After a few delays, the inaugural mission of the Orbital Sciences Antares mission successfully made it into orbit on April 21st. While the mission didn’t carry the actual spacecraft Antares is designed to lift (that’s currently slated for June), it didn’t go up there empty handed. The Antares rocket safely delivered all three of NASA’s PhoneSats into their intended orbit, and [...]
Reimagining Play: Interview with PlayMG’s Taylor Cavanah
Last month, we brought you a review of the MG, an Android powered handheld gaming system designed for casual games. The combination of vanilla Android and the MG’s custom parental controls made the device a compelling option for gamers young and old alike, and its comparatively low price combined with the vast Android software library [...]
AOKP Drops SuperSU for Open Source Superuser
The Android Open Kang Project (AOKP), one of the most popular custom Android builds currently available, has just unveiled their 6th build of Jelly Bean. Along with the normal host of bug fixes and improvements, this build features an especially important addition: the removal of SuperSU in favor of Superuser. Open Source Prevails As we’ve [...]
Pwnie Express Releases Pwn Pad Ahead of Schedule
The team at Pwnie Express seems to have a lot of trouble standing still, as it doesn’t seem more than a few months go by before they are talking about yet another disruptive open source product that they are about to unleash on the security community. First it was their Pwn Plug, which combined an off the shelf SheevaPlug with [...]
STRaND-1 Satellite Preparing to Activate Onboard Nexus One
We’ve previously reported on the NASA project to base a new generation of small, cheap, spacecraft around Android phones, dubbed PhoneSat. While PhoneSat is still on track to launch in April, the British have beaten their American counterparts to the punch with the Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1) satellite, currently orbiting the Earth. [...]
Koushik Dutta Releases BETA of Superuser for Android
Well known Android developer Koushik “Koush” Dutta has taken the wraps of the first beta for his new open source “ClockworkMod Superuser” application. This application is used to control the root-level permissions on “rooted” Android devices, giving the user the ability to individually allow and disallow applications which ask for root permissions. Of course, anyone running a [...]
WiFi Monitor Mode with Android PCAP Capture
Noted security researcher Mike “dragorn” Kershaw, developer of the gold standard in WiFi scanners, Kismet, has recently released a tool for Android that enables raw 802.11 frame captures in WiFi monitor mode. Putting a WiFi device into monitor mode allows it to capture all sorts of interesting data about the wireless network that would otherwise be [...]
Transform Your Nexus Into A Kindle Fire
That’s right, you read this headline correctly. You can now transform your aging Samsung Nexus S into a Kindle Fire. Now you’re probably asking yourself why you would want to transform one of the best phones of 2010 into a closed platform like the Kindle Fire. We’re sure you’re just oozing to consume your vast [...]
Ingress: Doing Google’s Legwork, Literally
If you’re at all plugged into the world of social networking and/or Android, you’ve almost certainly heard of Google’s latest experiment: the invite-only and Android exclusive meta-game, Ingress. Thanks to a fierce marketing campaign including multiple tie-in websites and heavy promotion on Google+, the buzz about Ingress is incredibly strong; especially considering most people don’t even know [...]
Android Community Demands MIUI ROM Comply With FOSS Licenses
A thorn in the side of many free software loving Android users, the Chinese MIUI ROM has long been accused of riding on the success of Android without fully complying with the free and open source licenses which it’s based on. MIUI’s developer, Xiaomi, has managed to cultivate a considerable fanbase for their ROM, adding [...]