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S60 Gets the Hacker Special; ROMpatcher Released

Posted by Zach Epstein on Apr 25, 2008 11:03 am 8 comments
Filed in News, Nokia, Symbian

Some might say the fact that the S60 3rd Edition OS took so long to crack is an impressive feat in itself. At this point however, it doesn’t matter. Fueled by the restrictions of Symbian Signed, last month S60 3rd got its first taste of hacker love as protected system files became accessible and the Symbian Signed certificate-checking process was circumvented. This was a huge deal to many of course, because it granted easier access to applications built by small developers who didn’t want to pay to have their apps signed or wait through the long arduous freeware signing process. Until recently, Symbian Signed allowed just about anyone to obtain a personal certificate in order to make these "unsigned" applications installable on a personal handset. When Symbian Signed decided to limit personal certificates to developers only, hackers weren’t having it. Fast forward to yesterday and it’s pretty much game over for the time being. A Russian hacker named ZoRn has developed what he is calling ROMpatcher. In a nutshell, ROMpatcher does exactly what the name dictates; it allows you to quickly and relatively easily apply patches to the ROM on S60 devices. For the time being there are only a few patches available which essentially just a few tasks that already existed (access to protected directories, circumvent certificate check) but now that the flood gates are open, expect the water to start roaring soon enough. S60 handset owners, what do you think? Are you planning on taking advantage of ROMpatcher?

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8 comment(s) for this post.

  1. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 11:06 am, mosamjc Said:

    Hell yes! I hate signing software just as much as the next person. Rock on, Zorn.

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  2. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 11:38 am, FUnaki Said:

    finally..the signing process was a huge pain in the butt but not anymore.

    Thanks ZoRn..

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  3. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 11:43 am, Randy Said:

    I would very much like to take advantage of ROMPatcher however, I need an S60 Device to do so.

    BGR: Care to provide one to me for, uh… evaluation purposes? :-)

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  4. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 11:51 am, mingkee Said:

    the major advantage of WM over S60 is highly-hackable, and less hassle to install “free software”, and more app choice

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  5. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 12:39 pm, matt Said:

    Plus WM freezes up which keeps all those pesky phone calls from coming in :)

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  6. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 12:50 pm, Blur Said:

    If this would one day lead to letting users install S60v3 FP1 or FP2 on to old S60v3 devices, that would be fan-fugu-tastic. As it is, I just sign apps I want to install myself. Annoying, but I didn’t find it too big a deal. Getting a dev cert/key was pretty easy.

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  7. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 1:55 pm, HTC_Poke Said:

    that would rock if i can put symbian 9.2 on my old 6682 :) could this soon mean cooked roms to >? like WM

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  8. On Apr 25, 2008 @ 3:44 pm, Wifiguy Said:

    For real, did anyone really spend 700 on this device in the states?

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