Hackers have been quite busy this past week, as they meddled with both the yet-unreleased Google Glass and Nintendo’s Wii U. The jailbreak of the former also revealed a quite serious security flaw, while the hack of the latter is set to enrage quite a few game developers.
Google has only sent its Glass eyewear to a limited number of people called Explorers. These were probably supposed to give some feedback after using Glass in different settings and with different purposes. Apparently, one of them got carried away and did more than that. Hacker Jay Freeman, who bought the device directly from Google, manage to jailbreak it in less than two hours. Given that he was also having dinner with his friends at the same time, I’d say that this man really knows his stuff.
Upon jailbreaking Google Glass and announcing this on Twitter, of all places, Freeman also pointed out that the hi-tech spectacles have a major security flaw. As Freeman declared, the lack of a PIN or authentication method could allow malevolent hackers to exploit the device, thus seeing and hearing anything the wearer does: “Once the attacker has root on your Glass, they have much more power than if they had access to your phone or even your computer: They have control over a camera and microphone that are attached to your head.”
Freeman also exposed his ethical-hacking side when he declared: ““It’s just kind of sloppy and negligent for Google to release a device to a bunch of early adopters that is missing a basic security function and even has a known bug on it that was disclosed eight months ago. Like someone could be inside of (tech pundit and blogger) Robert Scoble’s glass right now.”
If you’re among that ones who think that Facebook is part of the New World Order plan, you might also start believing that the government wants to walk in your shoes a bit, by knowing (literally) everything that you do.
One a side note, things don’t look that good for Wii U, either. Wiikey (witty name, I must admit, since it sounds just like “wiki”), the group of hackers behind many popupar soft mods for Wii and other video game consoles, have developed a custom USB device called WiikeÜ that enables people to play games and content stored on USB keys.
This move allowed the hackers to reverse “the WiiU drive authentication, disk encryption, file system, and everything else,” so basically they’ve opened the gates for pirated games. The WiikeyÜ (Have you noticed how popular the umlaut has become recently? Wink-wink, Budweiser!) has not yet been released to public, but it will be interesting to find out how the consumers react when they get their mitts on such a device. Will they start playing pirated games right away or will they use it for other purposes? Nintendo’s Wii U sales haven’t been that great lately (please read that as “lower than their lowered expectations”), and allowing users to play pirated content isn’t going to do much good, either. Considering the moves that Microsoft and Sony will do this year, it seems that Nintendo’s future isn’t particularly bright.
If you liked this post, please check how Google Glass might help weight loss and this list of 23 games for Wii U.
