Surface RT Jailbreak

The wonderful people at XDA Developers forum have successfully unlocked the Windows Surface RT.  I have watched the development since Christmas after I got a new Surface.  This week the jailbreak was successful, so I dug in and followed the instructions (here's a blog post by the exploit's author explaining a little more about the hack).  After a couple of tries, and a couple of BSOD's, I have a fully unlocked Surface!

I immediately started downloading the sample ARM compiled apps on the forum to run them.  Since the Surface comes with .NET 4.5 built for ARM, any simple .NET app should work out-of-the-box.  To date, the following applications have been built for ARM and successfully executed on an unlocked Windows Surface RT (links go to the post with a downloadable ARM executable):

• Tight-VNC - Remote administration server/client
• Putty - SSH/Telnet/etc. client
• Bochs - x86 emulator
• 7-zip - powerful zip/unzip utility

Some notes from my own experience if you are going to give this a try:

• Use the new app published by netham45 instead of building app1 for yourself.
• Don't forget to run the runExploit.bat file as administrator, or it will appear to succeed but not actually work.
• When the batch script asks you to press volume down, then enter, make sure to do both quickly, or you will likely experience a BSOD.

I'm excited and looking forward to a polished exploit, and a growing library of ARM-ready apps :)