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Hacker Cracks Lumia Bootloader, Offers Tool For Root Access and Custom ROMs (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Microsoft and Nokia have worked hard making Lumia smartphones difficult to break into at a low-level, but software hacker Heathcliff has just proven that it's not impossible. He's just released a solid-looking tool called Windows Phone Internals, and it can do everything from unlocking the bootloader to replacing the phone's ROM. WP Internals is a completely free download, though Heathcliff welcomes donations by those who've found the tool useful. According to the "Getting Started" section of the tool, supported models include Lumia 520, 521, 525, 620, 625, 720, 820, 920, 925, 928, 1020, and 1320. If your model is not on the list, the developer has said that he hopes to add more models in the near future.
Hopefully this will lead to other operating systems being ported to these devices, which could make them useful for a variety of applications. A Lumia 520 is currently at a low of $25 used on eBay, and perhaps you can get them even cheaper if you lurk.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
n/t
Does it run linux?
Can I boot Android into them?
which are the original 8.0 phones, going back to early 2012. It's not a download me and let me make you right again, it's, download me and grab your ankles because either you or your phone will be Assanged in a most violent way.
And don't let the wildebeest trample you on the way out.
Microsoft and Nokia have worked hard making Lumia smartphones difficult to break into at a low-level
If people keep buying these devices - from ANY company and with whichever OS - which treat their owners like the enemy who must be kept from having control - than in the end, that is the way everything will be. Even desktops are trending in this direction, but also the vast majority of phones and tablets, and soon, all the IoT devices.
If you want a future where a multinational corporation controls all your computing devices, by all means, keep buying this shit.
Doesn't matter anymore, it's windows 8 mobile. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally made it to show Microsoft the vulnerability, or Microsoft leaked it to get more ideas.
I needed a new phone and these Lumia models were dirt cheap. What stopped me was the ability to block ads either via browser or hosts file. I ended up buying an Android phone from Leagoo.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Doesn't that makes him a cracker?
Lumia is Nokia hardware.
So, can we install Sailfish to run it?
https://sailfishos.org/
It was dead cheap. I forget the model. Under $100. It has 2gb ram and I think 2 cpu cores. It's running Windows 8. It can update to Windows 10.
It's dead fast. The Ui is really nice. I played with it for a while. It's an ok phone. The OS seems solid.
I tried to run our corporate web apps on it and failed. Firefox, iOS, android all work. Google chrome works.
The windows phone could not even render the home screen properly. Seems like a JavaScript issue.
Besides this, it's a really powerful and cheap phone. And it works great with exchange. It got mail and showed me reminders and events.
MS doesn't really like people tampering with their OSs. And doing a background check on everyone who bought a phone should be trivial, considering the annual meeting of the windows phone users happens in the phone booth next to the Android convention...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not true. WinPhone uses an ARM port of the same NT kernel used on desktops. It's essentially the same kernel as used on the Windows RT tablets, which had a desktop.
I know this because I managed to load an unsigned kernel driver using my CVE-2015-2552 exploit long before this release.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
And whats to stop MS from uninstalling the program? They started uninstalling programs on Win 10 without permission what to stop them from doing this?
Jack of all trades,master of none
Is it really free?
Been using a Windows phone for more than a year now. Won't go back to Android.
Win32 != WinNT. Win9x (Windows 95, 98, ME) implemented Win32, but did not use the NT kernel. Hell, Windows 3.11 (which was 16-bit, while all NT versions have been at least 32-bit) had a partial Win32 implementation called "Win32s" that could be used to run some Win32 programs even though the kernel was still 16-bit. Windows CE (including Windows Mobile, aside from the confusingly-named "Windows 10 Mobile") implements Win32, but is completely unlike the NT kernel. A modified version of the CE kernel was used on Windows Phone 7 (I know, because I wrote code that parsed WP7 kernel data structures, which scarcely resemble NT ones), but CE was scrapped in favor of NT for WP8 and later.
CE has been ported to more platforms than NT and has much lower minimum requirements, but uses a far simpler memory manager, does not support SMP (multiple hardware cores), does not support NTFS (it uses a weird variant of FAT that allows files to be "modules" loadable as executable images but not openable as files; NT has no such concept), does not support any kind of access control (a rudimentary access control system was grafted onto the CE kernel for WP7, but it bore no resemblance to the NT access control system that WP8-and-later use), does not support NT drivers, does not use the NT bootloader, is missing many security features (of which user accounts and access controls are only the most visible) that NT has, and is generally unsuited for anything except embedded systems (but has some features targeting those, such as some real-time support, that NT lacks).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...