Grant H

OTAChecker Track, download, and inspect Android over-the-air (OTA) updates with just a device's fingerprint. Currently tracking 1798 OTAs (1.18 TB) across 345 devices.

A database of OTA updates I made
otachecker.com

Congratulations!!

Having a reverse engineering research focused conference on the US east coast is what we've been missing! Shout out to @psifertex.bsky.social, @peterlafosse.bsky.social , and the rest of the Vector 35 team for pulling this off. 💪

Had an excellent time at @re-verse.io. The people, the talks, the food and venue were all 💯

I was particularly happy to see friends from Europe make it across the pond, plus I got to reconnect with current and former students from UCF and UF.

Florida Man has returned for @re-verse.io. See you all there!

Looking forward to share our latest research on hostile SIMs and interposers at the upcoming RE//verse conference!

I'll be at the final ShmooCon 💚! If you're around, come find me, and let's chat about basebands, emulation, Android, and sailing. ⛵

I'll also be at DistrictCon and RE//verse in Orlando.

And that doesn't even cover all the stuff I've learned at $WORK!

So, how do you approach side projects and balance your time between work, them, and everything else?

I'm looking forward to 2025 being the year I finish more projects! 🥂

But despite a lack of public artifacts, I learned a ton, mostly about JavaScript and modern CSS (I started in the XHTML days 👴), but also Swift, protobuf and Java reverse engineering, extending pycrate, search indexing, Python Async, and SvelteKit. 6/

Imaginary users in my head are likely not even close to real users. That's why getting to even just a beta release of projects is crucial for me to level-set. 5/

I love the craft for the craft's sake but it's not particularly conducive for productivity.

Additionally, I want to work on things me and others would want to use. This makes it even more challenging to pick and release projects as I don't know what people will think. 4/

Unfortunately that means only FlagFinder is finished. This year I want to finish what I've started so I can freely work on new side projects. For me, getting things over the finish line is difficult due to my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to software. 3/

FlagFinder to search flags by appearance (colors, features, shapes), my first use of ChatGPT APIs, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. DB, a SvelteKit based game item viewer, and finally a tool to download Android OTA chains from Google APIs.

My definition of finished is "released to the public" 2/

2025 is the year I want to finish more projects.
2024 was also the year I wanted to finish more projects.

It's not easy, so how did I do in 2024? I worked on an iOS app to lookup diplomatic license plates, an ASN.1 grammar fuzzer and webapp, and ... 1/