How To Install ANDROID on an iPhone?

There's a longstanding idea that if you buy something, you should be able to use it however you see fit, within reason, of course, but Apple is notorious for making it very difficult to install alternative operating systems on its iPhones, even if they've been paid off in full and are not part of a carrier financing program.

Now, although usage restrictions are familiar for software where the idea is that you pay for a license to use the software, rather than the right to do whatever you want with the source code, this doesn't make as much sense in the context of hardware, I mean, the physical device may be protected by patents, but you still own the actual silicon and glass that makes up your iPhone, but one team of developers recently found a way to get Android installed on iPhones.

The system goes by the name Project Sandcastle, and it uses a specific jailbreak, which you can learn more about up here, to bypass Apple's restrictions and get Android up and running at least to an extent, but how exactly did the team at Corellium, a cybersecurity startup, pull this off?
One of the big keys is that they built a virtualized version of the iPhone that runs iOS on a Corellium-built virtual machine, in fact, because Corellium sells this iPhone VM, they're currently embroiled in a legal battle with Apple.

Their in-house virtual machine allowed them to test exploits without running the risk of bricking one expensive iPhone after another, as we're pulling off the actual feat of running Android on an iPhone, the team had to write a number of custom drivers, including for NVMe support, although Android is known for working on a wide variety of hardware, there weren't drivers available that could link an operating system other than iOS with the hardware inside an iPhone.

Corellium also had to adjust how Android handles memory as the iPhone processor family handles data in different sized pages than what you would see in an Android phone, additionally, it turned out that iOS initializes multiple processor cores, which all modern iPhones contain, differently than Android which caused further complexity, but these setbacks, there is now a working beta of Sandcastle that you can install on your iPhone after using the checkra1n exploit to jailbreak it.

This particular jailbreak takes advantage of a security flaw in the iPhone's bootrom, which is the first thing that runs when you power up the device, the flaw is a hardware level issue, so it's been described as unpatchable until Apple significantly changes their hardware design, but although getting Android to run on an iPhone was definitely an impressive and cool feat, there are unsurprisingly significant caveats.

Right now, the only devices that can run Project Sandcastle are the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, as well as seventh gen iPod Touch, and once you get it up and running, don't expect every Android feature to work the way that it would on a true Android phone, notably, there's currently no support for audio, cellular connectivity, Bluetooth, or the camera, and don't expect GPU support for gaming either, however, multitouch, USB, and WiFi all work.

So if you're interested in simply using Android to connect to the internet on an iPhone and browse lttstore.com, go ahead and give it a shot. however, do take note that because of the nature of how checkra1n works, it disappears whenever you restart your device, so you shouldn't be relying on Project Sandcastle, if this wasn't already clear, as a longterm OS for an iPhone that you use as a daily driver, even if you could put up with the limited functionality.

But given the relatively short length of time that the Android port took to develop into a functional beta, could we see an unsanctioned yet fully functional Android running on an iPhone in the future?

Top 10 GENIUS KIDS: Invented Amazing Things

Top 10 GENIUS KIDS

Most of the things we use in everyday life were invented by adults but you'd be surprised how many products have been invented by children genius children with incredible minds here are the top 10 unbelievable child inventions number.

10 Snowmobile

If you're trying to get somewhere in the snow there's only one type of vehicle you'll want to use to get there quickly and have fun while you're doing it a snowmobile they become a vital way to keep communities connected in colder regions but amazingly this wasn't the idea of a seasoned inventor the first snowmobile was created by a 15 year old boy Joseph Armand Bombardier was interested in mechanics and in 1922 he proudly showed his parents his invention that he had made by mounting engine from a Ford Model T unto forerunners and attached a handmade propeller to the back in trials this enables him to travel half a mile across the snow before it stopped and became somewhat of a life passion of his to perfect design in 1959 Bombardier then 52 years old released the ski-doo which was the world's first superlight model of a snowmobile.

9 Braille

In a world war communication and information is presented in ways that are so reliant on the ability to see and hear it can be frustratingly difficult for those with impairments to interact the way they should be able to Louis Braille learned this the hard way when at the age of three he contracted an eye infection that would leave him without sight for the rest of his life the next nine years he struggled to read by tracing his finger around the outline of raised letters on specialized paper and soon realized that individual letters were quite difficult to differentiate through this method and it was often virtually impossible to identify specific words by the time he had turned 12 he was given the opportunity to learn a method of silent communication that had been developed by the French military but still this proved to be far more complicated than he thought it should be he was left with only one option he created his own way of writing which consisted of raised bumps on paper that the tips of the fingers can easily identify this method became known as Braille and is still used worldwide to this day having made life so much easier for people limited site it's incredible to think it was invented by a child.

