Slashdot Mirror
PlayBook Jailbreak Tool Released
Trailrunner7 notes that some dedicated hackers who've been working on jailbreaking RIM's PlayBook tablet have now "posted a detailed walkthrough of how users can accomplish the same task on their own. The technique requires the use of a custom tool, but otherwise is fairly straightforward. One of the researchers, known as Neuralic, posted the walkthrough to Pastie.org Tuesday morning. In order to begin the process, a PlayBook user need to first install the beta 2.0 version of the PlayBook software and then install the Dingleberry tool, which exploits a weakness in the PlayBook architecture which stems from the fact that the backups the device takes aren't signed."
Ataris and NESs weren't locked down, which is largely an advent of code signing
Atari 7800 cartridges were signed.
It was somewhat impractical to write your own software, true, but if you wrote it, the system would run it.
NES and Super NES had an entirely separate bus for the CIC (checking integrated circuit) microcontrollers. This allowed a couple "lock-on" games to be published that have their own ROMs but connect the CIC bus to a passthrough cart slot to use a licensed game's key. A few other NES games had charge pumps to generate out-of-spec voltages that would stun the lock CIC in the console; the Super NES had a bit better protection circuitry to foil that. One company ended up getting slapped down in court for having defrauded the US Copyright Office to get the source code of the program that ran on the key CIC.