When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.
Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.
We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.
Disclaimer: We are not your mom. We are also not the ones who made any of this stuff, nor do we recommend doing it. There have been reports of this process bricking (read: breaking) phones, though it seems to work just fine for everyone we’ve talked to. If your iPhone breaks, melts, or runs away, or if AT&T somehow figures out you’re tethering and charges you a million dollars per megabyte, it’s not our fault.
We’re seeing some reports on Twitter that some users are having issues with WiFi, GPS, or YouTube after unlocking with Blacksn0w. If you have any such issues, go to Settings > General > Reset> and hit “Reset Network Settings”. Once that’s complete, do a hard power cycle by holding the sleep/home button for a few seconds and then sliding the on-screen power toggle.
With that out of the way, lets begin. The entire process is drop dead simple, and should take roughly 10 minutes. This should work on both Windows and OS X. The steps below assume that you have not yet jailbroken your iPhone, and will walk you through that process.
- Download BlackRa1n for either Mac or PC here.
- Plug in your iPhone
- Run BlackRa1n
- Hit the “Make it rain” button to jailbreak your iPhone. Your iPhone 3GS will almost immediately reset, and will soon display a picture of iPhone hacker Geohot. The entire process should take about 45-60 seconds. Do not interrupt this process by unplugging the cable or tinkering with your iPhone.
- Once your iPhone has fully booted: Congratulations! Your iPhone is now jailbroken.
- Look for the Blackra1n icon on your iPhone’s homescreen. Open the Blackra1n app
- Tap the label that reads “sn0w”, then hit the Install button in the upper right. This will unlock your phone for use on any SIM-compatible carrier, and reenable the IPCC hack required to enable tethering.. This part should take about 30 seconds.
- Once the unlock is complete, open Safari. Navigate to:
http://m.peacefulinsanity.com/Tether.mobileconfig - Hit the “Install” button in the upper right. Confirm the resulting prompt, alerting you that the file has not been signed. Allow the IPCC file to install, which will take about 10 seconds.
- Close Safari. Hold the sleep and home button until your iPhone resets. This reboot may take a bit longer than normal.
- When your iPhone resets, go into Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering. If you can successfully switch the “Internet Tethering” slider to “On”: Congratulations! Everything seems to have worked as expected.
From here, tethering is a matter of following the on-screen instructions. Enjoy your jailbroken, tetherable iPhone 3G/3GS on OS 3.1/3.1.2! If you’ve gotten this far, we’d recommend installing Cydia (just open up blackra1n and tap the Cydia label). You should also consider allowing Cydia to record the signature hashes of your device once installed; be it that Apple patches this exploit in the next release, you’ll most likely need those to get back to a jailbroken state.
No. I’m scared! :(
Worked like a charm for me. Using 3G now to convey this. Works fine-surprisingly fast!
Tried the hack. It’s much easier than the instructions make it seem.
Everything works except for tethering over Bluetooth. On USB it works fine. On Bluetooth it connects right away and shows the blue Tethering banner on the iPhone, but I can’t get an internet connection. The Network preferences panel on my macBook pro says Bluetooth PAN not connected.
Any ideas?
Works well over usb, having the same problem over bluetooth.
You know, this would be much easier if AT&T and Apple just offer 3G tethering without any hacks.
How come this is such a taboo feature to offer to customers who shovel their savings for this service?
Taboo because AT&T wants us to buy a $60 per month service, with a two-year contract, in order to use their network for computers.
The price is high because they don’t want people to actually use it. Their networks can’t handle it.
Ding ding ding ding!
Amen to that!! and it messes their other phones because their network can’t handle it. They already have this problem and it makes their non-Iphone customers very uinhappy when they can’t make calls. They can’t afford to pay their customer service for the angry backlash either.
you could go out and buy yourself an open phone. there’s lots out there. another reason why http://iphonessuck.com free yourself please.
Not an iPhone fan boy but I do have one. I use it for both personal and business use, so I’m not offended by the posts of that blog. However, the articles are very biased against the iPhone. Sure the iPhone is not a perfect phone (I still can’t believe it was called the Jesus phone), but it has some of the most incredible features and there is still a phone that I can say is better because of the combination of functionality and design, so right what ever you may like on that blog, but if you want a real number of followers, start righting like a true journalist and stop being so biased.
