I'm a bit confused.

people have been supersim:inmg and turbosim:ing their phones for a while now to unlock them.

Then its all over the news today ( http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/pte....ap/index.html ) that some kid is taking credit for the work and trading unlocked phones for cars? (heck, I'll unlock my phone and trade it for a car :p )

is he actually the person who came up with th eoriginal Supersim unlock and its just late hitting the news, or are the nes networks throroughly wrong?

Hes the one who, with the help of others, discovered how to use some soldering to *properly* unlock the phone.

This came out originally last week, and refers to Geohot's hardware unlock, which is the first true unlock of the iPhone itself (the SIM card methods trick a locked phone into thinking it has a valid SIM, whereas Geohot's method actually unlocks the phone to use any SIM you throw at it).

See iphonejtag.blogspot.com for Geohot's page. There's also a lot of information in other threads throughout this forum with everybody else trying to hardware unlock also.

My 0.02 €, it's more the matter of how hard you're looking for media coverage, or not.

How do you define a proper unlock ?

For the general public, "you can phone with any card" means it's unlocked
For the hardware supporters, the hacked SIM method was not proper.
For the software supporters, the hardware method is not proper.
For the super simple software supporters, the first software method will probably not be proper
and so on and so on ...

so yeah, it's a nice topic for endless fruitless debates, but not much IMHO it's easy to be the first to release something (just restrict the target field enough )