Back in the day, getting root on a unix box meant seeing that "#" when you were in terminal. That's all I really want, and honestly, all I've been able to see here are people who say you can root a phone by... COMPLETELY REINSTALLING IT.
Well no joke, silly! Of course you can be the superuser if you REINSTALL THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM! For some reason I haven't yet fully understood, this is talked of as if it actually accomplishes something. From what I can tell, for me it will make the FM radio not work due to having the wrong set of drivers in the OS that gets installed instead. Oh, and a terminal ap that works correctly, and some interesting tools.
Thing is, the Cricket phone didn't ship with anything inhibited in the first place, really. It does USB debugging. It allows one to install aps from the SD card slot. It even shares 3G as it's own WiFi hotspot! This isn't some crippled up iPhone by any stretch of the imagination - you can even replace the battery easily, or upgrade to a long-life with a case cover change! The only thing I gain is an opportunity to delete some junk like Photobucket, but the drawback is the "ROOTED" phone, near as I can tell, *constantly* runs as a superuser. Currently, I can just ditch Google Play and by killing a few things off after boot, have a pretty clean phone.
So what I want to know is, are there any old-school hackers out there who would be willing to help approach this the classic way - by looking for a suid-0 executable with a backdoor or a defective driver, etc etc.. the OS image is available for inspection, surely there must be something, some hole, that allows a user to escalate their privs by some exploit after installing an ap from the SD card, given all the other flaws that almost ALL software has these days. Its just a matter of finding it.
Also, I'd really like to tune the FM radio down to 76MHz, even though nothing is there. Apparently the M865 can do it, at least the Japanese version. I have a feeling the chip is the exact same. Another useful hack would be letting the FM radio work even without headphones - those holding the phone, in a metropolitan area quite near a high power transformer, will likely be able to get a signal anyways.
To meet these goals, I want to get root on the CURRENTLY INSTALLED operating system. Real unix hacking, like when I was a kid. Not like just reinstalling linux.
Well no joke, silly! Of course you can be the superuser if you REINSTALL THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM! For some reason I haven't yet fully understood, this is talked of as if it actually accomplishes something. From what I can tell, for me it will make the FM radio not work due to having the wrong set of drivers in the OS that gets installed instead. Oh, and a terminal ap that works correctly, and some interesting tools.
Thing is, the Cricket phone didn't ship with anything inhibited in the first place, really. It does USB debugging. It allows one to install aps from the SD card slot. It even shares 3G as it's own WiFi hotspot! This isn't some crippled up iPhone by any stretch of the imagination - you can even replace the battery easily, or upgrade to a long-life with a case cover change! The only thing I gain is an opportunity to delete some junk like Photobucket, but the drawback is the "ROOTED" phone, near as I can tell, *constantly* runs as a superuser. Currently, I can just ditch Google Play and by killing a few things off after boot, have a pretty clean phone.
So what I want to know is, are there any old-school hackers out there who would be willing to help approach this the classic way - by looking for a suid-0 executable with a backdoor or a defective driver, etc etc.. the OS image is available for inspection, surely there must be something, some hole, that allows a user to escalate their privs by some exploit after installing an ap from the SD card, given all the other flaws that almost ALL software has these days. Its just a matter of finding it.
Also, I'd really like to tune the FM radio down to 76MHz, even though nothing is there. Apparently the M865 can do it, at least the Japanese version. I have a feeling the chip is the exact same. Another useful hack would be letting the FM radio work even without headphones - those holding the phone, in a metropolitan area quite near a high power transformer, will likely be able to get a signal anyways.
To meet these goals, I want to get root on the CURRENTLY INSTALLED operating system. Real unix hacking, like when I was a kid. Not like just reinstalling linux.
