Unlocking Phones and Certificates

[Guest spacemonkey]

There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in all the different posts on this topic between Unlocking the phone and what is up with certificates.

Firstly Unlocking. What Orange does (and has always done with all their mobiles) is "Sim Lock" the phone to the orange network. What this means if you buy a phone from Orange it will not work with a sim card provided by any other cellphone company. You can get this unlocked by Orange service people but only once you have completed the year contract that you got the phone cheap with.

A lot of people are keen on this unlocking as they want the phone, which is only available through Orange but they want to use a different Telco, or maybe they don't even live in a country serviced by Orange.

Second, Certificates. Smartphone OS has a method of Code signing to identify legitimate code and what source it is from. This is nothing new from microsoft, it's the same sort of thing that you meet every day on the internet when that box pops up in IE saying you are about to run "whatever" and it has been digitally signed by Macromedia or something. After that Orange made the choice that only signed code with the Orange Signatures would be allowed on their device..

So when people talk about "unlocking" in terms of the software they want to run they are referring to removing the Digital Signature requirements from the SPV. Currently no one will do this for you and the only people who could legally do it in the future are Orange themselves, if they choose to.

So in summary if someone wants to use their phone in America or is paying Orange £25 to "unlock" it they are talking about removing the Sim Lock so they can use a different cellphone network. If some one is talking about software then they are talking about Digital Signatures and the strict rules currently imposed by Orange.

Hope that clarifies things for people, I have been getting mighty confused by the way some of the threads jump backwards and forward between these two points with no clear logic to them.

Monkey