Through the years, I have spent the majority of my free-time working with many various types of tech. From smart home appliances to bot-nets, I have covered many fields of technology.
The following projects are in chronological order, ranging from 2017 to 2022.
Personal Projects
My First Repair
- iPhone 5s
As a beginner, I had no idea of how I would shape out in the future. I hardly documented my progress and my development as I started to understand more and more about the tech world as a whole.
My first guess was a new battery, it was a lucky guess too. After ordering a replacement on amazon, I was ready to crack open my first device. Low and behold - I had actually repaired my old device, later selling it for $80.
The first repair I had ever attempted was on an old iPhone 5s of mine. Out of complete nowhere, it stopped working. Being the ignorant adolescent I was, I payed no mind to it after buying a hammydown from my parents. As many people may know, when a child with no source of income needs money, they'll do just about anything. In my case that was ripping open and old phone of mine and troubleshooting all the issues.
Learning Buisness
- My Journey with eBay
After my initial success with repairing an iPhone, I decided to attempt buying more off eBay and reselling for double, or triple the price. I was determined to make enough money to buy myself my own computer, from there, my options as a growing tech nerd would increase exponentially.
From spending so much time around them, I got attached to the beauty and design of iPhones. I enjoyed marveling at the development over the years of the different technologies that had came and went. So I decided to buy some legacy devices to fill out my collection.
As soon as my uncommon white iPhone 3g's arrived, I was hooked. Having such a collection was such a treat to me and made me feel like a hot-shot Tech-Youtuber who owned every generation of the device.
Photo Source: gsmarena.com
My introduction into the repair world
My love for the design of the iPhone 4S
Mac Mini -
My Personal Computer.
I had always dreamed of owning my own computer, and now that I had one, I could do whatever I wanted.
I bought the Mac Mini off eBay for $300, and I was mostly set on playing games with it, although I had to convince my parents it would be useful for the upcoming virtual school year
Virtualization
Some of my first advances into the software realm were via virtual machines and live USB drives. I had about every major OS on either a hard drive or a partition on my machine. I love experimenting with the various operating systems and learning about each one
My initial setup whilst moving rooms.
✕ iOS
A different approach
Combining my new skillset and my passion for iOS and Apple devices, I decided to attempt iOS jailbreaking.
Formal Definition - Jailbreak
"Jailbreaking refers to privilege escalation on an Apple device to remove software restrictions imposed by Apple on iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, bridgeOS, and audioOS operating systems. Typically it is done through a series of kernel patches."
My first jailbreak, a brief screen recording of myself marveling at the first "tweak" I had applied to my freshly jailbroken phone.
Captured on iPhone 6 iOS 11.2.1
Formal Definition - Tweak
"Users install these programs for purposes including personalization and customization of the interface by tweaks developed by developers and designers, adding desired features such as access to the root file system and fixing annoyances, and making development work on the device easier by providing access to the filesystem and command-line tools."
Exploitation
My in-depth analysis.
Through my extended research and use of many different jailbreak applications, I am now able to differentiate and explain many differences between the 4 common types of jailbreaks.
Untethered -
An untethered jailbreak is applied to a device to make the device permanently jailbroken. With persistence through reboots and only able to be removed via a complete iTunes restore.
Tethered -
A tethered jailbreak is the opposite of untethered, requiring a connection to a computer to force it to boot. I personally have never spent the time using a tethered jailbreak as many versions of iOS have various better options.
Semi-untethered-
A semi-untethered jailbreak is usually implemented via an application that the user has to sign and install onto their phone themselves. Previously using the depreciated "Cydia impactor", they would link the app to their Apple-ID to allow it to be ran on a device. Currently, AltStore is the most favorable method of installing un-licensed apps onto one's device.
Semi-tethered-
A semi-tethered jailbreak is ran from a computer to exploit the device, in checkra1n's case, it is a bootrom exploit that was present from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone X. Unlike a tethered jailbreak, the device is not rendered useless upon a reboot.
Jailbroken customization & setups
Building a Computer -
My Transition to Windows
Unfortunately, any changes I made would be obvious to any staff who would look at the computer when I turned it in. So I chose to only change one setting that allowed me to boot off external hard drives. This allowed me to use my own hard drive to run my own version of windows and run my own programs and commands whenever I wanted unbeknownst to anyone if they were to look at the system settings.. I chose to use a microSSD to store my personal OS on due to its small form factor, making the computer near-indistinguishable from anyone else's.
Playing games with friends from within my own operating system
Working with Desktop Computers
After my success with the laptop, I had decided that I wanted a powerful, desktop computer that I could use to run resource-intensive programs and games. Only question being, where to buy one.
After buying this beater PC from a buddy for 53$ (negotiating happened), I fixed it up a bit with some new (old) ram and a better (junk) graphics card. Bringing the specs up to -
1 TB HDD boot drive
16 GB DDR3 RAM
1050 ti GPU
That's when I realized if I wanted a good PC, I'd have to do it myself
After using the beater PC for a few weeks, I had decided to sell it to a different friend for 120$ - thus losing about $30. My new mission was to save up ~$600 to build a personal computer with the perfect specs for me.
After setting my priorities on acquiring a useable windows machine, I turned towards my school-issued laptop. Due to all the restrictions the county had put in place to prevent unauthorized programs to run on their machines, I wasn't able to get much luck exploiting devices via such a locked down machine. I had tried every method to do what I wanted including but not limited to- command prompt commands, batch files, bypasses, user privilege elevation. Nothing was working.
On the specific model of laptop (Dell Latitude 3300) I was able to press F2 to get into the system BIOS and poke around, of course I was not able to change anything because they had set a password. Cracking it was out of the option so I looked into hardware. After Finding the BIOS's watch battery inside the laptop I chose to not alter any computer hardware as to protect myself against discipline. That is when I had the idea to use a factory-issued passcode to enter the BIOS. After searching the internet archives for old files on the laptop, to my amazement, the factory password worked and I was able to manipulate the BIOS settings.
