George “Geohot” Hotz, the legendary hacker who’s famous for his iPhone jailbreaks, has turned his attention to Android devices and released the first root for the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active. It’s quite possibly one of the easiest root methods you’ll ever come across, and it was developed in a matter of hours.
If you’re upgrading to the Samsung Galaxy S4 later this month, but you’re worried you may have to give up some of your tweaks and custom ROMs until it gets rooted, then worry no more. The eight-core Exynos 5 Octa version of the device has already been rooted before it even goes on sale.
ClockWorkMod is the go-to tool for Android users who enjoy flashing different ROMs as well as performing a slew of other root functions directly from their phone. ClockWorkMod Touch adds touch support to the popular tool and has slowly been rolling out support to a variety of devices. Over the weekend, Koushik Dutta, the author of ClockworkMod recovery, released the first version of the software for tablets. ClockworkMod Touch is now available on the Asus Transformer and Transformer Prime.
The Android developer/hacker community loves a good challenge so when they found out the AT&T Galaxy Note supported T-Mobile’s HSPA+ frequencies, they immediately went to work. Over at XDA they even had a running bounty for the first person to successfully get the AT&T Galaxy Note running on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. It didn’t take that long before user tomin.fhl found a way to get it working and he’s been kind enough to post the instructions for any brave soul willing to take the plunge.
Another important cause has come to light, one that needs our support just as much as fighting SOPA or any other anti-freedom attack brought by greed. An extremely important and personal part of owning tech, is having the ability to play with it, learn from it, and improve it. Not everyone sees it this way, and some even want to restrict what you can and can not do to these tech products well after you’ve purchased them and taken them home. There are many greedy companies out there that wish to keep users shackled to their products, and claim things like jailbreaking or rooting violates Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
