adb

19 Articles

Meta Portal Given New Life As Extended Display

September 18, 2026 by 5 Comments

The Meta Portal and associated devices are effectively defunct, having been abandoned by the company in 2022. If you’ve still got one at home, you might be wondering what to do with it. That’s where Wormhole Display from [pgodlews] comes in handy.

The thing about the Meta Portal, and much of the rest of the related lineup, is that they were effectively just heavily branded Android tablets. The screens and speakers were good, and the basic functionality was all there — albeit locked down somewhat to prevent users from easily repurposing them at will. However, it’s possible to enable Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and turn the device to doing your own bidding.

To that end, [pgodlews] built Wormhole Display as an APK that can be dropped on to the Meta Portal to make it an extendable display for Apple devices. It shows up via AirPlay, letting you use it as a wireless display for your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You can do screen mirroring or use it as an extended display, as desired, including use of the Portal’s speakers if needed. Under the hood, it’s an Android port of UxPlay, a Unix AirPlay server which uses Android’s MediaCodec and AudioTrack in place of GStreamer to take advantage of the Meta Portal’s onboard H.264 decoder.

Extended displays can be incredibly useful, so if you’ve got an old Meta Portal laying around, consider putting it back to work. We’ve seen it done with e-readers, too. If you’ve got your own hacks to repurpose old, forgotten hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

This Week In Security: Android Exposes ADB, ShinyHunters Get Paid, Robot Dogs, And More

May 18, 2026 by 26 Comments

Google has patched an Android ADB bug in the May security patch set. If you have a Pixel phone you should already have the patches, and most other major manufacturers should be close behind. Unfortunately, the biggest risk from this patch will be to the vendors who are also the least likely to release timely – or any – security updates.

ADB, the Android Debug Bridge, is the main tool for installing apps during development and debugging apps while they’re running. It can also be used to side-load apps from a PC. While most normal users are unlikely to ever enable it, developers typically do and some power users might when jailbreaking a device or setting parameters not exposed in the Android UI. Debugging can be done locally via USB, or optionally over the network. To protect the device, the user must unlock the Android device and authorize each new debug agent.

Covered by Risky.Biz, a bug introduced in 2020, and present in every Android release since, allowed bypassing authorization entirely if network debugging was enabled and at least one connection had been made to the ADB service in the past. This happens because ADB compares the certificate of the incoming debug connection with the list of saved certificates. If the certificate type does not match — for instance supplying an Ed25519 certificate instead of a RSA certificate — ADB has been incorrectly handling the error code, and allowing the connection.

In most programming languages, false is considered zero, and true is considered anything not zero. The certificate API returns a 1 for a valid match, a zero for an invalid match, and a negative-one for a type mismatch. Negative one is not zero, so when treated as a boolean value, it becomes true.

To exploit the bug, ADB must be enabled in wireless mode, and there must be at least one trusted device in the ADB configuration. For the average user this is an unlikely combination, but for developers, the time to update is now.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Android Exposes ADB, ShinyHunters Get Paid, Robot Dogs, And More” →

Budget Stream Deck Clone Is Ripe For Hacking

October 21, 2025 by 13 Comments

The original Stream Deck was a purpose-built device to make it easier to manage a live video stream on the fly. Since its release, many other similar products have hit the market. Among them is the Ulanzi D200 U-Studio, which is proving popular with hackers for good reason.

[Rodrigo Laneth] has been digging into the D200, and found out it’s running Linux 5.10.160 on a quad-core Rockchip RK3308HS chip. Notably, he determined the kernel appears to be from Android, but that Ulanzi removed the Android userspace and “slapped Buildroot on top,” in his own words. Interesting, if not that unusual. What is key, however, is that the device has a fully open adb root shell, as noted by [lucasteske], which inspired [Rodrigo]’s investigation. This pretty much allows full access to the device, so you can make it do whatever weird thing your heart desires.

As you might expect, people are already making the D200 do fun stuff. [lucasteske] got it running DOOM in short order. Meanwhile, [Rodrigo] has it playing out Bad Apple!! at 30 FPS, with code and a deeper explanation available on GitHub.

It’s rare these days that manufacturers leave root open on any commercial device. You normally need to pull a few tricks to get that kind of access.

Continue reading “Budget Stream Deck Clone Is Ripe For Hacking” →

Quest 3 VR Headset Can Capture 3D Video (Some Tampering Required)

November 24, 2023 by 13 Comments

The Quest 3 VR headset is an impressive piece of hardware. It is also not open; not in the way most of us understand the word. One consequence of this is the inability in general for developers or users to directly access the feed of the two color cameras on the front of the headset. However, [Hugh Hou] shares a method of doing exactly this to capture 3D video on the Quest 3 headset for later playback on different devices.

The Quest 3 runs Android under the hood, and Developer Mode plus some ADB commands does the trick.

There are a few steps to the process and it involves enabling developer mode on the hardware then using ADB (Android Debug Bridge) commands to enable the necessary functionality, but it’s nothing the average curious hacker can’t handle. The directions are written out in the video’s description, along with a few handy links. (The video is embedded below just under the page break, but view it on YouTube to access the description and all the info in it.)

