People want to own their phones. Try as they might to frustrate their customers, networks and manufacturers are fighting a losing battle against the hacking community. The latest victory is an enormous one: the HTC Vision, better known as the T-Mobile G2 and Desire Z has finally been defeated. That pesky eMMC chip locking up the /system of the G2 has been circumvented, and full, glorious, permanent root has been attained:

12:04 < scotty2> -rw-rw-rw- root root 0 2010-11-09 03:00 test

Yep, that's full read and write permissions there, and it's permanent too. The #g2root channel has had an idea of the method to use for almost a month now, but have only just finalized the solution. Apparently the hack is actually a lot simpler than people were expecting... but of course, in a case such as this, the term "simple" takes on a relative scale. If you're feeling clever, feel free to explain the full technicalities of the hack in the comments. Full logs are available at the source with the fun starting at "hahahahahha", from scotty2, the hero of the day. Credit must also be given to tmzt_dg2root, IntuitiveNipple, wootty and plenty of others.

Right now the permanent root method is not the most user-friendly, but it should only be a matter of days before there is a permanent root for the rest of us.

UPDATE: Paul O'Brien has flashed a custom recovery to his Desire Z with S-OFF, enabling writing to the /system partition and resizing of other partitions ( Paul O'Brien has flashed a custom recovery to his Desire Z with S-OFF, enabling writing to the /system partition and resizing of other partitions ( Pic ). UPDATE 2: unforgiven512 has posted a guide to permanently rooting the G2 on XDA-Developers (Link: proceed with caution).

Source: #g2root via AndroidSPIN