Verizon Users Shout “I Am Root!”

Droid has been rooted. It was only a matter of time but we do like to celebrate this sort of thing. Why? Because if you pay for it you should own it. This will probably spark a flame war about licensing agreements and such in the comments but answer this: if it breaks, who pays to fix it? If you’re the one paying for it, you should be able to do what you want with it.

The process seems simple. Copy the magic file onto your SD card and go through the firmware upgrade process. Just make sure you know what you’re doing so that you don’t brick this sexy device.

[via Gizmodo]

71 thoughts on “Verizon Users Shout “I Am Root!”

  1. @Hackineer: I agree. I’m still using a Motorola SLVR(same crappy OS as Razr), but have no plans in switching to a “smartphone”(I want to punch whoever keeps making these awful buzzwords) because simply put, there’s no way I’ll ever pay the $100 a month that it cost for a data plan. $1200 a year, you’re serious? As if that wasn’t bad enough, it seems the standard is shifting towards charging an additional fee for each individual added functionality.

    Also, I don’t think the phone manufacturers have any grounds to say what users can and can’t do with their phones, so long as their copyrights are not being infringed, and the phones are not being used for malicious purposes.

  2. How can it even be legal to prevent the LEGAL owner of the device (phone in this case) gaining full control over their property….they paid for….and paid a large amount.

  3. Skitchin :
    Here in france, a 2hrs + unlimited internet/mails plan costs 26 euros.

    the “unlimited” trick is, when you get over 500 MB (a month) you get capped to 128kbs for the rest of the month.

    And P2P/NG/Tethering/VoIP are forbidden.

  4. Wolf Tohsaka: I don’t talk on the phone much at all, but 2 hours sounds a bit short even for me, though the rest isn’t so bad.

    Not sure how things work over there, but they sucker you into buying the phone to begin with by associating all of the price tags with what you pay if you sign a 2 year agreement…

    \m/!_!\m/ Gojira! :P

  5. @BlinkyBill: Like governments care if you willingly enter into contracts that strip those rights from you. Nobody is forcing you to have a cellphone, and it’s certainly not their problem if you’re behind the 8-ball if you don’t have one. Heck, you can effectively enter slavery by living a lifestyle that requires you to work a job you hate but makes good money. Maybe they should regulate that while they’re at it…

  6. @Wolf Tohsaka:

    Eh. They prohibit P2P/NG/Tethering/VoIP on the plans you pay $100USD/month (about 70 EUR) for over here too. I don’t _think_ they cap your speed though, but I could be wrong – I don’t own a “smartphone”. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out I’m wrong about that.

  7. I’ve been waiting on this. Now I might be enticed to swap from my current carrier with oh-so-lacking 3G capability…there’s a map for that. Not that I don’t love my G1 Dev phone, but if the ‘Droid’ is rooted, its essentially the same to me. Yeah, I know technically, it isn’t the same, but I’d rather be able to load the current Android image as opposed to the bloated Verizon image…

  8. MyYz400 “What does it gain you?”:

    I have turn-by-turn navigation, wireless tethering, and a custom UI on my G1 becuase I’ve rooted it.

    Normally, the community is much quicker at getting roms for the latest android releases than the manufacture. Once, the manufacture has sold me a phone they don’t really care about me until I want to by a new phone. The community is made of people like me, and they have much more incentive to add new features to older phones.

    Anyone know if this can be used to root the CLIQ?

  9. Just to reinforce / generalize, getting root on a smartphone (Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, you name it) allows you to remove blocks that carriers put in place that prevent a phone from doing things. Generally, these blocks are put in place so that the carrier can sell you something. For example, they can prevent you from running an open source mapping application (or writing your own…) so that they can sell you one they wrote (which is probably worse than the free one). Likewise, most carriers try to block tethering applications, because they’d like to be able to charge extra for that feature (if they make it available at all).

  10. where the heck are you guys getting your data service from, i have unlimeted data on 2 phones and 1000 anytime for 20$ a month! also rooting alows you to run many many many more programs than that crappy marketplace has.

