This Case for the iPhone Runs Android

You may have seen dozens of hacks that put Google’s Android on every Apple iPhone out there (and in desperate cases, a cheap Chinese copy) but hardly any solution is as easy or convenient as the one which comes courtesy of developer Nick Lee, who has made a special case which brings Android brains to a traditionally iOS phone.

Nick Lee, who is already known for undertaking adventurous procedures such as when he made it possible to run Windows 95 on an Apple Watch, made the case so that he did not have to choose between two great platforms all the time.

The case may not win a lot of casual users because of its bulky design but that is not without reason. (You can argue that Apple itself has a case quite reminiscent to this one and that only holds a tiny battery pack.)

It contains its own SoC, which is Huawei’s Kirin 620 (no slouch), 2 GB worth RAM and 8 GB internal storage. He also made it possible to boost connectivity through options including HDMI, USB ports, Lightning port and a microSD card slot. He 3D printed these into a case along with a battery and the result is one of the coolest looking, if not the most attractive case that you have ever seen.

The version of Android which can run as a result is the version 6.0.1 Marshmallow, which appears to be running adequately if not completely smoothly. It is launched via a custom-built app courtesy of Nick Lee’s employer, Tendigi, which allows the circuitry in the board to interact with the display of the iPhone 6S.

Before he came up with this remarkable case, Lee also streamed Android on the iPhone through a microUSB cable from the Nexus 5, thanks to the Android Open Source Project to make sure that the concept worked.

Projects like these make sure that the smartphone industry remains open to all sorts of intervention from the hacking community. The project may not be very polished and certainly not practical for day-to-day use, but has a sort of sophistication that begs to be acknowledged.

Now, if only someone puts the circuitry into a transparent case and brings it out into the market that would be awesome.

This Tiny Computer Runs on Radio Waves Powered wirelessly & hasn't battery

No matter how smart and fast your devices would be, the biggest issue is always with the battery technology.

Whenever you go to buy any electronic gadget — smartphone, laptop, or any wearable — the most important specification isn’t its processor speed or its camera quality but its Battery Backup, which is not getting better any time soon.

What if you could eliminate the very thing entirely?

Well, that's exactly what the electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington’s Sensor Lab and the Delft University of Technology has developed a new gadget that doesn’t need a battery or any external power source to keep it powered; rather it works on radio waves.

So, this means you have to turn on your radio every time to keep this device charged. Right?

No, you don’t need to do this at all, because the device sucks radio waves out of the air and then converts them into electricity.

Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform

Dubbed Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), the device is a combination sensor and computing chip that uses a standard off-the-shelf RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader to suck in radio waves and convert them into electricity.

Though the WISP is not designed to compete with the chips in your computer or even your smartphone, it has as much processing power as the Fitbit, which is enough to run sensors and transmit data.

The discovery could highly transform the Internet of Things (IoT) world as the WISP is even more low maintenance compared to Bluetooth Low Energy sensor chips being used today.

The next step in making the WISP usability even more convenient and easy is to create Wisent that would allow for wireless programming of the WISP. For this, the team has recently collaborated with the Delft University of Technology.

With the help of Wisent, the WISP can be programmed wirelessly and uses the very same radio waves to communicate.

"So far WISP required cables to reprogramme it, nullifying the advantage of battery-less-ness. Therefore, we present Wisent, a protocol that allows WISP to be reprogrammed wirelessly," said Przemysław Pawełczak, assistant professor at the TU Delft’s Embedded Software group.

"Our vision is to have truly wirelessly reprogrammable software-defined battery-less computers wherever and whenever we want."

For more details, you can head on to the research paper [PDF].

Though the ultimate aim of WISP is in fully realizing the Internet of Things and giving "dumb" objects some smartness, it might even find its way into smartphones as a sort of emergency backup calling module that works even when your phone’s battery is dead.

However, there is no detail on when the WISP will be made available for purchase, or how much it will cost.

Playstation 4 Gets Hacked & Run Linux & Pokemon

It was only a matter of time before Sony’s next generation console PlayStation 4 was hacked.Fail0verflow was the team responsible for carrying out the feat, by getting Gentoo Linux on the console too.

The team demonstrated Linux on the PlayStation 4 at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (which is an event widely known as 32c3) on December 30, 2015.

How Dis Fail0verFlow Manage to Accomplish the Feat?

The hacking group managed to find a vulnerability in the PlayStation 4 gaming console by bringing up the Settings option, as this is the place where the Linux kernel-based operating system is launched.

Afterwards, the group managed to navigate to the User’s Guide section, where they were able to locate the vulnerability and successfully hack the console. Another reason why the team was successfully able to hack the machine was because there was a broken NOP command on the integrated AMD Radeon GPU. NOP, or No Operation, is used for timing purposes, and present to prevent further delay when launching the gaming application and the team were able to notice this, albeit with a small amount of effort.

Here is the group running a modified Pokémon ROM dubbed ‘PlayStation version’ on the PS4 via Linux.

What Works, and What Doesn't?

After the hack, the following components and instructions present on the motherboard remained functional:

• Timers
• IRQs (interrupt request)
• PCI
• Serial port
• Framebuffer
• Kernel mode setting
• HDMI encoder
• Ethernet
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth
• S/PDIF audio

3D hardware acceleration, USB ports, and the HDMI audio port did not respond after completing the hacking process, but the group has stated that they have figured out a way to make these three things work as well. As for the Blu-Ray disk read, Fail0verflow are still making an effort in order to make it work.

Does it seem like the PS4 will get hacked to run pirated games and backups? This development has certainly got everyone thinking about such a possibility in the near future.