George Hotz, who is perhaps a little better known as Geohot has offered his response to the Dev Team’s decision to wait until iPhone OS 3.1 is available before releasing a jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS and it has come in the form of his own jailbreaking tool.

“Normally I don’t make tools for the general public, and rather wait for the dev team to do it. But guys, whats up with waiting until 3.1? That isn’t how the game is played. We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes. It isn’t worth waiting because you might have the “last” hole in the iPhone. What last hole…this isn’t golf. I’ll find a new one next week.”

That’s right, he has released a tool by the name of “purplera1n” and it will allow anyone to jailbreak their iPhone 3GS running OS 3.0.

All things considered, the process seems pretty simple.

“To get started right now, go to purplera1n.com. Download it. Make sure you have windows(but not 7), the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with 3.0 firmware. Connect your iPhone normally. Click “make it ra1n”. Wait. On bootup, run Freeze, the purplera1n installer app. Hopefully you’ll figure out what to do from there.”

Of course, he was kind enough to point out that this is still a beta and that you should backup everything before you begin. As of now purplera1n is only available for Windows (except Windows 7), however according to a recent message on Twitter it looks like we may be seeing a Windows 7 and OS X version as early as next week.

“i’m going to sleep…partying this weekend…maybe monday for os x and win 7?

Unfortunately, it looks like I am going to have to wait to test this out. I am running OS X on my iMac and my only Windows option is on my Eee PC, which happens to be Windows 7 and while I miss my jailbroken iPhone it is not worth the time of a Windows XP installation.

That said, I would love to hear from anyone who is able and willing.

[UPDATE] It looks like we have an updated version of purplera1n to play with. Coming from a recent post over at iphonejtag the new version adds and improves support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, International and 64-bit. of course, the new version is still beta, but with Windows 7 that means I can now play. Hopefully all goes well.

iPhone supports some basic security mechanisms, including SSL; mail authentication methods and VPN’s, as well as WPA and WPA2 for WiFi access.

iPhone has a passcode lock feature. When enabled, you must enter a four-digit code every time you wake iPhone from standby. It also prevents transferring photos to your PC or Mac; you must disable the passcode lock to transfer photos.

We don’t know how robust the passcode lock is, though, and it is generally not good practice to store very sensitive information on mobile phones, PDA’s or laptops without encryption. We recommend not storing anything sensitive on your iPhone for now, passcode or not.

Another open question is whether iPhone can be reset by iTunes to bypass the passcode lock, yet remain activated for service by AT&T. If so, this would enable anyone to crack an iPhone and use it as a phone and Internet device, though perhaps without retrieving your personal information.

iPhone supports L2TP and PPTP VPN’s (virtual private networks), but we didn’t have a VPN set up for testing, so we don’t know how well this works.