  11. @Skitchin and @Blinky:

    A few observations:

    You can get 5 years and $50,000 fine for *owning* a cracked card for a satellite receiver– I didn’t say *use* it. What this means, is that you don’t have to actually commit a crime to be “guilty,” you only have to have the wherewithal to commit the crime. In other words, you can be jailed simply for potential or perceived ability.

    You can buy a house, pay mortgage and tax payments through the nose, and then have some HOA douche tell you that you can’t fly an American flag out front, or that your Christmas lights must be off by 11:00 pm.

    You can buy copies of a certain-brand of operating system, and then be told you don’t own it, and that you can be denied it’s use at the maker’s discretion… without a refund, of course.

    You can put a locked fence around a pool, then have some punk trespass, climb the fence, and swim in your pool while you aren’t there, then get sued and LOSE the case because said punk hurt himself on your diving board.

    On the other hand, you can get drunk, crash your car into another car carrying a pregnant women, and if the baby dies, you’ll face murder charges. Yet, if she decides that a baby might put a damper on her party lifestyle, she can pay a doctor to kill it for her.

    I could go on and on.

    The law is supposed to be the formal expression of a society’s values. Unfortunately, in this society, what is right and what is legal diverged a long time ago. What is legal is now defined primarily by lobbyists and the rich– and it has *nothing* to do with what is right.

    …and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you have been paying attention, you will have already heard that His Lord My Grand Poo-bah Barry Obama has empowered the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as it would a toxic gas. Guess what produces CO2 besides cars, planes, and factories…YOU DO. So, if you didn’t think that you were sufficiently tooled by elected bureaucrats, wait until you see what the newly empowered unelected ones have in store for you.

    This is all part of the (many) reasons why the people as a whole no longer respect the law, and it will have much to do with our eventual decline and collapse.

    So, as much as I agree with your comments, they are irrelevant, because they aren’t rooted in reality.

    Now get back to work, comrades.

    =================================================
    Skitchin said:

    Also, I don’t think the phone manufacturers have any grounds to say what users can and can’t do with their phones, so long as their copyrights are not being infringed, and the phones are not being used for malicious purposes.
    =================================================
    Blinky Bill said: How can it even be legal to prevent the LEGAL owner of the device (phone in this case) gaining full control over their property….they paid for….and paid a large amount.
    ==================================================

  12. @Moreau
    But at least one people or many people have a reason to fight for.

    If I don’t fight for my own rights (within common sense) who else would do it? And if nobody does it, then… why make a difference? it would look like nobody cares in the end.

    In another topic…
    I want to be a hacker… they play with fancy toys XD hahahahaha.
    T_T i need to get a job dammit.

  13. @cliff:

    Well, not me, (I have a very basic phone on Verizon), but the price I quoted of $100/month was AT&T. Unlimited texts and data, and it looks like 900 minutes from what I can find on their site.

    Who do _you_ have service from??? AT&T charges $30/month just for unlimited data, with 0 minutes, on one phone.

  14. DMCA that’s how they can tell you it isn’t legal to do what you want to it.Now if there is no encryption/protection scheme then DMCA should not apply however if there were no encryption/protection scheme this entire thread wouldn’t exist because it would have been done the day it was released. Even if there were no DMCA issues the carrier can still drop you because you violated the terms of your agreement unless you paid full price for the phone then I don’t think they have a leg to stand on.

  15. Show me something the DROID can do rooted that I can’t do with my Nokia N95. I’m not locked to a provider, I can run apps in Symbian, Python, and even Windows.

    I’m certainly impressed by hacking the DROID, but not so much by the DROID itself.

  16. @Hacksaw:

    You do raise a good point – if the phone is one of those deals where you get the phone cheap in exchange for paying for service, it could possibly be argued that you don’t really own the phone until the contract has ended.

    If you bought the phone outright – sure you can do whatever you want to it. But they can also deny you service because of it.

  17. I won’t purchase a device I can’t run as root. I didn’t buy my 3G iPhone till it was fully pwned, and that’s a deal breaker in any “upgrade” situation.

