German iPhones Unlocked via iTunes

By Nick Mokey November 25, 2007

German iPhones Unlocked via iTunes

If you were wondering just how Apple would provide the unlocked iPhones necessitated by a recent German lawsuit, the answer ends up being surprisingly simple: through iTunes. Rather than stocking unlocked iPhones alongside locked models in retail locations, Apple provides a simple do-it-yourself maneuver for unlocking an iPhone when a customer is willing to pay the 600 euro ($885 USD) premium for one.

According to MacRumors.com, Apple stores that sell the unlocked phones keep track of the IMEI numbers on them, a sort of unique identifier for mobile phones. Apple maintains a database of phone IMEIs that were purchase unlocked, and when a customer with a phone in the database logs into iTunes with an Internet connection, his or her phone is automatically unlocked.

No word yet on whether this official unlock process will open any new doors for hackers, although projects like those from the iPhone Dev Team and for-profit companies seem to already have the ground covered, if not by the same simple means.

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On this episode of Digital Trends Live, host Greg Nibler is joined by Nicole Raney, managing editor of The Manual, to talk trending tech news, including Uber going public, the theft of $40 million in Bitcoin, iPhone XR design leaks, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin update, robot butlers, and more.

Later in the show, Nibler welcomes Sandra Oh Lin, founder and chief executive officer of KiwiCo, to discuss how its STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) inventor kit boxes can fuel the imaginations and skills of the next generation of great inventors.

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Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

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AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."