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RIM PlayBook Tablet Jailbroken
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers is claiming that they've found a root exploit that enables them to jailbreak the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet made by Research In Motion. In a video demonstration of the jailbreak, one of the researchers shows off the ability to change the settings on a PlayBook and says that he also has the ability to install the Android Market app on the tablet."
..with a converter?
or is it just a wrapper? or just some totally unnecessary shit rim added to the hoopla loop to have master keys on which store you get your apps from?
wtf?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Now the PlayBook will have a native email client :(
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
Best Buy is trying to dump these for $199.
Only about $99 too high for me. Sorry, almost worth it, but I'm not springing $200 for what is a short-lived product. The hardware will not be supported much beyond warranty, I fear.
Still, RIM is on track to convert to Android. So long as their mail client is better on Androidt than it is on iOS, they have a chance. Even Google is stumbling out of the iOS gate. There is still time for RIM to maintain some relevance.
And privacy isn't much of a problem for RIM any more. They are no more or less secure than Facebook, and their corporate clients are losing any hope of being safe from the prying eyes of sovreign states. Welcome to the party, security is an illusion.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The original OS has been rooted, at last year's pwn2own contest for instance...
There is incentive to root Android, iOS and the new Blackberry OS since it's QNX based, because once rooted you can install unofficial apps and all these systems are unix based so there is plenty of unofficial code you could install...
The older blackberry os is completely proprietary, even if you rooted it you'd have nothing to install on it.. Also the average blackberry users are corporates, not the kind of geeks who would want to root their phones.
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I can check my email without it connected to my blackberry?
playbook is NOT running android. Its running openjdk based JVM. The android apps have to be packaged with RIMs packaging tools so the JVM on playbook can fire the app. The jdk holds playbook's implementation of android classes. as an e.g. opengl calls on the playbook jvm translate to lower level graphics call that are relevant to playbook.
Remember this is QNX. This is a privilege escalation above the default 'devuser'. I still see nothing that indicates that the bootloader or anything of importance was 'rooted' in the same sense as an Android 'root' or and iPhone 'jailbreak'.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
IF you have the physical device, and IF you have developer access to it, and IF you explicitly sideload this... then some additional access has been obtained to the OS.
Unlike the iPhone/Android "jailbreak" concept, this lets you muck about in the OS but doesn't give any way to overwrite the bootloader.
It's an interesting proof of concept, and certainly something RIM should be looking into ... but it also isn't the fatal flaw in RIM security that much of the popular tech press is reporting.
The thing about the PlayBook though is that it's already open enough you don't really need the root. What is this "unofficial code"? RIM already has a publicly available C/C++ Native SDK, they've even ported several open source apps and libraries themselves and made them available on Github. The PlayBook has also permitted sideloading since day one, so it's not even like you need RIM approval.
"The researcher, known as Neuralic" (from TFA). Where I come from, researchers are scientists, and have real names. Pretty confident that Neuralic is not on his birth certificate. Not that they may not deserve the name researcher, but c'mon. George Hotz calls himself a hacker, and he's a little more famous then Neuralic. And he uses his real name.
The Kindle Fire has half the RAM, half the storage of the PB base model, no cameras, no Bluetooth, single band WiFi, slower CPU/GPU, and lower quality (less accurate) touch screen. There may be other changes too, wouldn't be surprised if it was a lower quality LCD panel, the PB's is amazing and with that expensive.
The older blackberry os is completely proprietary, even if you rooted it you'd have nothing to install on it..
WTF? Since when is J2ME proprietary?
AFAIK RIM has never dictated what apps can or cannot be installed. They do however make that power available to BES administrators. One of the biggest mistakes RIM made IMO was their lack of vision creating an "app store". Until I discovered Handango.com around 2004/2005 whenever I needed a particular type of app I would post to a forum and hope someone else knew of an app that would do what I needed.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Sure. RIM's future does look bright -- they've made some fantastic acquisitions over the past few years, Torch Mobile, QNX, DataViz, The Astonishing Tribe (TaT) just to name a few.
As for the appeal of their devices, the PlayBook (while slammed in the media) is a really great tablet in terms of hardware and the software get's better with each release. The UI is undeniably next-gen (they're well ahead of the game here).
Their phones are rock-solid. They have best-in-class security. They have one of the best web browsers on the market (until iOS5, they had the best HTML5 support.) Their messaging software from email to BBM is, again, best-in-class (refined over more than 10 years to make text communication as simple seamless and fast as possible). Oh, the battery life is fantastic. While the 9900 got low-marks in the battery department, that's only if you compare it to older blackberries :) iOS and Android users who have made the switch find the battery life to be astonishing.
Really, the only thing wrong with their phones is that they're a bit boring. Using a Blackberry isn't an event like other platforms. I see the famous blinking light, type a response, and I'm back on-task. I don't need to engage with it like other phones. The myriad of shortcuts and UI designed for productivity make doing just about any task completely effortless.
For the technophiles, BBX (QNX for Blackberry) represents the future of mobile computing. It is, undeniably, the most advanced and capable mobile OS in the world. From stability to capability, QNX is simply unmatched. Developers will love the TaT designed Cascades UI Framework, which lets developers do some pretty amazing things, almost effortlessly.
What's not to love?
Required reading for internet skeptics