You remember that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, with all the Ewoks celebrating? That’s the Android community right now: a bunch of hairy dudes dancing around, celebrating their victories over oppression.
Instead of the Emperor, the opressor is HTC’s anti-tamper system, and instead of blowing up the Death Star, their victory is … finally perma-hacking the T-Mobile G2. See? This analogy totally works. Sort of. Not really.
The nutshelled story so far, for those who are just tuning in: the G2, while a pretty great handset, has an interesting.. feature. At first glance, it couldn’t be hacked — at least not permanently. Any changes made to the handset’s firmware would be lost the instant the handset was reset, preventing the hardcore crowd from permanently achieving the low-level, full system administration (“root”) access they wanted.
Early this morning (and after weeks of work), the pretty-much-unstoppable bunch over at XDA have triumphed once again. User Scotty2 achieved permanent root access on the G2, while user unforgiven512 has written up an instruction guide so all can partake.
Before you dive in, however, heed their warning: “THIS COULD PERMANENTLY BRICK YOUR PHONE, INSTEAD OF ROOT IT IF YOU DO THE EVER-SO-SLIGHTEST THING WRONG.” Ready to throw caution to the wind? Have at it.
