This is old hat for serious Android hackers, but for me it took long enough to find (no help from Google or grep) that I’ll post it here. If you’re building your own Android kernel, the last step in the process is to pack the kernel binary and gzipped ramdisk together into a boot image with mkbootimg. Here’s where to find the base address to use for the “–base” parameter for your device. more …
Yesterday, Google revealed that it had used its “security of last resort” remote removal feature this week to wipe 58 malicious applications from user’s devices.
Google also removed the bad apps from the Android Market, contacted law enforcement, and is pushing a security update to protect devices’ identification codes. Needless to say, these are all good moves, and unlike some privacy advocates I’m not going to quibble with Google’s remote app removal power as long as it’s being used conservatively, in a security context, as in this case. Analogous to public health or combatting botnets, Google must be able to wipe malware from people’s phones to protect everyone, not just the infected.
What does bother me about this news is that these applications appeared in the Android Market at all, where they were available for some time before being reported to the Android security team. I’ve owned an Android phone for a couple of months now, so I thought I’d weigh in on one of the sad realities of the experience: I find myself increasingly worried about security, certainly more so than I have been about any personal computing device since the last time I ran a Windows PC 10 years ago. more …
Now that ThundeROM includes the Xionia kernel with the Linux TUN/TAP driver compiled as a module, it was downright easy to get OpenVPN working on my LG Optimus S. I didn’t even have to compile anything! Here’s a quick run-down of what I did. more …
If you’ve installed the Android SDK, but running the tools/android GUI fails with an error message when Java can’t find your SWT-GTK libraries, here’s a possible explanation: Your /tmp partition is mounted with the noexec option. more …