PCWorld:The 10 Best Hacks of 2010 (So Far)

Smartphone Hacking: Android and Beyond

Of all the mind-bending news items that have come out in the last few months, this one was up there on the ridiculous-o-meter: getting an iPhone to run the Android operating system. It's like a Hackintosh in reverse!


If you're looking to jailbreak your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch but didn't want to use your USB cable, you're in luck. An untethered jailbreak for the iPhone called "Spirit" makes the entire jailbreaking process a lot slicker than having to use your computer to reboot your device running the iPhone 3.1.3 OS.
Overclocking, once the domain of folks trying to eek a few extra MHz out of their CPUs, has spread to the phone hacking community, and you can now overclock your iPhone or iPod Touch.
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Man Infects Himself with (Computer) Virus

We are one step closer to the future: a British scientist has become the first human being to contract a computer virus.
Yep, you heard that right. Dr. Mark Gasson, a cybernetics expert at the University of Reading, deliberately infected himself (by way of an RFID chip implanted in his wrist) with a benign computer virus. This was part of an experiment designed to show how implantable bionic devices are susceptible to computer viruses.

The device in Gasson's arm is an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip that emits a signal and allows him to access certain parts of the University of Reading laboratory, as well as operate his cell phone. In other words, the chip functions as an internal swipe-card.

Gasson and his colleagues then created a virus for the chip. They put it on the chip and Gasson went into the lab--and when the lab's computers read the code, the virus implanted itself into the database and began to replicate. Now if any of his other colleagues swipe their traditional swipe-cards to get into the lab, the virus can replicate itself on their swipe-cards.

This experiment shows that viruses can be transferred wirelessly from implant devices to the computers they communicate with.
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