Cellphone Hacks

528 Articles

Debian On The G1 Once Again

January 15, 2009 by 7 Comments

g1

[ghostwalker] dropped in on our previous Debian Android post to let us know that he had streamlined the install process. The first time around, it quickly became difficult to complete the process because firmware updates had taken away root access. Hackers have since figured out how to downgrade from RC30 and install BusyBox. All you need to do to put Debian on your phone is download the package from [ghostwalker] and then run the installer script. This isn’t technically a port since Debian already has ARM EABI support. What would you run on your phone if you had access to the entire Debian package tree? A video of Debian starting up is embedded below.

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Multitouch Patched Into Android

January 13, 2009 by 16 Comments

g11

[Luke Hutchison] has come up with a rather clever hack to get multitouch support on the G1. He wrote a patch against the Synaptics touchscreen driver. When two fingers are placed, the driver reports the x/y of the midpoint and a radius for the size field. If only one finger is used, the size is reported as zero. The nice thing about this approach is that it’s backwards compatible; the extra data will be ignored by current apps. Unfortunately, Google’s Android team says that if multitouch is ever added, it would identify individual fingers and definitely not using this method.

[via ABN]

[photo: tnkgrl]

UIRemote: Universal Remote Application For IPhone

January 7, 2009 by 18 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-SlcjmqeYw]

When several students from the University of Toronto became tired of having multiple remotes lying around, they decided to do something about it. Their solution to this problem came in the form of UIRemote, a universal remote application for the iPhone. The application allows the iPhone to control anything that is normally controlled by an infrared remote, thanks to the use of a custom infrared adapter that plugs into the phone’s headphone port. It’s a technique similar to our iPod remote control from 2004. While the UIRemote application and adapter are still in beta, the students expect to release both things simultaneously sometime within the next two months.

[via Engadget]

Tiny Projector Teardown

January 4, 2009 by 10 Comments

projector

The team from Tech-On has taken the time to teardown two interesting microprojectors. The first model they tackled was the Optoma PK101. It’s based around a digital micromirror device (DMD) like those used in DLP. Separate high intensity red, green, and blue LEDs provide the light source. A fly-eye style lens reduces variations between images. They noted that both the LEDs and processors were tied directly to the chassis to dissipate heat.

The next projector was the 3M Co MPro110. It uses Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) technology. The light source is a single bright white LED. The projector seems to have more provisions for getting rid of heat than the previous one. The most interesting part was the resin polarizing beam splitter. It not only reflected specific polarizations, but also adjust the aspect ratio.

[via Make]

25C3: Nokia Exploit Stops All Inbound SMS

December 30, 2008 by 21 Comments

[Tobias Engel] released a serious Nokia vulnerability today. By using a specially crafted SMS message, you can block the recipient from getting any future SMS messages. The attacker changes their Protocol Identifier to “Internet Electronic Mail” and then uses any email address 32 characters or more in their message. The recipient will receive no indication that they got the message and no other messages will be allowed until the phone is factory reset. You can see a demo video here. This affects many different varieties of S60 phones and no fix is known.

[Thanks fh]

25C3: CTF Dominated By Iphone-dev Team, HackMii

December 30, 2008 by 4 Comments

25c3ctf

While we had been excited about 25C3’s CTF competition, we couldn’t even venture a guess as to who would win. It seems the iphone-dev team weren’t satisfied to just give an amazing talk. They teamed up with the Wii hackers from HackMii to win the competition. You can see their progress during the eight hour competition above in red. It’s impressive to see hardware hackers jumping over to network security AND completely killing at it.