8 Calculator

Nowadays if you need to make a quick calculation you only need to reach for your smartphone to gain access to a powerful computer things used to be far more complicated than that, it might surprise you to know though that the first mechanical calculators were actually introduced in the mid 17th century and even more incredible was the fact that they were designed by a child prodigy Blaise Pascal he had been educated by his father who was a local tax collector and turned his interests of physics at a very young age his studied required the use of advanced mathematics and he found it tedious to calculate everything on paper so set his mind on finding a quicker solution he spent three years of his latter teen years trying to perfect his idea after building 50 prototypes he finally made something that worked which is now known as a Pascal calculator this invention was at the forefront of automation and as well as being the first mechanical calculator is arguably one of the earliest types of computer to ever be built so much of the tech we rely on in modern life can be traced back to this making Pascal one of the most influential inventors to have ever lived.

7 Christmas Lights

Every year when Christmas comes around the world is lit up in a blaze of light when people decorate their trees houses and buildings with countless colorful bulbs this wasn't always the way things were done though and only started happening in the 20th century for then people would decorate their trees with candles and even though they involved having open flames on dry trees they were seen as being far safer than the mysterious electrical methods of creating light that were being introduced at the turn of the century eventually though people began to start trusting electric lights but they were still extremely expensive in 1917 however supposedly after a fire in New York that have been caused by candles on a Christmas tree fifteen-year-old Albert sadaqa saw an opportunity and developed some novelty lights from his parents company for use on trees soon there was more demand that he could cope with and by 1925 he and several other companies combined to form the Noma Electric Company and dominate a market for decades to come.

6 Walking Battery

We've all been there it's been a long day out and you need to make a call but your phone's batteries somehow completely drain there aren't always powerpoints nearby and not everyone's prepared enough to have a backup battery with them wherever they go but in 2014 a 15 year old child genius revealed his solution to this problem to the world angelou casimiro from the philippines had designed a device that's worn around the ankle and can generate an electrical charge he'd realized that the average person takes 7,000 steps per day and it seemed like a use of energy that could be harnessed for the technology that we take around with us well it doesn't produce enough to keep a device like a phone charged constantly it gives enough extra juice to be able to power it up to make that important call or message in tests he was able to generate enough to use a phone for ten minutes after playing basketball for two hours but it's not just phones that will benefit from this his main aim was to provide lighting to poor rural communities with no mains access the device was showcased at the Google science fair in 2014 and since then he's gone on to develop a series of further devices making him one of the most prolific child inventors of the time we are constantly.

5 Baby Hot Seat

Despite every parent's best intentions it's a fact of life that sometimes things can be forgotten and technology can be instrumental in making everyone's lives easier having begun inventing at the age of 11 Alyssa Chavez had her tragic stories of children dying after being left in hot cars and decided to do something about it by her mid-teens she had developed a new product called the baby hot seat with the intent to make tragedies like these a thing of the past the idea behind it is simple but deployed in an incredibly easy to use way she began exploring different alarm technologies that were available and adapted them for this purpose the pressure-sensitive device is placed in the child seat in a car and is connected to the smartphone of the adult responsible for them if the child is left in the car when it's locked the alarm will trigger to remind the adult that they left infant behind she was granted the patent on her design at the age of 17 which made her the youngest latina patent holder in the US and has given her the opportunity to continue developing this product and to explore other ideas in the range.

4 Electric Television

Virtually every home in the US has a television and many have more than just one when you look at them you can see how much technological know-how has gone into their design likely the result of rooms of engineers and designers deciding on how best to build them but amazingly the first ever electronic TV was created by a child Philo Farnsworth has been fascinated with electronics ever since he first had a long-distance phone call with a relative despite living in a home without electricity until the age of 14 he was at high school when he began developing a means of transmitting images via radio waves in the same way as audio could be while several other inventors around the world had invented crude means of image generation on a screen and demonstrated a television based on rotating discs Farnsworth's invention which he showed to the world in 1927 was the first recognizable ancestor to the sets that we use today it used scanning electrons to project an image onto a screen and the first image he transmitted on two it was a line according to the stories from the time an investor had asked him when they'd see dollars on the thing at which point he turned to the camera of the image of a dollar sign but it wouldn't be too long until they all benefited from the invention just 12 years later RCA paid to use his patents and were the first company to sell TV sets across the u.s.

