Google's gift to attendees of its I/O conference last week was the hot new HTC EVO 4G cellphone. One of the lucky giftees was developer Matthew Mastracci, who showed his gratitude by teaming up with two friends and hacking the hell out of the poor little EVO.

A few hours later and the team had successfully rooted the phone, and "managed to get the standard su tool installed." This means that they had root, or super-user access to the phone and its file system. This lets you do anything you like to it. Here's the video:

What does this mean for security? Not much. If you have physical access and a little time, you can hack pretty much any device. More interesting is the reminder that the new wave of smartphones - Android and iPhone - both use variants of the UNIX operating system under the hood, first developed way back in 1969. That these modern pocket miracles are running on an OS invented before I was born still kind of blows my mind.

Root on an HTC EVO 4G! [Grack]

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