Google Glass
Google
Glass is the latest innovation from Google, a product that, like
self-driving cars, the company is hoping will bring a completely new
industry to the world, and a new way to consume content and stay
connected at all time. Thanks to Google Glass, you can see messages,
notifications, take pictures, look up maps and share posts all through a
tiny screen in front of your eye. But while Glass may be a
technological innovation, right now it is very much a beta product, that
only geeks and tech enthusiasts are rushing for. The first batch is now
shipping, with some people having received them in the last couple of
days.
However,
if there is one thing prevalent in tech communities is open source,
freedom of code and the desire to hack into any system to find out how
they work. So it is no surprise that already, Google Glass has been
‘rooted’. One particular early adopter received his unit and got to
work, hacking into the Android kernel running the device, and managing
to ‘jailbreak’ it. While Google has usually been a friend of the open
source community, releasing a lot of code for free, Jay Freeman did not
want to wait, and achieved his task in just a few hours.
According
to an interview he gave, the well known iOS jailbreaker says that he
had to use a known Android exploit in order to get the necessary
permissions to change code in the device’s firmware. He says that it was
a fairly simple task, and already another developer named Liam
McLoughlin achieved the same task. This ‘jailbreak’ allows them to
change the root code in Google Glass, make it do whatever they want. It
is not clear yet if the consumer version will be vulnerable to the same
hacks.