He also provides some excellent guidance on practical things like how to capture stable shots, editing the videos, and injecting the necessary metadata for optimal playback on different platforms, including hassle-free uploading to a service like YouTube. [Hugh] is no stranger to this kind of video and camera handling and really knows his stuff, and it’s great to see someone provide detailed instructions.

This kind of 3D video comes down to recording two different views, one for each eye. There’s another way to approach 3D video, however: light fields are also within reach of enterprising hackers, and while they need more hardware they yield far more compelling results.

Continue reading “Quest 3 VR Headset Can Capture 3D Video (Some Tampering Required)” →

Macintosh Classic II With E-Ink Display

August 24, 2022 by 30 Comments

As various antique computers age, it becomes increasingly hard to operate them as hardware begins to physically fail. Keeping these systems up and running often requires scavenging parts from other machines which are only becoming harder to find as time goes on. But if you throw out the requirement of using only era-appropriate components, there are some interesting ways to revive older devices with a few touches of modern tech, like this Mac Classic with a unique display.

The Macintosh Classic II was the successor to the first Macintosh computer Apple sold that had a price tag under $1000. As such, there were some lower specs for this machine such as the monochrome 512×342 display. This one has been retrofitted with an e-ink display which actually gives it some of the same grayscale aesthetic as the original. The e-ink display is driven by a Raspberry Pi which displays a replica System 7 environment and a set of photos.

While the only part of the computer that’s original is the shell at this point, the project’s creator [Dave] also built in support for the Apple Desktop Bus through an Arduino so the original Apple mouse and keyboard can be used. While it’s largely an illusion of a working Mac Classic, we still appreciate the aesthetic.

If you’re more of a classic Apple purist, though, take a look at this SE/30 which uses almost entirely original parts with the exception of a Raspberry Pi to allow it to communicate with the modern Internet.

Continue reading “Macintosh Classic II With E-Ink Display” →

Retro PowerBook Gets A Mac Mini Transplant

January 10, 2020 by 8 Comments

Around these parts, seeing a classic laptop or desktop computer get revived with the Raspberry Pi is fairly common. While we’re not ones to turn down a well-executed Pi infusion, we know they can be controversial at times. There’s an impression that such projects are low-effort, and that the combination of old and new tech gains little in the way of usability due to the usability quirks of the Pi itself.

But we think even the most critical in the audience will agree that this build by [Tylinol], which sees the internals of a circa 1993 PowerBook 165c get replaced with that of a 2014 Mac Mini, is something else entirely. For one thing, there’s no question that packing a modern (relatively) desktop computer motherboard into a laptop’s body takes a lot more planning and effort than hot gluing the comparatively tiny Pi into the same space. Plus as an added bonus, anyone who counts themselves among the Cult of Mac will be happy to see the vintage machine retain its Cupertino pedigree.

So how do you get a Mac Mini inside of a PowerBook? Very carefully. As explained by [Tylinol], the inside of the PowerBook’s case was coated in graphite and conductive enough to be a problem. So after the original hardware was removed, a layer of tape was added to insulate it; though we imagine a suitably thick spray-on coating could be used as well if you don’t have that kind of patience.

Once the case was gutted and insulated, [Tylinol] added new stand-offs to mount the Mac Mini motherboard and hard drive. For anyone wondering, the 2014 model was used because the shape of the board almost perfectly fits around the trackball PCB. A board from a newer Mac could be used, but it would likely mean using an external mouse.

Which would have been a problem for [Tylinol], because one of the main goals of this build was to get the original input working. That meant adapting the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) devices to USB, which turns out to be something of a Dark Art. But with the help of some contemporary information about the long-forgotten protocol and a Teensy 3.5, both devices are now picked up as standard USB HID.

But of course, that’s just scratching the surface. [Tylinol] also had to figure out how to swap the original display out for a modern panel, and then get the whole thing running on internal battery power. Even if you’re not particularly interested in retro Apple hardware, this is really a phenomenal build that deserves a thorough read-through.

For those of you who don’t mind getting a Pi in a PowerBook, we recently saw a recreation of Lord Nikon’s laptop from Hackers that went that route.

Fix Your Insecure Amazon Fire TV Stick

April 18, 2018 by 48 Comments

I recently spent a largely sleepless night at a hotel, and out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, decided to kill some time scanning the guest network to see what my fellow travelers might be up to. As you’d probably expect, I saw a veritable sea of Samsung and Apple devices. But buried among the seemingly endless number of smartphones charging next to their sleeping owners, I found something rather interesting. I was as picking up a number of Amazon-made devices, all of which had port 5555 open.

As a habitual Android tinkerer, this struck me as very odd. Port 5555 is used for Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a development tool used to control and perform various administrative tasks on an Android device over the network or (more commonly) locally over USB. The number of users who would have legitimately needed to enable network ADB on their devices is surely rather low, so to see a half dozen of them on the network at the same time seemed improbable to say the least.

Why would so many devices manufactured by Amazon all have network ADB enabled? I realized there must be a connection, and it didn’t take long to figure it out.

Continue reading “Fix Your Insecure Amazon Fire TV Stick” →