Dubious achievement: Hackers ‘jailbreak’ the iPhone 3G

Eight days after Apple’s new iPhone went on sale, an international team of programmers announced on Saturday that the device had been “pwned” — hacker jargon for “controlled” or “compromised.”

The loosely organized group, which calls itself the “iphone-dev team,” played an important role in the worldwide dissemination of the original iPhone, releasing a series of tools that allowed the device to run third-party software and to work in countries where Apple had not yet struck deals with local carriers. By February 2008, estimates of the number of unlocked iPhones in circulation around the world ranged from 800,000 to 1.5 million.