The iPhone Dev-Team is one of the most talented and well respected hacker groups currently around. You have scores of individuals with iPhones that are mercilessly shackled who want true honest to goodness freedom for their property. Why spend several hundred dollars on a device that is neutered? That’s what the Dev-Team is here for. However, after an iPhone freedom fighter, George Holtz, became unhappy with how the Dev-Teams progress was going in regards to waiting until after the 3.1 iPhone update to release an iPhone 3GS lock, ‘ol Gerogy boy took matters into his own hands and released purple sn0w. But he didn’t just stop there, he made the claim that purple sn0w was better than any of Dev-Team’s offerings — not a small claim at all seeing as how the Dev-Team is somewhat famous around these techie parts. The Dev-Team has finally taken the stand to tell their story…
Now, before you get confused and start mixing up developers, hacker groups and software, let me clear the confusion if any exists: Purple sn0w is developed by George Holtz, the same guy who brought us purple ra1n. The Dev-team brings us widely known pieces of work such as yellow sn0w, red sn0w, and ultrasn0w (3GS support). Why ‘ol Georgey boy picked purple sn0w isn’t too hard to guess. Still, you have to admire his determination to do his own thing…right? In regards to purple sn0w, it is an iPhone 3GS software unlock that accomplishes the dirty deed of unlocking your precious iDevice by patching a mere 3 tiny files without running any extra fluff to slow down you device or clutter it up. In George’s own words:
First off, what is purplesn0w? It’s a soft unlock for your 3GS that I’d actually use day to day. It’s not a daemon that takes any resources, and it doesn’t add a task to your baseband. It’s very close to a true unlock. All it does is patch three files, CommCenter, lockdownd, and your wildcard activation plist (which you need, activate w at&t sim first, no hacktivation support yet). That’s it, no other files are installed.
So there ya have it. For more info on purple ra1n or purple sn0w you can check out George’s Blog.
Source: Geeky-Gadgets, The iPhone Blog
