Blog Update (November 8, 2008 8:05 AM): G1 Jailbreak Fix Released (and Blocked), Plus Hacking Philosophy 101

Blog Update (November 6, 2008 7:40 PM): Google says a patch to close the G1 jailbreak described below will be pushed out soon. Will we see a repeat of the PSP/iPhone root battles after all?

Greetings. Well, we knew it would happen, but you gotta give the gang over at xda-developers credit for moving at warp speed. Looks like the HTC Google Android G1 has already been "jailbroken" -- that is, a procedure developed to grant full read/write "root"-level privileges on the device.

This potentially opens up capabilities not presently available to users on the G1, such as running applications from storage cards (instead of from limited internal memory), true daemons, and ... well, all kinds of useful and fun stuff.

Here's an article that gives more background on this development, and accurately (in my opinion) explains why it seems relatively unlikely that a serious iPhone-like "arms race" between Google and G1 users will develop to try repeatedly close (and crack) this sort of access to the G1's internals.

After all, the G1 is vastly more open than the iPhone to begin with, and apparently the G1 root crack was also (as one might expect) far simpler to implement than was the case in iPhone-land. Still, time will tell.

Have fun. But if you've never played Linux sysadmin, please don't complain to me if you brick your phone!

% su
#

--Lauren--