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Torrenting iPhone 3.0 firmware: a cautionary tale

You probably know that installing a copy of the new iPhone 3.0 firmware that you grabbed off a torrent site is illegal, but you should also know that it's a royal pain in the butt. Users on iPhone forums are discovering the hard way that a copy of 3.0 is no good unless you're a registered developer, so it can be unlocked on your device. Otherwise you're in for a world of hurt, with hacky workarounds that require you to turn off your Internet connection every time you want to use your phone with iTunes.

Once you've gone to 3.0 without registering, it turns out to be really hard to go back. Users having trouble downgrading back to the current version of the firmware are all over iPhone forums, annoying legitimate developers (or their friends -- each dev can apparently sign up 100 devices) with questions about restoring to the old version. Meanwhile, the iPhone just throws a bunch of errors at them. I'm sure a way to restore will pop up soon, but if it doesn't, you could be holding a brick until the official release. Is it really worth all this trouble to avoid waiting a few months for copy and paste?

Note: Gizmodo has a step-by-step guide to downgrading.

Tags: apple, firmware, firmware-update, iphone, iphone-3.0, ipod-touch, news, torrent

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