    Paying extra for tethering, or whatever other feature? No. I pay for my data bandwidth; and I do not in any way object to metered bandwidth, but I will use that in any way I wish to. What’s amusing is when attempts are made to block tethering, one can just switch to wifi tethering, which is easier to set up an manage than other (“proper”) means anyways.

  18. sorry guys the palm pre comes root capable Out Of The Box and can be put on boost’s unlimited everything for 50 a mont plan…. As a matter of fact I’m on it now.. And he’s I cn put that stupid android os on here but the web os is a multitaskers dream!… Its like the iphone but hacker friendly look it up.. PALM PRE AND PALM PIXI

  19. @Moreau
    Yes, humans emit carbon dioxide when they exhale. However, carbon dioxide is produced in massively bigger quantities by cars, factories, cargo ships, etc. Your stomach contains hydrochloric acid. Should we not treat it like a hazardous substance simply because it exists in your body? You drive an immensely stupid argument. The fact is that climate change is real and needs to be dealt with. Curtailing unregulated mass CO2 emissions is one of the steps toward bettering the environment.

    I see your other points, but I really don’t like how you present abortion as a choice about a “party lifestyle”. There are lots of reasons to have abortions, and the fact that you can be tried for murder for the killing of an unborn child is actually fair. A woman has the right to make choices about her body, you don’t. That’s why abortion is legal but killing a pregnant woman gets you double homicide charges.

    This discussion is about rooting phones. Don’t taint it with your trollish offtopic rants about climate change, abortion, or Obama.

  20. @D-Rock
    “Anyone know if this can be used to root the CLIQ?”

    That was my first thought too. While a GSM version of the Droid is already available, it’s too pricey for me (buying an EU version aka Motorola Milestone)

  21. @Zelka

    Pointing out hypocrisy of DMCA and similar laws is good, but skewing the discussion toward dumb arguments about abortion and against trying to curtail climate change is not ok at all.

  22. @Octel

    You also make some fine points but remember this:
    An unborn child is NOT her property just because it grew from her egg cell and she is carrying it does not make it hers (as in ownership, im not denying it is her child)

    So while i agree that a person who kills an unborn baby should be punished, the killing of unborn babies (abortion) should be morally and ethically questioned.

    Ok after all that this is a post about rooting phones and this is all irrelevant.

    Rooting phones is awesome, and so long as you are not using this as a method to run unpaid for apps (im looking at you iPhone jailbreakers :)) it should not be illegal, and if it is in your country/state then there is a very good chance that the relevant authority who *should* be prosecuting you, probably doesn’t care about one guy with a jailbroken iPhone or a rooted Andriod phone.

    I speak about the iPhone mroe because it is closed source, where as the Android is opensource, and we should be able to mod the opensource parts freely (as in not gmail and stuff, but the rest).

    This post is too long, and this is what happens when I sit at home with jack-all to do. To quote Reikaze up there, “I need a job” lol

  23. @Octel again

    Totally agree, i was reffering to the rules being imperfect, not climate change and abortion…

    Yes there are many good reasons to abort… party lifestyle is an ethical dilemma to say the least…

  24. Some of you guys get way off topic, talking about morals and abortion and such. I do think that out of this entire thread, Zelka hit the nail on the head. Android is an open source project. It should remain open source, and any device running Android should be fully rooted to let the user do with it what they will. That’s the point of changing to open source. The community ultimately drives the improvements. When a carrier, Verizon, AT&T, and so forth pick up the open source, makes their own tweeks and changes, that doesn’t make it a proprietary system, and it SHOULDN’T give them the right to tell us what to do with OUR hardware that we purchased with the hours of our life working to pay for said hardware. I for one say to hell with OS tweaks any carrier offers, I’ll pay for the hardware, and I’ll pick the OS, now let me do with it what I will. I’ll stick with my G1 Dev phone, already rooted and open to whatever my heart desires until something better comes along. I am much more impressed by the hardware of the Motorola Droid, but until I can make it my own, what’s the point? We already have the choice with our desktops and our laptops, why not our smart phones? Sorry this is so long. I’m gonna try to get down off my soap box now. I AM ROOT!

