The jailbreak is thanks to the work of the iPhone Dev Crew although, as Daniel Ionescu of PC World points out, "the downside of this hack is that if you unlock your iPhone this way, there is no way to restore your iPhone to its original state".
"This means that if something goes wrong with it, and you take it to Apple for repairs, they will be able to tell that you have been tinkering with your phone. Your warranty, of course, will be void, and repairs can be costly", he notes.
As reported previously, jailbreaking an iPhone was ruled legal by the US copyright office back in the summer of this year, although Infosecurity notes that the practice is still frowned upon by cellular providers and Apple.
According to the iPhone Dev Crew, the jailbreak is thanks to the AT+XAPP command, which was discovered by a pair of researchers – Oranov and Sherif_hashim – and which was subsequently fixed by Apple.
What's interesting about this jailbreak is that, as the dev crew state in their blog, it exploits the same security loophole.
"It turns out that the very first iPad firmware 3.2.2 has baseband version 06.15.00 still vulnerable to AT+XAPP. The iPad baseband is built for the exact same baseband chip as the iPhone3G/3GS - they're fully compatible", says the dev crew blog on this issue.
Equally interesting is that there appears to be two jailbreak routes for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, details of which can be found on the dev crew website.