Taking Control of Your Devices

by Nick

Well, three years later, I have finally decided to write another submission after feeling an urge.

If you want to check out my previous submission, it is in the Spring 2017 issue with the title "Longing for the Past."

So, I love hacking things.  I know hacking has different meanings, but I am referring to the being able to do stuff on something that, really, you are not supposed to be able to do.  For instance, jailbreaking an iPhone, which I will get into later.

In my last submission, I spoke about things I was interested in, such as the ZX Spectrum+ 48K which I still own, dialing into bulletin board systems and phone phreaking.  My hobbies have changed since then and, while I may have moved on from those hobbies, they still give me great memories.  I had GCSEs and a lot of school work, so I honestly forgot all about 2600.  Once I finished school, I stopped using my Kindle (which is how I read 2600) until I found it the other day, gathering dust.  I charged it up, turned it on, and let it download all the 2600 issues I did not have.  I was up all night reading.  What a great magazine!  I thought to myself, "I have to write a submission," and here we are.

Anyway, so onto what I want to talk about: taking control of devices you own.

Let us start with the Amazon Kindle.  A simple device with an E Ink display, a 1 GHz processor, and I believe 256 MB of RAM.  It is brilliant, but it runs an operating system created by Amazon which is locked down so you can only do what they allow you to do.

Back in 2016 when I first got the Kindle, I decided to jailbreak it.  At the time it was on an exploitable firmware, so I dragged in a modified update file into the root of the Kindle USB drive and clicked on the "Update Your Kindle" button in settings.  That was pretty much it.  It was jailbroken.  The developers of this jailbreak were clever and designed the code to survive through updates.

Anyway, now I can use a terminal on the Kindle, use an IRC client, have a better web browser and a good PDF viewer, and even SSH into the thing.  Now while some of these add-ons may not be useful or productive, it makes the device feel more like my own.

Now onto PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 consoles.

These consoles were both last-gen and came out in November 2007.  I have had the Wii since 2010, but I picked up the PS3 in December 2018 because a friend gave me a good deal, and I wanted to play some old games.  Again, I wanted control over my device, so I researched on how to jailbreak the Wii and, somewhat like the Kindle, it was a matter of extracting a few files on to an SD card, inserting it into the Wii, and scrolling through the message board until a letter came up with a bomb icon on it.

Once you click on this, it initiates an exploit which allows you to install "Homebrew Launcher" on the Wii.  On this jailbroken Wii, I have a DVD player app, Wii-Linux, and a launcher.  I got an external HDD hooked up to it, which I backup my games onto in case the discs get scratched.

The PS3 was much more fun, however, as I initially started with a basic Homebrew ENabler (HEN) exploit, as I heard that the PS3 was easy to brick.  After getting a little bored of HEN functionality, I decided to go for a full-blown Custom Firmware (CFW) exploit.  This required an exploit placed on a USB drive plugged into the PS3.  I loaded up a PS3 exploit website and it used the exploit on the USB drive to patch the NAND/NOR flash memory.  If the PS3 lost power, then it was gone forever unless you had a hardware flasher handy.  Anyway, it worked, and I installed a CFW of my choice.  Like the Wii, I installed a launcher so I could backup my games to the internal HDD in case the discs got scratched, and it is actually faster loading from the HDD as opposed to the Blu-ray drive.  Other uses of the jailbreak include being able to install an Atari 2600 emulator and being able to play PS2 games on the non-backwards-compatible PS3.

Just like with almost every other device I own, I wanted to jailbreak my Xbox 360.  It did not go too well though.  The Xbox 360 Reset Glitch Hack (RGH) requires soldering a board with wires to the Xbox's motherboard.  I managed to mess up the soldering though and the 360 stopped working.  The 360 OS works in a hypervisor-based environment.  An RGH works by sending timed pulses to the 360's CPU, which when hit at exactly the right time, causes the Xbox to boot without the hypervisor.

Now my favorite.  Apple iPods, iPhones, and iPads.

I got my first Apple device (iPod Touch Fourth-Generation) back in 2010 when I was nine years old.  I loved it; it had an endless supply of free games on the App Store and entertained me for hours on end.  That was until I saw a Windows 95 emulator running on an iPad.  I went on the App Store, searching for iDOS only to find out it had been taken down and the only way to run it was by downloading something called Cydia.  I remember searching for ways to jailbreak and then I finally found "limera1n."  limera1n.exe itself did not work for me, but I found better software.  Something called redsn0w.  At the time, I did not understand the difference between tethered and untethered.

As a quick summary of both terms:

Tethered:  Every time the iDevice boots up, it needs the jailbreak software to boot the iPod, otherwise it simply will not boot.

Untethered:  The iDevice can boot without a computer.

So, I went on holiday and within a few days, I forgot to charge it one night and by the morning it had run down.  And of course, it would not boot.  I did not have a laptop either.  Anyway, once we arrived home, I jumped on my computer and learned the difference between untethered and tethered, and finally booted my iDevice using redsn0w.  That was probably the funniest memory I have of my jailbreaking adventures.  I just remember how upset I was that I could not use my iPod for the rest of my holiday!  Now I do not use the iPod anymore; I managed to set up a dual-boot between iOS 6 and iOS 5 and each partition has only 8 GB each!

So now I own the iPhone XS, iPad Mini First-Generation, iPad Fourth-Generation, the same iPod Touch Fourth-Generation, and an iPhone 3G.  I managed to find this iPhone 3G on eBay for around £20.

I knew that you could do a lot with an iPhone 3G, so I bought it.  I bought it with a carrier lock and, within an hour of owning it, I unlocked the baseband by first downgrading the baseband, flashing to an iPad baseband, and then unlocking the baseband with a package called ultrasn0w.  I tried all iterations of iOS it supported, and it was interesting to use iOS 4.2.1 (the first iOS I ever used on my iPod Touch Fourth-Generation.  Both iPad's I own are jailbroken, but they are just gathering dust because the iOS is outdated, and they are slow.

The only device I really use now is my iPhone XS.  It runs on iOS 13, which I like because it is fast, snappy, and does what I need it to do.  I do not really feel a need to jailbreak my devices anymore because I have no reason to.  I mean, sure, if a jailbreak came out for it, then I'd give it a go which is what I did with an iOS 12 jailbreak, but in the end it actually just slowed the device down and negatively affected battery life.

So, what is my point?

Well, I wanted to share some good memories with you, the readers.  Also, though, I wanted to voice my opinion.  If you spend money on a device, whether that be £50 on a Kindle or £999 on an iPhone, that device is yours and you should be to do with it whatever you want.  In the same way, Android users can install any APK they want (if it is compatible with the device), I feel like Apple really needs to relax strict security measures around iOS and iPhones/iPads.

Now I know that Apple is all about security and privacy and so am I, but it should be the responsibility of the user to decide whether they trust a certain app, theme, or any kind of modification to their device.  Each year that a new iteration of iOS is released, it seems like Apple picks a few of the popular jailbreak modifications and includes it in their iOS release.

A good example was f.lux, in other words, "Night Shift."  I am not saying there is anything wrong with this, but in the end, for me at least, it just gives me another reason not to jailbreak.

But for developers who spent their time developing these tweaks, it is a shame that such potential is just "not needed anymore" because Apple already includes this feature in their iOS software.

Please note that any device modifications can potentially screw up your device, causing them to be bricked or, therefore, completely unusable.  Please make sure to follow trusted guides for any device modifications you make.

Thanks for reading!