iPhone Dev Team posts cryptic message – what are they up to?

Update: The Dev Team has released an image with further confirms our original suspicion. Check it out after the jump.

On the eve of the iPhone 3G software unlock, the following text just went up on the iPhone Dev Team blog:

01110110 01110100 01100001 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 00110110 00110001 00110000 00110110 00110000 00110001 00110111 00110100 00100000

Now, any self-respecting geek should immediately recognize this as binary. If we take that block of binary and convert each 8-number chunk into it’s respective ASCII representation, we get the following:

vtaber 61060174

Well, that makes no sense – but we’re obviously heading in the right direction. We’re just not quite there yet. Now what? If we’re following the standard cryptography process, we start simple: substitution ciphers (wherein each letter is replaced with another letter, X letters away from the origin. X remains constant throughout the word.) We’ll go with the most common, ROT-13 (each letter rotated 13 times). We wind up with:

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ignore 61060174

Alright – so, we’re ignoring something with an ID of 61060174. Let’s take a look at the original blog post URL:

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/67687499/2008

How convenient – an 8 number chunk beginning with 6, just like what we’re supposed to ignore. Lets swap it out. We get this. It’s the blog post “The man from DelMonte – he say yes!”, in which the Dev Team announces that anyone hoping to unlock their iPhone should NOT upgrade to the official 2.2 release.

Does this mean the Dev Team has cracked 2.2? We’ll know later tonight.

Update: Looks like it. The Dev Team just released the following image:

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