How I Freed My Android Tablet: A Journey in Reverse Engineering (www.thanassis.space)

Slashdot reader ttsiod is an embedded software engineer at the European Space Agency, and shares this story about his quest to "dominate" his new tablet: Just like it's predecessor, I wanted to run a Debian chroot inside it -- that would allow me to apt-get install and run things like Privoxy, SSH SOCKS/VPN tunnels, Flask mini-servers, etc; and in general allow me to stay in control. But there was no open-source way to do this... and I could never trust "one-click roots" that communicate with servers in China... It took me weeks to reverse engineer my tablet -- and finally succeed in becoming root. The journey was quite interesting, and included both hardware and software tinkering. I learned a lot while doing it -- and wanted to share the experience with my fellow Slashdotters...
He writes that "I trust Debian. Far more than I trust the Android ecosystem," and describes everything from how he probed the boot process and created his own boot image to hunting for a way "to tell SELinux to get off my lawn".

Comments

Re:you think it won't get worse?

[Kjella]

You do realize Stallman has been saying this stuff since the 70s right? Its been a known problem for a VERY long time and we fought the good fight for as long as we could, but pocket computers killed it.

Well I think it swings both ways, it's more and more obvious that you don't really control any closed source operating system, you pretty much must have security patches and everything else comes along for the ride and increasingly it can't be configured or disabled. That's the way of iOS, Android, Win10, they're trying to push that model on Win7/8, I'm not sure about OS X but they're probably not far behind. If you want control, you want Linux (or some other open source OS). That said, most people don't felt they were in control at all. By making Apple/Google/Microsoft the gatekeeper, they trust just one source instead of any random exe from the Internet. Same way most people want the CA system instead of messing with peer-to-peer trust. Because when they don't understand - and they won't understand, no matter how much you try to teach them - they end up trusting something or someone.

That said, what I'm mostly disappointed with is how the world has ended up revolving around a few, huge centralized services. Newsgroups, IRC, Email, blogs and really any kind of service that runs on a network or you could run from your own server is toiling in obscurity, you need to be on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube playing by their rules and if they want to wield the ban hammer there's very little you can do. Personally I'm far more concerned about how we've lost control of the human interaction rather than control over the local machine. And for the most part we don't own things in the digital world anymore we license or stream them, it's all permissions that can be revoked or services that can be shut down. That said, it works surprisingly well until one day it doesn't.