Why don’t you learn to spell.
s/right/write/
s/righting/writing/
DUH!!
James
James,
Why don’t you learn punctuation? Why don’t you learn to spell. (sic) is an interrogative and requires a question mark, not a period.
Love you!!
james you are a tool. Do yourself a favor and go take a job in primary school. maybe then people would appreciate you telling them how to spell. :q!
the iphone sucks website is biased crap. it’s like watching Fox News to get real information.
That being said, I find it odd that someone who hates the closed off nature of the iPhone also hates when someone finds a way to open it.
Some people will never be happy.
I suppose CNN is real information. I’m from Rick Sanchez’s home market and he was the king of “it bleeds it leads”. There’s a real journalist. Your thinking with your dipstick Jimmy!
Jimmy,
Your mother was blowing last night during Hannity, then opened her brown eye to me when O’Reilly came on.
I switched to CNN for “real” news and she sharted and vomited all over your baby pictures.
Cheers!!
It’s all about the loot. If it does’nt make sense, it’s about money.
OMG that was insanely simple!
I hate jailbreaking my phone but this was amazing!
Donating like $500 for saving me 8 hours of work.
TMOBILE OUT FOR THE WHOLE COUNTRY – see trending topics on twitter
Yeah, because T-Mobile wouldn’t have shat the bed worse than AT&T when 20M high bandwidth users started saturating their network too, right?
Keep farking dreaming.
Does this method not compromise the visual voice mail feature like so many other/older tethering hacks?
Not sure if it’ll keep working, but it appears to be. I’m able to access my Visual VM box, delete VMs, and see new ones come in.
I’ll update you if things start breaking.
I read a tutorial last week which said DO NOT to use the benem.at site because it was breaking peoples VVM and such. I tweeted a link + details last week for a tutorial that I used and it worked (and still works) flawlessly.
http://twitter.com/jcw5002/status/5277599316
That is one convoluted set of instructions!
The APN configuration file from http://help.benm.at appears to have both the wap.cingular data APN as well as the acds.voicemail for visual VM, so it shouldn’t break Visual VM.
Also, once you load the profile and get tethering working, you can remove the profile and tethering appears to stay enabled (so far it has.)
So remove the profile after enabling tethering and then do a general>reset>reset network settings
one more time. You should be good to go.
Nope. Once you remove that profile (and reset network settings, tething no longer works).
Thanks for this tutorial!
Do you know if it will also work on the 1st iPhone generation (2G)? The jailbreak at least?
Thanx!
If you are using OS X, you can jailbreak your 1st gen (2G) iPhone using the dev teams Pwnage Tool 3.1.4.
Here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/211802082/pwnage-pie
Thanks Jason. How about a Windows System? Dev team doesn´t seem to release a Windows version, right.
This is why I love TechCrunch. Freedom is mine!!!
Nice post!
Oh, BTW. Blackra1n rules! :)
love it! very simple. I was always scared but this worked like a charm. Now I’m going to un-Jailbreak my phone to stay in compliance. =p
Four days ago I discovered a tethering carrier hack for iPhone OS 3.1.2 on the interwebs. The hack requires a jailbroken phone, but I didn’t have to do to anything with blackra1n.
I can confirm that I have working MMS, Visual Voicemail, and tethering on iPhone 3.1.2 with AT&T!
Here’s my tweet w/ the details and the link to the tutorial I followed: http://twitter.com/jcw5002/status/5277599316
Ever since I downloaded the new carrier settings and eneabled tethering my battery seems to drain at an unbelievable rate like 10 times as fast went from 52 percent down to 46 percent just writing this MSG. WTF how do I switch back to my old carrier settings. I don’t even have the tethering enabled either why the he’ll would it be draining so fast?
Crap like that is what keeps me from jailbreaking. My battery isn’t that great to begin with, all I need is something that causes it to drain faster for no good reason.
I’ve jailbreaked with tethering hack (not the one described above… see my other comments) and have NOT seen any change in my battery lifetime.
turn tethering off …settings…general..network… internet tethering = Off
or just restore from itunes
mine was too…soo what i did was this… I synced my phone so it backed up after i performed the unlock and tethering was working. I resotred my phone, but did not update the carrier fiel when itunes prompt. I restored from the back up and resynced the phone. Never updating the carrier file…Boom. Unjailbroken iphone with teethering working. MMS works awesome!!!!
I tried your method. Once I completed the Backup the tethering option was still available. As soon as I tried to make a connection the option was removed from the phone. Dont know if you experienced a similar situation after you posted.
How do i do this if ive used blacksnow before this?
You can at least name the genius no?
Thanks to George Hotz (geohot)
“We’re seeing some reports on Twitter that some users are having issues with WiFi, GPS, or YouTube after unlocking with Blacksn0w. If you have any such issues, go to Settings > General > Reset> and hit “Reset Network Settings”. Once that’s complete, do a hard power cycle by holding the sleep/home button for a few seconds and then sliding the on-screen power toggle”
Do you pinheads -really- want to hack your phone that bad? And everyone wonders why Apple doesn’t open up the iPhone. Hmm. Maybe because it basically sours the entire user experience?
Here’s hoping for bricks for all of you, or even better, a nice crisp letter from an attorney!
your right, go with an android
uh, what?
Ouch. Good luck bricking an iPhone, you’d have to try pretty hard to do that–enter a death command in Terminal, screw up the baseband, or just install an untrustworthy app that roots itself deep in the filesystem, like IntelliShared.
Apple’s tried taking jailbreaking to court on multiple occasions. People aren’t copying the firmware though; they’re modding it. So there’s no legal action that can be taken for the time being.
It definitely doesn’t sour the experience–it improves it. Who knows what they want better than the end user? Although there are a few quirks, I definitely love multitasking, tethering, expose, and all the other benefits. I could care less about battery life; I charge it every night.
Pinheads, there would be no reason to hack or request that Apple opens up the iPhone if they would simply catch up to 1999 technology and allow tethering.
The iPhone is the only phone I’ve owned in over 10 years that can’t be used as a modem.
Why Tether? The iPhone doesn’t do flash. It doesn’t edit standard office documents. It doesn’t have a terminal emulator. It has no FTP. Most phones are like this, which is why tethering to a laptop is and easy fix.
It seems strange that such a lauded device that plays iTunes can’t do what every other moderately advanced (I’m being generous here, Windows Mobile is hardly advanced) cell phone has been able to do for 10 years.
^^^ It can do all of that. You just need to jailbreak. :)
Such a dirt simple task to overcome Apple’s attempt to prevent the iPhone from what it already does well.
I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s true the iPhone doesn’t do flash (good riddance!), but it does everything else you listed. There are 100,000 apps in the iPhone app store, and many for each of the things you listed. AT&T doesn’t currently allow tethering, but iPhones elsewhere do.
But that’s what I don’t get. Why’d you buy the damn thing then?
You hacker-types are the only people I’ve seen in ten years who buy products knowing they don’t do something and then bitch when they don’t.
We bitch when it can do something but is deliberately crippled from doing so. And fair enough, who cares what apple thinks their gizmo should and shouldnt do. I bought it. its mine.
1. Flash sucks. I’m *glad* it doesnt have flash. I’m glad that its lack of flash forced youtube to provide non-flash versions of videos.
2. “Standard Office Documents”? Hah. Show me the RFC where they are defined. If you mean “MS proprietary document formats”. Meh, whatever MS Office is a POS.
Terminal Emulator missing? Odd, mine seems to be working just fine.
ftp? I’m sure theres an ftp client installed as part of the bsd subsystem, and there is probably an ftpd (server) somewhere in cydia. I don’t have a need for either, scp works just fine (in either direction).
Oh, and AT&T’s exclusivity is the reason for most of the restrictions. AT&T doesn’t want you to use your iphones Internet access for your laptop, they want to charge you more money for that.
you guys could atleast put up his name..rather than just saying .. iPhone hacking community !
“He” is the community !
Thanks George Hotz !
I installed new “carrier” twice and reboot…still no tethering in settings. I wonder if its because I had MyWifi and the trail period expired?
This didn’t work for me. It appears that the Modem Firmware has to be 05.11.07 (http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ , http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=2543).
The iClarified instructions say to update to 3.1.2, but that hasn’t changed my Modem Firmware from 04.05.04_G. It seems I don’t get to jailbreak easily right now.
Oh well, switching to Droid anyway.
