Why is phone network unlocking mystical information known only to phone store employees and gypsy market stall owners?
I've got a Lumia 630 I want to unlock, but the last time I tried this with a decade old dump-phone I was no more lucky. Even when you've waded through all the currynigger websites offering unlock codes, nothing works.
Maybe I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something; are they single-use codes generated on request or something? If so, how come the software that generates them has never been leaked? Or reverse engineered?
What gives?
Install gentoo
>>51504792
>unlocking phones
murica problems
Here in yuropoor, we use sim cards and phones are just dumb shells with an antenna. Your sim card, provided by your phone company, contains data like your number and which network it should connect to.
It baffles me that america doesn't just do that too. Are your phones custom-branded by every goddamn network provider and locked in to only be able to connect to them? So your phone basically becomes more like a terminal to connect to their specific network only, and changing providers means losing your phone? Bwahahaha
>>51505003
I live in the UK, presumptuous fool.
But yes, that's pretty much how it works.
I just had a good chat online with an advisor from the company I purchased the phone from, and since it's PAYG and I've had it for more than 12 months I can get an unlock code for free. (I'll have to ring up and talk to Sanjit first, though.)
My question still stands, though, out of pure curiosity. According to Wikipedia the manufacturers will have software to generate the codes or will maintain a database of them precomputed, but I figured somebody would either leak shit or reverse engineer them. It seems like such a glaring target. I suppose you're fucked if most manufacturers are using one-way hashes, but still.
>>51505037
Ok so you're in between murica and yuropoor, and apparently you guys went with the idiotic american system (well it's not like we've ever been able to convince you guys to follow our examples) :P
The whole unlock code things sounds like just something that was created out of thin air. Maybe a hash of the phone's serial, maybe a hardcoded list, maybe a magic number seed, whatever. It's a complete ripoff and purely for customer mind control.
>>51504792
i tried to unlock a moto g a while back.
i just gave up.
You have to pay a subscription fee to access the manufacturer's code database. This is what the phone shop gypsies do, and that is why it can't be done for free.
>"buying" a locked phone
>>51505003
>>51505138
The US also uses SIM cards, or at least most of the service providers do it exactly like you describe.
Since I've never been dumb enough to buy a locked phone, I don't really understand how it works, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the phone uses a SIM card.
>>51504792
Can you use custom recovery and ROM images on a locked phone, or not?
>>51505987
You can, and I researched this today. Apparently you can't remove the network lock this way.
>>51506009
Then the vendor malware must be in the baseband firmware, right?
>>51506249
If it is? How would I modify it? I had a cursory search about this but turned up basically nothing.
A SIM unlock code is tied to several aspects of a device similar to the way an activation hash works on a Windows PC - it uses various hardware IDs and creates a unique number that can't be duplicated even if you had two of the same pieces of hardware that came off the production line in sequence.
Companies are beginning to move away from using such unlock codes - T-Mobile and their Metro PCS division are now using software unlocks that have to connect back with the companies themselves to generate the unlock. There is no code to type in anymore and nowhere to enter the code anyway - if you put in an unrecognized or unallowed SIM it just puts up a notice saying so and then referring you to use the app to do the unlock.
This way those companies can make sure people aren't making money by getting the codes of old since they're not used anymore, at least on most newer devices for those two carriers - I'm sure more will follow that precedent soon enough.
The days of unlocking services on eBay and other places are pretty much history.
>>51504792
Give it back Tyrone
>>51505003
You're dumb.
Here in the land of the free, there is a such thing usually referred to as a "free market". In this "free market", it enables a multitude of comoeditors that circlejerk eachother behind closed doors, but that isn't relevant right now. In the phone market, there are 3 "big dogs" that include, Verizon, att, and sprint. Each has their own commy technology that grinds freedom lads into the ground if they're not familiar with the circlejerking ways. Att uses Sim cards as the great eurofags do, Verizon and sprint use cdma. Now what americunts don't understand is the technology and how unlocking works. The rule of thumb is, get a phone that is cdma and GSM compatible, that way it will work with all other carriers if you want to switch. If you're locked in a contract, that fucking sucks and have fun with customer service.
