RIM PlayBook Tablet Jailbroken 63
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers is claiming that they've found a root exploit that enables them to jailbreak the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet made by Research In Motion. In a video demonstration of the jailbreak, one of the researchers shows off the ability to change the settings on a PlayBook and says that he also has the ability to install the Android Market app on the tablet."
Re:Heartbreaking (Score:5, Informative)
The original OS has been rooted, at last year's pwn2own contest for instance...
There is incentive to root Android, iOS and the new Blackberry OS since it's QNX based, because once rooted you can install unofficial apps and all these systems are unix based so there is plenty of unofficial code you could install...
The older blackberry os is completely proprietary, even if you rooted it you'd have nothing to install on it.. Also the average blackberry users are corporates, not the kind of geeks who would want to root their phones.
Not running Android (Score:5, Informative)
playbook is NOT running android. Its running openjdk based JVM. The android apps have to be packaged with RIMs packaging tools so the JVM on playbook can fire the app. The jdk holds playbook's implementation of android classes. as an e.g. opengl calls on the playbook jvm translate to lower level graphics call that are relevant to playbook.
Not 'rooted' (Score:5, Informative)
Remember this is QNX. This is a privilege escalation above the default 'devuser'. I still see nothing that indicates that the bootloader or anything of importance was 'rooted' in the same sense as an Android 'root' or and iPhone 'jailbreak'.
Ehm... not quite (Score:5, Informative)
IF you have the physical device, and IF you have developer access to it, and IF you explicitly sideload this... then some additional access has been obtained to the OS.
Unlike the iPhone/Android "jailbreak" concept, this lets you muck about in the OS but doesn't give any way to overwrite the bootloader.
It's an interesting proof of concept, and certainly something RIM should be looking into ... but it also isn't the fatal flaw in RIM security that much of the popular tech press is reporting.
Re:Almost worth it... (Score:5, Informative)
Best Buy is trying to dump these for $199.
Only about $99 too high for me. Sorry, almost worth it, but I'm not springing $200 for what is a short-lived product. The hardware will not be supported much beyond warranty, I fear.
Actually RIM announced in their earnings call this past September that they would be running these discounts in order to move inventory; and recently there has been talk from RIM about a next generation of PB tablets.
Your statement (I can't call it reasoning, because there is no reasoning present) makes no sense considering that they're moving their entire future platform to "BBX" as they call it and have a major new platform release scheduled for February, specifically for the tablet.
And privacy isn't much of a problem for RIM any more. They are no more or less secure than Facebook, and their corporate clients are losing any hope of being safe from the prying eyes of sovreign states. Welcome to the party, security is an illusion.
You're referring to the fact that the enterprise BES data is encrpyted, and RIM literally can't give anyone access because RIM does not own the user's private keys?
Still, RIM is on track to convert to Android. So long as their mail client is better on Androidt than it is on iOS, they have a chance. Even Google is stumbling out of the iOS gate. There is still time for RIM to maintain some relevance.
[citation required] See above comment about missing reasoning - why would RIM convert to Android? Any new Android player is doomed to minimal market share at best, at this point -- there are already too many on the market, and they're sure to be whittled down in the coming years.
Re:What are the physical difference (Score:5, Informative)