Quotes

The fundamental question is, Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy? I will be, but until I'm the president, it's going to be hard for me to verify that I think I'll be more effective.

- George W. Bush, 06/27/2000

This quote has been randomly selected, I have no control over the quotes displayed here.

Motorola Droid Rooted

After a long wait, the Verizon Droid (Motorola Sholes) has been rooted. The method is being kept secret until it becomes patched to slow down the process as long as possible. As with many android hacks, we owe our thanks to zinx (#android-root on freenode) for finding this vulnerability. zinx does not own a Verizon Droid, his Droid owning helper is [mbm], a big thanks to him too!

Before applying this update, be sure to install the 2.0.1 patch first, as doing it second will un-root the device. This has been tested and does work providing the SHA1 checksum matches as shown below. A safe copy can be downloaded here. Place this item in your SD card as update.zip. Reboot the phone and hold the x key on the hardware keyboard until you see the Motorola logo, than release. You will see an exclamation point and a phone, do not panic, press Volume Up + Camera at the same time. You will see a menu, slide out your keyboard and navigate to Apply sdcard update in the menu, press in on the center button. The update will install and you may than reboot.

???842634563f78ecc11c7d4155684a09cc06d4c9c8  signed-voles-ESD56-from-ESD20.84263456.zip

To get root on the Verizon Droid, firstdownload droid-root.zip and copy it to your SD card as update.zip and follow the steps below.

• Reboot your phone.
• Press x on the hardware keyboard while booting until you see the white Motorola logo, then release.
• Press Volume Up + Camera when you see a picture of an exclamation point and a phone.
• Navigate through the menu using the arrows on the hardware keyboard (portrait mode) to Apply sdcard update.
• Apply the update and reboot.
• You now have root.

This is not a traditional Android “rooting”, root access is presently only available through the adb shell. Install the Android Debug Bridge to your PC and enable USB debugging in your phone by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development and selecting USB debugging. In your systems shell (or command prompt for windows) type adb shell (assuming your paths are correct setup) and you will be connected to your Verizon Droid. Type su and you are root. Be very careful with this as you can do damage to your phone when in a root shell.

It should now only be a matter of time before a custom firmware is available for the Motorola Sholes. Do not flash any other firmware updates as this may patch the vulnerability used by droid-root.zip.

If you would like to have root on-the-go inside of say Better Terminal Emulator follow these instructions.

Download this modified su command here. Push the new su command to the phone with adb push su /data/local/su. Now, launch a shell on your computer with adb shell. Type the following commands [checked that mtdblock4 is the correct device for /system using the mount command with no arguments].

• su
• mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock4 /system
• cd /system/bin
• mv su osu
• dd if=/data/local/su of=su
• chmod 6755 su
• sync

Now if you open your phone and enter a terminal emulator of your choice and type su, you will have root.

Broken Droid

Well, I got to get the new Motorola Sholes (Verizon Droid) in an attempt to reduce my phone bill from AT&T, which was quite high. This will not be a review as there are plenty. This is a post to announce the destruction of the first Verizon Droid to the best of my awareness. The phone was accidentally left at a restaurant and when I got it back, it was destroyed. Asurion has already come through and replaced the phone, for which I am very thankful, and glad I bought the insurance. For the community and my own record of stupid things I have done, I will now post the photographs. I am being strongly urged by the community to disassemble the phone and take pictures. Any input?

For photos: http://www.michaelpurcell.info/gallery/v/Droid/Destroyed/

YubiKey Security Token

Yay, my Yubico security token finally came in the mail! I have been pouring over the developers documentation for this for quite some time now and am quite excited to see what this little guy has to offer. I’ll be sure to post more as development comes along. So far I am looking into writing a PAM module for secure XML-RPC requests for authentication to a secure back end. I am hoping to add support for both legacy authentication and more secure two factor authentication through XML-RPC. The XML-RPC will make use of RSA key pairs for negotiation and symmetric encryption (probably AES-128 or higher) for the actual authentication/session management data. In case anybody is wondering why I chose XML-RPC… I don’t really have a good answer, kind of an impulse. I am developing this module for personal reasons, but if it works out I will probably clean it up and (L)GPL it for the community, so wish me luck.

For those interested in two factor authentication, check out the Yubico technical manual, its a great read.

Mike – Release Canidate 4.

So it has been a little while since my last update. Things have changed. Let’s see.

• I left Delaware Technical & Community College.
• I work for Delaware Criminal Justice Information System (this may have been mentioned).
• Several programming projects started and left as vapor ware.
• Quit playing video games for the most part in January to get some of my life back.
• Switched my entire desktop experience to Debian.

To proceed in relative order. My life-long intention has always been to proceed in a self-employed direction, with a slight niche in conquering the world. I spent far too many years of my life in Delaware Tech. No ill feelings toward any of my teachers, they simply taught the programs agreed upon by the department. There was little left for me to learn at Delaware Tech, and if your not there to learn then why are you there? I decided to proceed with my life. It would be against my own politics to continue my “education” at Delaware Tech merely to acquire an expensive piece of paper.

Now for a twist. Remember that my lifes intention has always been to continue dominating the world, then why am I still working for the State? Honestly, my life is far from the point where I could support myself under my own business, and the fact is I feel quite comfortable at Delaware Criminal Justice Information System (DELJIS). At DELJIS I can work on projects that let me explore my creativity while helping society. I have no intention of leaving DELJIS for some time. By the way, ePayment is now complete for the JP courts, now is the time to pay those old speeding tickets

Unfortunately my brain has entered crunch time and several programming projects have be pressed into abandonment. These projects are listed below.

• Cup Holder (automotive car computer environment)
• Call of Duty 4 modifications and server side hacks. (I don’t play games anymore)
• MySpace wordpress widget (this is not vaporware, I just am not maintaining it and recent MySpace updates have broken it)
• Facebook wordpress plugin (Who cares)

So I finally ditched Windows completely (sort of). My only remaining Windows environments are virtual machines maintained for Photoshop and work (The state has a proprietary love affair). My distribution of choice is Debian and it is serving me well. In fact I recently acquired a new quad core server for my home, quite pleased with it so far, good to move beyond 600MHz.

Check back in 6 months or so for an update.