Android

On most unrooted, stock, Android phones, enabling tethering will run a “Provisioning Check” with your wireless provider to ensure that your data plan allows tethering. This post documents Tethr, a way to bypass the provisioning check on Android devices prior to version 7.1.2. After discovering this method I reported it to the Android bug bounty fixing the issue and receiving CVE-2017-0554. Background The ability to tether is controlled by your device’s build.prop file, usually located at /system/build.prop. The default is to require the provisioning check before enabling tethering, but it can by bypassed by adding the following line: ...

Update: ActionBarSherlock is no longer necessary. The latest Google Support Library includes appcompat which is a better solution. ActionBarSherlock is an Android support library designed to allow you to use the ActionBar which was introduced in Android 3.0 Honeycomb with older devices, back to Android 2.1 Eclair. This allows your applications to have a modern looking interface, even on older devices whose API does not support the new features. To get started using ActionBarSherlock in Eclipse follow these steps. ...

A while ago I was working on building a custom kernel for my Android phone. Once you get the source the compilation process is not as straightforward as I hoped. Here are the steps required to get from the kernel source to a flashable image for your phone. Get a copy of the build toolchain and Linux kernel for your device First download a copy of the pre-build toolchain from git. ...

Have you ever wanted to give a friend access to a wireless network you are on but don’t want to go find the key? WIFI Key Recovery will find the key on your device and allow you to share it via a message or QR Code. Additionally WIFI Key Recovery will allow you to backup/restore your current WIFI configuration to your SD card! If this app does not work on your rooted phone email me I will try to add support. ...

This is a minimalistic how-to to get a Debian environment running on almost any (rooted) android phone. I adopted the method here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10 to be more universal and added some new features. Preparing the Debian Image You will need access to a computer dunning a Debian based distribution to create the image for you phone. I used Ubuntu 10.04. To create the image you need to install a program called debootstrap. debootstrap will allow you to create a mini Debian install in your image. ...

The official HTC Incredible 2.2 update added a new feature to the ROM. When the phone is connected to a computer via USB, even if the memory card is not mounted, it will act as a virtual CD-ROM. It basically just acts as a CR-ROM drive with the disk image found in /system/etc/CDROM.ISO. The default ISO was some annoying Verizon thing. Most (rooted) users simply deleted the ISO from their system. I however found a way to make this feature a bit more useful. ...

I recently got a HTC Incredible to replace my aging LG Chocolate. One feature of the Incredible was video out. Specifically the ability to output composite video to a TV. The cable was first demoed by WireFly here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJyt463AoOA And since then threads like these have started trying to hunt down the cable. And it looks like one day it may be sold here or here. But for the time being this cable is not being sold anywhere, and there is a rumor that it may never be commercially sold. ...