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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."
Hey, good job on the hack. But how many people own a PlayBook?
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I remember the days when you'd go buy a computing device and it would just be yours, without the need to "jailbreak" it.
Guess it'll be a nice memory to tell my grandkids about someday: the time before megacorps took over our computing devices (and we all let them).
I remember the days when you'd go buy a computing device and it would just be yours, without the need to "jailbreak" it.
PCs still exist, as do Android tablets. Locked-down computing devices likewise have existed since the Atari 7800 and NES were introduced in the mid-1980s. The more things change, the more they don't.
No wonder people are unwilling to use OSS tools when they have such horrible names.
I mean, really, when you pick a word like that normal people are going to stay away from it.
Seriously, that's just nasty.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In terms of preferred names of tools, groups, individuals, etc. the jailbreaking scene, whatever license they happen to release their software under, really seems to resemble the warez release guys more than OSS. The latter certainly have more than their share of ill-polished nerd jokes, and generally tend not to take marketing's advice on strategic blandness very seriously; but the former intentionally seek out and adopt directly offensive, tasteless, or vaguely threatening names for things.
If one is unfortunately enough to get a NFC capable Blackberry phone, such as the Bold 9900, from AT&T or T-Mobile, good luck trying to get NFC to work.
Is it disabled within the Blackberry OS, based on Vendor ID, at the request of these horrible carriers, even though other carriers enable it for those exact same phones. And currently isn't any jailbreak or hack to enable it. (Older unbranding tools like MFI don't work on these newer phones.)
Actually RIM is the worst smart phone company when it comes to deliberately disabling features and functionality at the request of carriers, especially compared to Apple, Google, and Microsoft. With that type of regard for their end users, I hope they continue imploding and go bankrupt soon.
Well, Apple officially named their tablet device an iPad, and the oft used name for the iPod touch is the "iTouch."
And, of course, there is the everpresent Nintendo Wii. Dingleberry is hardly alone in the odd, somewhat disturbing names in the tech world.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
???? I do not get it. I understand that bashing RIM is "a la mode" these days, but I think it is an overkill. Any device can be hacked when it is locally accessible. Any. There is no architecture that can withstand an attack if it can be performed while having physical access to the system. It is just a question of time and tools. And for many consumer devices it is just not practical - not too many people are interested in jailbreaking Panasonic microwaves.
The quality of the architecture is determined how hard is to break into someone's device while having some kind of remote access to it - user-driven or from the network.
It is a privilege escalation to a 'root' user, which in this context is equivalent to an 'admin' user.
In short, using an insecure backup/restore process, it changes the ability for root to login via ssh. No bootloader access, no 'jailbreak'. From there, all you get is what you could have done by developing an app.
As you could always load an app directly onto your Playbook, this is not all that impressive.
I have come to expect it from Crackberry, but though /. would have a critical eye.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
In terms of preferred names of tools, groups, individuals, etc. the jailbreaking scene, whatever license they happen to release their software under, really seems to resemble the warez release guys more than OSS. The latter certainly have more than their share of ill-polished nerd jokes, and generally tend not to take marketing's advice on strategic blandness very seriously; but the former intentionally seek out and adopt directly offensive, tasteless, or vaguely threatening names for things.
viz. Back Orifice