Someone mentioned to me that yesterday’s root for the Motorola XYBoard appeared to not work on the Xoom Family Edition (FE), so I took a look. What I found was a set of vulnerabilities so egregious that it’s hard to not draw comparisons to a deliberate backdoor.

Yesterday, I tried a little experiment in releasing a root exploit for the Motorola Droid 4. I set up a bounty, where the first $200 would go towards me buying myself a Droid 4 in exchange for the work I’ve done developing the exploit, and the remaining bounty money would go directly to the American Red Cross. I thought this would be a good arrangement for everyone: users get a shiny root exploit for a few bucks, I get a new phone in payment, and money gets donated to charity. Everybody wins.

After getting a taste of rooting tablets with the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet, I decided to turn my attention to the Sony Tablet S. It turned out to be a tough device to root.