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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
The easiest way to escape malware is to not download random stuff from the internet. Android has the play store and f-droid, both good places to get malware free apps, the linux distros also have their software repos, filled with non-malware software. And the only problem was that windows had no such repo.
Why? Windows is much, much, much, much more optimized to run in such low spec devices than Android. True, windows seriously lacks in apps, but the ones that exist run much better.
And don't let the wildebeest trample you on the way out.
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
Some phones come with malware installed from the factory. Especially the cheap Chinese models.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
Soon people will have to break the laws to own what they buy.
For everyone who has ever wondered just why the decks in cyberpunk stories and games are so horribly expensive when technology is so pervasive (and hence should be cheap): They're devices that the owners own. Which is probably by the time these stories play already a grey area by itself, and certainly these things are not mainstream.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or just use a secure platform. Hint it's not Android.
http://saveie6.com/
What Android is optimized for well anything???
http://saveie6.com/
Most of the malicious apps just use the privileges the user gives them, without any exploitation of zero days or so. Combined with the shitty update situation of android, you get the mess currently present. But if you have a phone that's supported by a reliable ROM vendor like CyanogenMod, you can keep your phone updated and malware-free.
Some phones come with malware installed from the factory.
Just install a trustworthy ROM without google play and other, more obvious, malware. Of course, you have to buy a device with existing alternative ROM support, the number of supported devices is usually very small.
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
Been using a Windows phone for more than a year now. Won't go back to Android.
Free, dumbass. Stop trying to redifine terms, Richard.
Good Android phones under $100 are everywhere now, check out Huawei.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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...
huh. i might consider accepting pervasive soul-crushing DRM if it meant that i could kill somebody over the internet.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky