Hacking The Motorola A780

A780

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has picked up one of these phones and started poking around in the system. The first thing of note is that the phone doesn’t use the typical lightweight tools found in most embedded systems. Instead of busybox or uClibc it uses their heavier counterparts. The phone also has a 2.4 kernel and switching to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has successfully built a compatible toolchain and has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to construct a firewall between the GPRS and the USB connection. Other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging everyday like JTAG pads for both processors and debugging callbacks built into the factory code. Harald Welte will be presenting these and future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in December.

Continue reading “Hacking The Motorola A780”

Hackaday Links

[Dancerman] sent us a couple pdfs covering the Navy’s research on railguns which might show up on new platforms like the DD(X): first is NRAC’s Electromagnetic Gun Technology Assessment, second is slides from the Annual Gun & Ammo Symposium which covers the problems encountered when scaling a system up for ship use.

I was pretty tired of railguns by the time someone sent in the obligatory Powelabs link. So, I read about Sam’s Subaru 2.5RS engine swap and watched the sandboarding videos instead.

[george] knows that these a pretty common, but his laptop picture frame looks pretty good. He added WiFi and Bluetooth adapters to the empty battery bay so that he could have remote access and control the frame with his phone.

[Douglas J. Hickok] used a solar powered yard light to illuminate his Jack-O-Lantern. It ends up looking like a hat.

[tio.chorizo] doesn’t want to pay for the Nano lanyard headphones so he modified his stock ones. He made a large loop and then used heat shrink tubing to hold it in place. Here is a Coral Cache of his photos.

[seth fogie] pointed us to airscanner’s page of iTunes DOS/Spoofing attacks with flash demos.

If your Folding@Home system is chugging away and your looking for another project you could try setting up some diskless clients. [Grendup]

With a little butchering you can make your own in car DVD player. [the_eye]

A completely useless 2.5cc gas-engined turntable

This Engadget post has links to commercial clothing that has integrated controls and power. Now someone just needs to do it for cheap.

Cool Tools featured a blackbox for your car. It plugs into your OBD-II port and records the signals coming from your ECU. If you are in an accident it will have the information from right before the impact.

Cinematical highlighted the documentary Project Grizzly. It’s the story of Troy Hurtubise who built a bear proof suit and is now claiming he can see through walls/cure cancer.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links”