Hasta La Gadget!

There might be a tiny bit of upheaval up at the peaks of Nokia management today, but that doesn’t mean we all need to stand around looking serious and forecasting who’ll leverage what synergies in order to actuate the requisite paradigmatic shift in the company’s device portfolio. No, we’re much more inclined to go check out a new ad video that show off the mods and hacks Nokia users have put together with their handsets. It’s quite the breathless run-through, this ad, but if you’re careful you’ll spot a few of your old favorites used in quirky new ways. March past the break for a gander.

Continue reading Nokia celebrates its users’ inventiveness in latest N8 ad (video)

Nokia celebrates its users’ inventiveness in latest N8 ad (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even if you can look beyond the SIM lock and the aging Android 1.6 OS on the Dell Streak, there’s still one irksome problem: the lack of a mini or micro-USB port (Dell clearly missed the USB party last summer). Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, John from Linux Slate decided to build an adapter for his tabletphone’s dock connector, which he confirmed to be PDMI instead of a proprietary design. The procedure was simple: John cut up his Streak’s cable plug, soldered a mini USB socket onto the board, and housed the new assembly within the Streak’s cable clip. Voilà! Until third-party USB-to-PDMI cables start to show up in the stores, it’s either this mod or cough up $20 for a spare cable from Dell. See the adapter in action after the break.

Continue reading Dell Streak procures a hacked-up mini USB adapter, gets friendly with your dusty cables

Dell Streak procures a hacked-up mini USB adapter, gets friendly with your dusty cables originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If it works as advertised, a USB dongle could soon break the PlayStation 3’s seemingly hackproof seal.

An obscure group called PS Jailbreak is selling a USB dongle that will supposedly modify the PS3 so users can dump backed up (aka pirated) games onto the system’s hard drive to play them just like legitimate copies.

We write this with such cautious language because hackers have hailed the PlayStation 3 as a console Everest. Sony baked extremely strong security into the system, and though the PS3 has been hacked by a few tinkerers (including George Hotz, the first person to unlock the iPhone), no tried-and-true mod has emerged.

Until we can get our hands on a one of these USB dongles, color us skeptical. (The fact that the “PS Jailbreak” website doesn’t seem to be working right now doesn’t give us much confidence.) Meanwhile, check out the video above claiming to demonstrate the mod running a backup copy of a game and let us know what you think.

PS Jailbreak via Engadget

See Also:

• Student Arrested for Jailbreaking Game Consoles — Update
• Sony's PS3 Update Could Affect Supercomputer Users
• Sony Unveils Memory-Rich PlayStation 3 Models
• PlayStation Network Problems Cause PS3 Meltdown (Updated)

GPUs democratize brute force password hacking originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In 2009, Chris Paget showed the world the vulnerabilities of RFID by downloading the contents of US passports from the safety of his automobile. This year, he’s doing the same for mobile phones. Demonstrating at DefCon 2010, the white hat hacker fooled 17 nearby GSM phones into believing his $1,500 kit (including a laptop and two RF antennas) was a legitimate cell phone base station, and proceeded to intercept and record audience calls. “As far as your cell phones are concerned, I’m now indistinguishable from AT&T,” he told the crowd. The purpose of the demonstration was highlight a major flaw in the 2G GSM system, which directs phones to connect to the tower with the strongest signal regardless of origin — in this case, Paget’s phony tower.

The hacker did caveat that his system could only intercept outbound calls, and that caller ID could tip off the owner of a handset to what’s what, but he says professional IMSI catchers used by law enforcement don’t suffer from such flaws and amateur parity would only be a matter of time. “GSM is broken,” Paget said, “The primary solution is to turn it off altogether.” That’s a tall order for a world still very dependent on the technology for mobile connectivity, but we suppose AT&T and T-Mobile could show the way. Then again, we imagine much of that same world is still using WEP and WPA1 to “secure” their WiFi.

Hacker intercepts phone calls with homebuilt $1,500 IMSI catcher, claims GSM is beyond repair originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jul 2010 22:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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