  25. @Zelka, Moreau – Since this is a hacker site, try to think out of the box. from a logical standpoint, I would say that what should be changed to fit society values is the fact that you can be charged with (double?) murder for running over a pregnant woman.

  26. @Octel

    My first instinct is not to respond to your comments. I don’t waste my time with people who are either too stupid to understand the facts, or are smart enough to understand them, but for political reasons choose not to.

    Unfortunately, the are too many well-intended people in the world who hear claptrap, and then, thinking they are doing something “good for the earth,” perpetuate it. Thus, some people are likely to see your comments, and incorrectly assume that you “care” about the earth, and that I must be an android that has no use for clean air, clean water, and unadulterated food. No, I am in fact a human being… it’s just that I’m a RATIONAL one.

    I defy you to produce *ANY* evidence of man-made global warming. *ANY* Please don’t rehash the lame “hockey stick” (disproven), the temperature metrics (multiple errors and multiple embarassed apologies by the likes of NASA and others)and even problems with the issue of temperature measurement itself (gross failure to follow standards for weather boxes– yeah read about it.)

    Whatever you do manage to conjure up, I can show you the money trail… why the carbon brokers who convince fools that they “care” stand to reap BILLIONS from carbon trading. I can show you other money trails… researchers whose entire existence hinges on grants… grants that won’t come if they don’t tow the company line.

    (Just WHAT do you think would happen to funding for a “global warming” researcher if he was to objectively determine, and then report, that there was no such thing? Are you aware that people have lost jobs and entire careers for daring to say that the global warming “emperor” has no clothes? Apparently not.)

    Even if you think you CAN show “global warming,” so what? “Global wrming” does not equal “man-made global warming.” The earth has heated and cooled, sometimes rapidly and without apparent reason, many hundreds of thousands or millions of times over the 40 billion year history of the planet. That’s what the earth does— it CHANGES— constantly.

    Who the hell is Al Gore, or YOU for that matter, to decide for the entire planet what the “correct” temperature should be? By what objective measurement did you rule out the possibility that the last 2000 years has been “too cold” and that any “warming,” is not part of the earth’s mechanism to return to the “correct” temperature?

    Sure, I understand why Obama thinks he’s qualified to set to the earth’s thermostat, because after all, he thinks he’s God— but you?

    Oh! CO2 levels are up? Well, I’ve got news for you. I get up every morning, and the sun comes up every morning. Thus, I have a large data set depicting an irrefutable link between me and the sun. The discussion is over! The sun rises each morning because I DO. (Yes, I’m joking. My point is that correlation does not equal cause-and-effect.)

    Please… don’t offend me with talking points from a lame ex-vice president hypocrite who uses ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more fuel and energy each year than most people on the entire planet. Please don’t quote the Copenhagen jackasses with their private jets and fleets of limos (who will generate more CO2 than some African countries do in an entire year), or the Kyoto crowd who wants the USA to take it in the shorts, but has decided that pollutants that come from Russia, China, and elsehwere somehow won’t hurt the planet. Do you realize what you are to these people? A SUCKER.

    The problem with the whole global warming hoax is the absolute absence of objective science. It’s AWOL– gone. Instead, we want to enslave productive people on the basis of warm-fuzzies, PR, and computer models that can’t seem to predict the weather a week in advance, let alone 10 or 15 years.

    Bottom line, if you feel so strongly about the GW hoax, put your money where your mouth is. Instead of dictating to me what *I* should be thinking or doing, start by changing *YOUR* impact on the planet. Unplug your computer and network connection. Grow your own cotton, and weave your own clothes. Grow and hand-pick your own food. Rise when the sun rises, go to bed when it sets. Don’t make use of any kind of lighting, fuel, adhesives, paints, plastics, or pharmaceuticals. Don’t use matches… in fact, don’t cook your food or heat the cave you’ll have to live in. When you have done this successfully for 5 years, you can come back and give us all some pointers on doing our “fair share” to save the earth.