3 Iaid

Most inventions that solve a problem are created by people who directly experienced that problem for themselves there's something about a child's incredible capability for compassion towards others that led to the Iaid being developed when Alex Dean's was 12 years old he saw a visually impaired woman struggling to cross a busy street on her own he became sure that he would be able to design something to help even though he didn't immediately know what and spent his free time over the next three years working on the problem his solution was a product that tries to imitate a bats ability of echolocation and uses ultrasonic sensors to scan the surroundings with four sensors attached to a belt a signal is sent to a joystick that is used to inform the user of the location of obstacles in 2015 he won a design prize because of this invention but he's not done yet he plans to keep refining it and is determined to use everything that he's learned to create something that has far more use than the current version does.

2 Superman

In 1932 geeky 16 year old students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster met each other for the first time and knew that they were destined for great things together little did they know at this time that they were about to invent one of the most influential characters in literary history that would spearhead an entire genre of fiction for decades to come they had created a number of characters that were featured in new fun and Detective Comics but they struggled to find a place for their favorite creation an alien that wore blue and red clothes had super-strength and could fly they had been developing their Superman for several years before he finally made his first appearance in Action Comics number one and the rest was history there's a dark side to this story however because the two were only paid 130 dollars for the rights to the character that would go on to generate billions following a dispute with the publisher they weren't even credited as having created him and it was only after a public campaign during the release of the first Hollywood movie at their place in comic book history was rightfully acknowledged.

1 Swimming Flippers

While we're definitely designed for moving across land humans aren't too bad at swimming through water too we definitely aren't as fast as animals that are adapted for that environment though and it was from looking at fish and other marine life that a young Benjamin Franklin came upon the idea of swimming flippers he realized that he could travel through the water faster if he had a larger surface area to push with and his first design was a handheld fin made from oval wooden planks that had holes in the middle for his hands the designs have of course come on leaps and bounds since these first prototypes but it shows how one of history's most successful inventors was already analyzing the world around him and creating life enhancing designs at an impressively young age. 

Stop Using Zoom: Is Zoom Getting Banned

As difficult as isolation and social distancing have been for many of us, imagine how much more unpleasant things would be without the tech that keeps us all connected, and perhaps nothing has exploded in popularity recently as much as Zoom, the teleconferencing and video chat software that has seen huge levels of adoption worldwide since the start of the COVID pandemic.

But now the app is being banned left and right, everyone from companies like Google and SpaceX, to agencies like NASA and the Australian military to the entire government of Taiwan has forbidden their people from using Zoom. But why?

Well there have been a number of well-publicized security problems with Zoom, which is a little strange considering that we don't really worry all that much about having our video calls on other platforms being broken into, I mean, when's the last time you worried someone was gonna hack into your call on a platform like Skype, Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger?
Well, it turns out Zoom has actually had security issues for a while, but many of them are just now coming to light due to its recent burst in popularity.

Back in summer 2019, there was a widespread security flaw on Mac systems where Zoom's installer would effectively turn your computer into a server without telling you which made it much easier for a stranger to add themselves to your conference and look through your webcam with just one errant click, The feature was put in place to make it easier to jump into meetings without additional clicks because the web server feature accepted connections that normal browsers wouldn't, I mean, we all trade security for convenience everyday, but that one went a little too far, don't ya think?

Apple actually ended up issuing a Mac OS patch to fix the problem, but since then, a number of other issues have been discovered, one was a relatively easy way to bypass email confirmation and gain access to any account where the email address was known simply by using the same ID tag in the sign up page's URL to access the confirmation page without ever having actually had access to the email account.

No fancy hacking skills needed, and because of how Zoom's permissions work, a simple attack like this could actually allow an outsider to access all accounts associated with a domain if the compromised account is from a company rather than an individual. Is anybody using Zoom?

Although that issue has been fixed, Zoom's encryption is still rather weak. In early April of 2020, researchers discovered that the encryption Zoom used at the time was actually AES-128, not the advertised AES-256, which is much more secure. Perhaps a larger issue for most people though is how easy it is to find Zoom meetings without even breaking any encryption.

Attackers have had success rapidly trying random ID's until they found some that were active, making it simple for them to break into meetings and sometimes transmit disruptive or offensive audio and video, a practice dubbed Zoom bombing, So it's like chat roulette, but at the office. And to top it all off, Zoom has been routing lots of traffic through servers in China, and unlike other countries which have strong privacy protections for user data, China's government doesn't need a warrant to see what's happening on servers located inside the country at any given time, raising fears from the privacy conscious, and if that's not enough, Zoom is also facing issues that aren't strictly its fault.

Zoom's installer has been a favorite target of hackers who are modifying it with malware and then releasing it back out into the wild. And because so many people are quickly downloading and signing up for Zoom using existing email and password combos involved in previous data breaches, it hasn't been tough for attackers to steal accounts.

