It seems that jailbreakers and potential unlockers are having to wait longer and longer for news to cheer about as the cat and mouse game with Apple and the networks becomes more and more difficult for those involved in producing jailbreaks and iPhone unlocks. Once upon a time, when a new firmware was released, it didn’t seem to take that long for the development teams to pull something together to release to the public, but as time progresses it also seems that the difficulty levels involved in this kind of work is increasing dramatically.

Last year, company by the name of CutYourSim caused a mixture of excitement, confusion, and subsequent disappointment and cynicism when it released a permanent unlock procedure – only for the service to be abruptly halted once Apple caught wind of what was occurring.

The jailbreaking of an iPhone is an art which appeals to a diverse group of people for a number of different reasons. Some people genuinely and strongly disagree with Apple’s tight hold over the operating system, some individuals love the freedom to be able to install previously unavailable tweaks, modifications and themes while others need to perform a jailbreak as an intermediary stepping stone to achieving a network unlock to use the device with any carrier.

Back when the iPhone Dev team were unable to provide an update to Ultrasn0w to provide a software-based unlock on certain iPhone 4 basebands, it was left to a Chinese development team to step into the limelight with the introduction of the Gevey SIM. For those that don’t keep up to speed with the happenings in the world of unlocks, the Gevey SIM requires the user to actually place the SIM interposer between the network’s SIM card, and the rest is well, magic.

About two months ago, we wrote a post on the status of the iPhone 4S jailbreak. Because of the recent updates on the whole matter, that post is now outdated. In this post, we’ll be talking about the state of the iPhone 4S jailbreak and software unlock.

Today has been a crazy sort of day when it comes to news from the jailbreaking community. First we saw Chronic Dev-Team (CDT) – the folks behind GreenPois0n jailbreaking tool for iOS 4.2.1 – releasing a new tool called C-Dev Crash Reporter which allows jailbreaking enthusiasts to send crash report data to CDT (instead of Apple) so they could find exploits, then we saw an all-new jailbreaking tool for iOS 5 / 5.0.1 called Ac1dSn0w released, and now we have received news regarding iPhone 4S unlock. Details after the jump!

Many of you will be more than aware of the difficult – often impossible – task that is carrier unlocking a brand new iPhone.