GeoHot Working on Unlocking iPhone Baseband 05.11.07 for a $10,000 Bounty

GeoHot, the little genius behind BlackRa1n is back at work and is reportedly working on an unlock for baseband 05.11.07. Baseband 05.11.07 is the latest baseband version of the iPhone OS 3.1.2 which is not unlockable for the time being.

The Dev Team has been working on unlocking 05.11.07 for a while without much success so let’s hope GeoHot will be a bit more lucky…

There is something that ticks me though. At first GeoHot said he would not work on an unlock for 05.11.07. Fastforward 24 hours later and GeoHot changed his mind when he was offered $10,000 by Jody Sanders to develop an unlock for the latest iPhone OS.

For those of you who don’t know Jody Sanders, he’s some asshole from the UK selling the jailbreaks and unlocks developed by the Dev Team to people who don’t know better. Yes, this guy sells jailbreaks and unlocks people can get for free. The Dev Team wrote about him a few months ago and said:

Seems like “Jody Sanders” of the West Midlands, UK (who we mentioned in our release post) is at it again and is stealing our work and passing it off as his own, he has done this before and this scam was reported by the Guardian and also by on this blog last year and was also covered in a very very long thread over at hackint0sh forums.

We specifically restrict the commercial use of our software, and yellowsn0w is included in these restrictions. This dodgy geezer is selling our software to you at a bargain £19.99 he says:-

So Jody Sanders offered $10,000 to GeoHot to sponsor an unlock by GeoHot and I think this is really wrong. It is not wrong to get paid for your hard work. It is actually a good thing to do. I don’t work for free and I don’t expect others to do it either.

What I think is wrong is that GeoHot will be working for Sanders, a scammer who’s been ripping people off for a while. As if it wasn’t enough,  GeoHot is getting all cocky about it and pretends he can find an exploit in 24 hours.

Yesterday I put GeoHot on the spot by asking him on Twitter why he changed his mind:

@geohot You say the 10k aren’t the reason but yet, you didn’t want to work on 05.11.07 48h ago. Something clearly made you change your mind

I didn’t expect him to reply anything at all but he did reply the following:

@SebastienPage the fact that i have to wait two days for a new logic analyzer

Not a very useful reply but at least he didn’t ignore me…

I’m not a big fan of GeoHot. He sure is a genius but the kid is way too cocky, pretentious and has no ethic. So much for the community! The Dev Team is most likely really pissed at him too but can’t really raise their voice because they need his genius…

What do you think of this situation? Do you approve GeoHot working for a scammer?