Over half a million credentials are up for sale on the dark web at the time we wrote this topic, so what can you do if you're using Zoom and you can't convince your friends or organization to move to a different platform?

Well the easiest form of risk mitigation is to simply slap a password on your Zoom meetings, which will effectively stop Zoom bombing attacks, and there's also an option to lock meetings after everyone has joined so no unauthorized participants can butt it. If you don't have Zoom yet and you need to install it, one pro tip is to make sure that you're only installing it from Zoom's official website, not from some other source that could be giving you a compromised installer.

Of course, with so much public scrutiny, Zoom is attempting to fix some of these issues, and they won't be rolling out any new features for the next couple of months so that their developers can focus on security and privacy patches.

The Challenges of Landing Humans on Mars

The red planet Earth's neighbor and the destination of NASA's most ambitious mission to date but this expedition will be harder than we ever thought possible it hurts to think of how hard it is at the farthest a human being has ever been from the earth, we got to take every precaution as NASA's astronauts arrive at Mars, they'll face a huge obstacle landing on the planet is a daunting task in the past Mars hasn't always rolled out the welcome mat Mars is kind of like a graveyard for spacecraft it's actually really hard to send something from Earth and land it on Mars.

This is how the European Space Agency hoped its $250,000,000 skia Pirelli Lander would touchdown in 2016 but the Landers system's got it wrong the parachute detached early sending the craft into freefall for 33 seconds skia Pirelli smashed into the surface at 335 miles an hour leaving a deep black scar on the Martian landscape it turns out that Mars is actually a particularly difficult planet to land on even humanity's most brilliant engineers we've got about a 50% success rate when it comes to landing on Mars.

The red planet is littered with dead spacecraft that didn't stick the landing and for NASA's first crewed - sent to Mars the space agency must learn from these mistakes but as the crew hurdles toward.

the surface they're battling the same problem as all the Landers that failed before the Martian atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth's, so it can't provide the drag needed to slow a spacecraft down, so it's not like the earth where you can have these big giant parachutes that gently glide you down to the surface you can use some of the air, but it's hard the Red Planet's thin atmosphere is a problem that's been billions of years in the making Mars doesn't have a large atmosphere because it's constantly being peeled away due to the lack of protection of a magnetic field the solar wind can strip away an atmosphere on earth a liquid metal core creates a magnetic field which shields the planet and helps maintain the atmosphere.

Mars is different 4.5 billion years ago Mars and Earth formed from dust and gas in space Mars forms we're building materials were scarce its growth was stunted so Mars is much smaller than the earth it's a factor of 10 smaller than the earth and that factor of 10 in mass is important all of that extra mass allows the inside of the earth to stay warm and to have a core that's rotating which generates a magnetic field 4 billion years ago the churning heart of Mars started to cool and solidify with no hot core there's no magnetic field being generated all of the high velocity charge particles coming from the Sun pick away at the atmosphere and slowly tear it away.

We know it's losing atmosphere every second due to the solar wind so you know bye-bye atmosphere, with little Martian atmosphere to work with NASA had to be creative to get it screwless Landers to the Martian surface in 2012 the Revolutionary sky crane landed the Curiosity rover using parachutes and retrorockets previous missions have used both a parachute and something else like a bouncy ball inflated around the spacecraft I don't think a human crew is gonna be too pleased if they're going to be bouncing under the surface and an airbag rolling to a stop right to land people on Mars NASA will need some new tricks the 2020 Rover will overcome the challenge with the advanced supersonic parachute inflation research experiment aspire it will rapidly slow down the craft with the force of an airplane jet engine.

This is fine for the rover it's actually going to work no problem but it's not going to work for people a human Lander will weigh far more than the two thousand three hundred pound Rover not even supersonic parachutes could land two crews safely on Mars NASA will need a new plan one idea is to use the thin Martian atmosphere in a unique way there's an idea of coming in really fast getting to the thick part of the atmosphere and then going horizontal to the ground and gliding and losing your momentum that way.

As the astronauts descend they tilt the nose of the Lander towards the Martian surface aiming for the thickest part of the atmosphere close to the ground then they pull up at the last second using friction from the atmosphere to slow the crowd descent engines switch on for the final touchdown is this a crazy idea I mean yeah it's it's a little bit weird I don't know if we'd really think about it doing something like this but I mean you've got to think outside the box sometimes right now NASA's plans for landing a craft on Mars are still on the drawing board but even if they can get astronauts on to the surface the thin atmosphere isn't done with them yet it causes swirling dust storms that cover the planet's entire surface Mars doesn't just have dust devils it has dust hill and these towering clouds have killed before.