Usually, Elias used the brute-force boxes. He would hook the phone up to a clunky purple box with flashing LEDs, letting the machine try 0000, 1234, 00000, 12345, and so on, thousands of times a second. But the C1-01 was stubborn. Its security architecture was weird—a hybrid of the old S40 OS and a locked bootloader that would brick the phone if you prodded it too hard the wrong way.

For Elias, that light was a beacon in a dark room.

Type the sequence: #pw+CODE+1# (where "CODE" is the number generated by the software).

Reads the phone’s unique serial number automatically when connected in "PC Suite" or "Modem" mode.