    Lest I forget, a reply to your comments about abortion. YOU missed the entire point. The issue was the insanity (otherwise called “the law”) that says if you kill a child by accident, you are murderer, but if you kill it on purpose, you are “exercising your right as a woman.”

    I don’t care what side of the fence you’re on…the point is that you can’t be on BOTH.

  27. @Moreau

    Dude! Chill out. This is not the place for that kind of rant. Take your lunatic ravings somewhere else. And you lunatics on the other side of the table, stow it as well!

    Anyhow, with the Droid rooted, it’s made my next Mobile decision that much harder. Where I live and work in the UK, Orange is the only network with decent coverage, but mind-boggling plans. Do I grab the Motorolla Milestone, or the Nokia N900? Both now appear very capable, with the N900 being possibly that bit more flexible. Debian on ARM? that’s dead easy to deal with.

    Android still appeals to me though, but which to choose?

  28. Utterly dissapointed, not by the “hack” but by the big “off topic” comments here, no matter who what said.
    Please, if you want to discuss stuff like this, go to sites/blogs/forums who are about that.

    Now technicall stuff please.

    My main grasp with all these “smart” phones is that they are simply (especially in Belgium) way to expensive for the amount of “smart” you get.
    N900 is a fine piece of kit, but 600 euro??? com’on.

  29. how sad that some tease us wtih posts of “unlimited everything” for $20 or $30 and then never say which service it is. Knowing about your great deal doesn’t help the rest of us without knowing which service offers it. Isn’t hacking really about helping the community?

  30. @Moreau
    GTFO, thanks

    @polossatik
    Considering the amount of processing power and RAM that’s packed into such a small device, I’d say 600EUR is justified.

    Look at the specs for the Droid/Milestone:
    550 MHz CPU, 430MHz DSP, 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM, 3.7 inch WVGA multitouch screen, 5.0MP camera with flash, Wifi, and Bluetooth

    all in 169 grams! Sure, you could purchase it on contract but you have to understand that the real production cost of the device has barely (if any) profit margins.

  31. @Skitchin
    The phone manufacturers aren’t the ones who put limits on they’re devices, its the networks. Motorola among all other phone makers has had to _remove_ functionality from they’re phones to get them to be picked up by the networks. Verizon has been mandating the replacment of the defualt motorola firmware on things like the RAZR KRZR etc for ever. And how do they justify it? We lowered the price by ~100-200 dollars on your device” So my only real point here is don’t blame the phone makers, blame the neworks. The pipeline for getting a phone approved is incredibly long and requires the manufaturer to remove fetures that the network doesn’t like.

    * None of the above excuses the lifetime that the RAZR has had though… :P

  32. @Moreau
    Don’t bother. He’s obviously a Global Warming Consiracy Denier.

    I love that word, denier. I’m going to start using it more. As in: you are a just another Flying Spaghetti Monster denier.

    Oh ya. Rooted Phones = win

  33. Ok, so sorry to join in on the offtopic posting, but…

    If you’re going to say that a woman can’t abort her baby under any circumstances, then you _must_ also say that if I don’t jump in front of a bullet to save someone’s life then I am guilty of murder. There is _no difference_. Sure, a baby probably won’t kill you, but it can. At the very least if you’re going to say abortion is murder than you must also say that if I see the red dot of a sniper targeting laser on your head and don’t put my body between the bullet and you I’m guilty of murder – because after all, I made a choice to prevent a most likely non-fatal injury to myself and that choice directly resulted in a fatal injury to you. So that choice makes _me_ the murderer, right? And not the guy who pulled the trigger?

  34. @Urza9814

    Mind you, I have no objection to your point of view. It’s your “logic” that makes my eyeballs bleed.

    If you can’t tell the difference between death by a failure to act, vs death as the result of purposeful intent and action, you have some serious problems.

    The average lab monkey can identify the difference.

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