how George "Geohot" Hotz unlocked the original iPhone for the first time, back in the summer of 2007. If not, The New Yorker, in a far broader profile, tells it again:

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.