Enjoy that extra $15 charge for using Exchange on Verizon. $45 for data. Ouch.
^^^ Rumor incorrect. $15 extra for business accounts only. Exchange on Verizon / Droid is same as iPhone on AT&T, $30 for consumers.
I won’t be getting DROID, but some upcoming Andriod 2.0 phones coming in the near future look nice.
this didnt work
This has been available for a while (use Cydia, install a tweak for 3.1.2, install 2 carrier profiles). I’ve had it that way and I’m able to tether via USB and Bluetooth just fine. This is just more official now that it’s easier.
Any bets on how long until Apple patches this one over?
Does anyone know, for sure, that AT&T cannot/will not charge per kb or MB for this unofficial tethering solution?
no.
It might be a good idea to remind people to make a backup of the phone right before you jailbreak it, in case you decide you dont like it and want to reverse the process by restoring.
Seems common sense, but when I checked my last backup, it was over a month old. Not dealbreaking being that old, but its nice to not go that far back.
Ok silly question – after I jailbreak will I still be able to sync songs/apps using iTunes? Is there any way to roll back to the “blessed” apple binary image?
yes and yes. :)
Jailbreak and unlock iPhone with baseband 05.11.07 using blacksn0w by GeoHot and much more http://www.zjtechlive.com/jailbreak-n-unlock-iphone-with-baseband-05-11-07/
Tethering is my big peeve about the iPhone. I have never successfully gotten the native tethering to work without breaking voicemail, so I use PDANet, but it’s much less reliable.
I’ve been disappointed so many times before, but I may give this a try.
I just realized he works for Apple, hence the break apart. I just ran BlackRain and the first thing it does is download your phone statistics and presumable collects/emails them.
Bad news, folks. Visual VM doesn’t seem to work using this method. As soon as I install the config from http://help.benm.at, tethering and data works, but Visual VM doesn’t until I delete the config profile.
That’s correct. Follow this link which describes a way to FIX a tethering fail (if you used benm.at like this tutorial).
http://www.redmondpie.com/fix-iphone-3.1.2-tethering-and-visual-voicemail-vvm-ows754/
It works and so does VVM on 3.1.2.
Awesome. Thanks!
Thanx for the valuable information. Please provide more information over it. Provide links to related topics if possible.keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.
Or if in Canada, since OS 3.0:
a) make sure your iPhone is running the latest software and firmware
b) go straight to Step 12.
Rogers doesn’t charge any extra for tethering. For once they didn’t follow AT&T’s footsteps and I’m starting to love them a bit because of this (and way better 3G service than AT&T in the states).
I’m amazed at how poor AT&T’s service is. In San Francisco, service is atrocious. I almost never add slowdowns, dropped calls or even no coverage zones but it became frequent in SFO. Pretty pathetic. It’s their network, because here in Montreal, 3G service is perfect anywhere, anytime.
So yes. If you love to hate AT&T, you are all well justified in doing so.
Canada doesn’t have unlimited data like AT&T does. So tethering isn’t the threat to Rodgers as it is to AT&T.
Not that I agree with AT&T’s policy on no tetheing but this is the difference.
Don’t think this works on the 500Mb data plan, only 1Gb and above (last I checked anyway)
Everyone brings up either San Francisco or New York City when talking about how “atrocious” at&t’s service is. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love any telco but at&t’s service is WAY, way better in most other parts of the US. In Colorado Springs, CO 3G coverage is great and speedy, in fact it’s a lot better than the EDGE coverage. It’s also fine on most of the Eastern seaboard.
True. Never had any problem in Boston.
Same here. I live in Miami and AT&T’s service is fine – not perfect – but fine.
I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and that was an entirely different story. In many areas I was unable to access voice or data services even with full signal strength. Sometimes the signal strength dropped to nothing and service reverted to Edge network. Because of the difficulty in getting a connection, the battery also drained very quickly, leaving me with a dead phone by mid afternoon.
I should add though that when it did work in NY, the iPhone was amazing. The Map application provided excellent directions to anywhere in the city via walking or public transportation. It tells you what station to go to, what train to get on, when the train leaves, and when you should arrive at your destination.
Tethering is great- it seems to be faster than the internet offered by my building.
Only problem is my gmail now say’s my password is incorrect. Anyone know how to fix this?
Damn that was easy.
Oops. I almost bricked it. When I ran sn0w from within the iPhone (step 7), the carrier went to “Searching…” I let it sit for 5 minutes, and decided to try a reboot. It froze on the apple logo while booting.
If this happens, try this: plug in the phone to the computer, hold down power+home. It should shut off and on once or twice, but keep them held down until you get the iTunes plug screen. iTunes will then restore your iPhone.
Ok i went and downloaded blackra1n program. Whenever i try to run it, it just says entry point not found. I click OK but it just keeps popping up until i hit ctrl alt delete pull up the task manager go into procceses and quit from there. N E Help with this or n e one experience this
HAHA firmware blocks the ability to tether and now it back cat and mouse games.
Well I can’t wait to get one of these myself, personally.
I’m on o2 network. followed all the instructions perfectly, but it still says ‘Set up tethering’ and takes me to o2 log in and pay page.. thats not right?
What’s gone wrong? :/
This tutorial is geared towards US users who are on AT&T. AT&T does not currently offering any sort of tethering plan to it’s customers, but this hack can be used to enable tethering through the normal data plan that we pay $30/mo for.
Looks like O2 offers a tethering plan and charges for it. So, it’s unlikely that you will be able to get free tethering using this hack. The hack is mostly to just enabled the capability, but with O2 it seems to be already available?
Sorry bro!
I thought that was the case. Its another £30 a month on top of the monthly payment so it was worth a crack.
Thanks anyway Jason
Works! incredibly easy as well!
Thanks!
The most easiest and shortest jailbreaking ever and top that , enabling teethering was super easy .. Thanks !
Wow, it worked flawlessly for me! Thanks.
Has anyone tried this with an iphone on T-Mobile in Germany? I’ve been thinking of getting one, and I had read that they don’t allow tethering either.
Thanks!
What’s in this piece may be necessary for some users (all US users?), but tethering works fine with OS 3.1.2 with T-Mobile in Austria, and perhaps other (most other?) non-US locations and carriers. You might want to hack your iPhone overseas to use another SIM card, but if all you want to do is tether, you probably won’t need to hack.
This worked like a charm. I already had blackra1n installed, so I just opened it back up, downloaded the update and unlocked the iphone. Really simple process. Tethering works great with no problems on my iPhone so far.
So blackra1n and cydia together jailbreaks the phone and also unlocks to be accessible to any carrier?
Does the software provided here works for iphone 3G 3.1.2 firmware?
Please drop a note.
Cheers,
Sang
Works like a charm.
Interestingly, it appears to only tether to wireless (3G or EDGE) and not to wifi. Now obviously, most of the time if your iPhone is on wifi you can get your computer on it also so you don’t need to tether, but there are circumstances where it would be nice to have the option (such as an airport where you only want to pay for one wifi connection). Other tethering options seem to support this. Any way it can be enabled with this?
Wow, worked first time for me on my iPhone 3G (3.1.2, 5.11.07). I’m pairing it over Bluetooth with my Macbook and I’m genuinely impressed.
I finished the whole process-but I didn’t get the “blackra1n” icon on my iPhone homescreen. Can someone help?
Sang,
yes you are correct. it wored in 3.1.2 for me. If phone is 2 weeks old it does something called tethered jailbreak, means a reboot will clear jailbreak. otherwise you are fine.
works easily
Guys!
Help, did blackra1n everthing seemingly went well. However when i go to network settings it shows Set up tethering and obvioduly when i hit it it shows contact At&T.
Please advise
Sang,
I, too, had that problem. I waited about 15 minutes, and then somehow it turned into an on/off switch. Maybe try waiting it out?
Interesting thing i found, i guess tethering does not work for me coz i do not have a data plan. :(
Why do you have an iPhone without a data plan?
Tethering on Windows Mobile:
1. Click ‘Internet Sharing’
2. Within ‘PC Connection’, select USB|Bluetooth|WiFi|etc
3. Within ‘Network Selection’. select your 3G connection, for example ‘AT&T 3G’
4. Click ‘Connect’
It Just Works.
@passerby:
Sure, too bad EVERYTHING else sucks about Windows Mobile! (and Windows in general, for that matter…)
trying to install now, been like 20 min, how long before I give up? what to do?