As with the yellowsn0w video we showed you last month, this video was brought to us by Dev Team member Muscle Nerd.

redsn0w, quite simply, bypasses the Apple anti-jailbreak protection that causes the device to stop booting up if a jailbreak were detected. It opens up a whole slew of applications that are not, or will never be, offered through the “official” channel, the App Store.

The official release for redsn0w is expected shortly. [Qik]

The target release date for the official unlock is New Year’s Eve. The unlock will only be available to iPhone 3G owners that have 2.11.07 baseband or earlier (jailbroken). As you can see in the demo the hack is finished—Dev-Team members say all that’s left to do is package it up into a nice, user-friendly package. [Dev-Team Blog]

You first need to be logged into the Mac with administrator privileges and, when asked, you have to provide with the administrator password.

Yes, it’s that easy. Enjoy. [Get the script here or here via Hackintosh]

While it took a little longer than the free iPhone EDGE unlock, it does sound like this is the real deal. The team is claiming a successful unlock–now the next step is to package it up in a user-friendly GUI app like Pwnage Tool.

The only catch is that it will work only with iPhone 3Gs with baseband version 2.11.07 or earlier, and it must be jailbroken. To ensure you preserve an unlockable version of the baseband, the Dev Team has warned against the usage of the QuickPwn jailbreaking tool and against updating via official firmwares without first waiting for Pwnage Tool to work with it. More guidelines for that are here.

Phew, after all this l33t my head is starting to spin, but the good news remains–iPhone 3G unlock is on the way! [Dev Team]

Well, it’s only semi-legal. You’d better download these files fast before they’re taken down (they’ll most likely pop up again elsewhere though, with a day or two’s delay). The instructions are here, complete with photos of the process. If you want to unlock, hit that up now rather than pay $US30-$US50 to some guy to unlock your phone for you. [Sw box via ZonaBlackBerry via Into Mobile]

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone’s motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh’s turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

As a last step, the technician put the phone back together, and it looked like nothing had been done to it.

All this for a mere $US80! Call me crazy, but watching someone do this to my phone would be infinitely more satisfying than simply downloading a program to crack it. You’d feel like your phone really earned its unlocking. [Crave via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Get ready, because the iPhone 3G unlock is coming to an iPhone 3G near you. The iPhone Dev Team have been able to break in the baseband processor. As you may remember from the first-generation iPhone unlock, this is big news because it means they have access to the core of the system, which gives them the ability to fully manipulate the iPhone 3G hardware and, therefore, unlock it. They gave us all the technical details and posted a demo of it in action:

This is a video of a custom application running on the iPhone 3G baseband, which is big news.

Nucleus is the operating system that runs on the PMB8878 baseband processor, we are using minicom running on the iPhone to talk to the basband via AT commands, the AT command shown is a custom AT command that has been inserted into the PMB8878 that starts an application on the baseband, one of the things that this application does is to lists the tasks (processes) that are running within Nucleus.

Now it’s just a matter of time before they come with the unlock and, at last, total carrier independence on compatible 3G networks. [iPhone Dev Team Blog]