flawed:LOGIC

Last night, I was a very bad person. No, I didn’t hurt a baby, and no, I didn’t steal a homeless man’s blanket. No, what I did was much worse: I shed any semblance of moral code left in me and hacked my cellphone. I broke the agreement I signed when I had service initiated by my provider and changed the internal code allowing my phone to execute commands that it would not have otherwise been able to do from the factory.

At this point, I am sure you are comparing me to Jeffrey Dahmer or Saddam Hussein for the heinous acts I have admitted here on this very webpage. I am a blight on this fair city and must be extradited to Guantanamo Bay or Serbia so that I can be “lost in the system.” Before you get out the bamboo cane and get ready to lash me, let me explain the nature of my “hacking”: I unlocked my phone. I changed 2 bytes (essentially 16 sets of 1’s and 0’s) to allow me to use my phone on a competitor’s network.

Why did I do this? Well I figured that since I’m no longer living in Bermuda, the great folks at Digicel Wireless won’t mind too much. Hell, it’s not like they have an extradition treaty with Canada (or any other country, for that matter). I am now free to use my legally purchased (in Bermuda) cell phone on a network in Canada. It’s a great day for the freedom of information, is it not?

I’m sure the next question on your mind is, why should you even have to unlock it? Why don’t the networks just leave the phones unlocked? Well the reason is that when you go to Generic Cell Phone Store Ltd. to purchase a cell phone and a carrier plan, the price of the cell phone is (almost) always marked down to about 30% of it’s original price. (For those of you less mathematically inclined, that means that you might pay $300 for a phone but the store/service carrier is paying closer to $900.) The reasoning behind this is that as soon as they lock you in to a contract, a decent percentage of your monthly fee just goes back into recooping the lost expense. By locking your phone to their network, they are is essence guaranteeing that you’re not going to pay their on-sale price for the phone, just to cancel service after a month to go to Nameless Competitor Wireless Inc. instead.

It’s a great marketing strategy but unfortunately for the person who just wants to buy a phone and have the freedom to use it on which ever network he sees fit, it creates something of a speedbump. The consumer who should be able to take his cell phone to which ever provider can offer him the best deal is now stuck with one for the life of the phone. Whether or not this is anti-competitive and abusing anti-trust laws is not the purpose of this article. It is simply to say that I paid $200 for a phone that was a paperweight when I left Bermuda.

So I hacked it.

A USB cable and a few downloads from a dubious Russian site later, my phone has seen it’s software downgraded to allow the unlock, a few extra features added thanks to this new software, and finally the actual unlocking. I feel like a new man. I feel like I have the freedom to go where ever my phone wants me to go.

Of course after all of this hacking I have one final question: when the hell can I buy a friggin’ iPhone?