What are the chances...

[silverback]

Of being able to root when lollipop hits? Will there be a security loophole that will allow those of us with old devices that missed our opportunity?

I know its all speculation, but I am hopeful.

 

[Rukbat]

Will there be? Almost certainly. The last hole-proof operating system written was EgyptOS and it was chiseled on stones.

Will someone find it in a few months? Are those the odds you're looking for? Beware falling Martians - the odds are better. Finding a hole to use to root any particular ROM makes climbing Mt. Everest not much more difficult than sleeping. There are tens of thousands of lines of code and one single typo may be the way in. After you study the first few hundred lines, they all begin to look the same - a gray blur. So you study a function at a time, for a few days. Thousands of functions. And if you know Linux really well, you know what to skip because it has nothing you can use. But it's still not a weekend's work. Or a 70 hour week's work. It's either walking from New York to Los Angeles on one toe (IOW, slow painful plodding), or a stroke of luck.

I've been writing code, including operating systems, for 40 years, and still stand in awe of people like Geohot and Hashcode.

 

[YAYTech]

Seems like they work to lock down Android more with each update. It's also not necessarily just a question of whether someone will figure out how to root lollipop, but if they will figure it out and have it be applicable to a specific device. I would expect it to take quite a while, and the time may not get out into figuring it out on older devices. Only time will tell.

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