For those of you finding entertainment in reading the trials and tribulations of the iPhone SIM card hackers, there's been a lot of good reading recently. There's been George Hotz, forever e-mmortalized by his "Unlocked iPhone for Car" trade. There's also been the company in Ireland that's been threatened by AT&T lawyers for talking about distributing software to allow SIM unlocking.

Those not tech-inclined may think that this "hacking" is really the work of some techno-nerds and there's no real significance to the general populus. Well, think different.

Don Reisinger, in his CNET Blog entry "Steve Jobs Master Plan: iPhone Hacking" and says that in fact, this is calculated move by Jobs and Co to help iPhone world domination.

And I tend to agree. But my theory is a bit different. Steve Jobs, before the release of the iPhone, actually invented the time machine and went forward in time and read my blog post "Why I'm Not Buying an iPhone - Yet" and decided to change his strategy.

OK, kidding aside, Don has a great point.

My gripes about the iPhone are summarized: locked SIM, it doesn't do as much as my laptop, software is not downloadable, and slow EDGE speed.

Two of my four gripes are well on their way to being knocked out: downloadable software and locked SIMs - and in my opinion, that's enough for me to go out and get one. [In fact, I already have, I'll talk about my change of heart in another blog post.]

I won't go into the details of these developments for this post, but I will in the near future.

The significant thing that I've discovered in playing with both of these "hacks" on an iPhone is that Apple has obviously not engineered the phone to be 100% resistant to hackers, and in fact, they've left some real obvious paths wide open. That to me, says that there's an obvious strategy that Apple wanted hackers to hack the iPhone - but they couldn't open it up completely and risk losing their essential alliance with AT&T.

It's like this. If you wanted to lock down a house, you would buy a big steel door, put on Medeco locks that require laser cut keys, and put a rabid, hungry guard dog on the other side. No one would even try.

What Apple did was the equivalent of painting a wooden door silver, putting on locks that fit most key blanks that you buy at the hardware store, and put a poodle inside with a nice perfumey smell.

The SIM Card is not locked inside the phone - you get access to it by using a paper clip. The phone is running OS X - and as soon as you break through the relatively simple activation process, you can run software that runs on OS X rather easily, with a few modifications. And Apple's lawyers aren't chasing people that write these hacks - AT&T is doing the chasing and only doing so because they're trying to sell the hacks to everyone.

Apple wanted their phone to be unlocked. They wanted their phone to have installable software. They could have designed a much harder system to crack, but they didn't. This way, now everyone can have one. And they can even make their own software for it. That's the future that Apple wants - and it seems the hackers are going to give it to them.