The Data To Remove Meta From Your Occulus Quest VR Headset

Using Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities For Good … And Fun 

The Occulus was once to be a more or less open source VR headset until Meta got it’s grubby paws onto it and it went from Kickstarter to Facebook.  Suddenly the new Occulus Quest was not just closed source but now tied to your Facebook account.  There was a brief grace period where you were still allowed to use the hardware you purchased without needing a Facebook account but that quickly ended and unless you were willing to accept Zuckerberg into your life your Quest VR headset became more or less useless.

Fast forward to today and there is now a way to leverage a number of unpatched vulnerabilities present on the original Occulus Quest to permanently divorce it from Meta, and it is very simple to do.  Ars Technica has a link to a web interface which will do everything for you, no need to download anything at all.  This is a little scary as it demonstrates the Quest is rather insecure, but in this case the ease with which you can hack the headset works in your favour.

This will completely reset the Quest, so nothing will be left linking it to the mothership and it will also let you sideload apps without needing a Meta Developer account.  There are a few other things you can try out but if you have a second generation Quest you are probably out of luck since the developer of this exploit has found that the second generation is more likely to become a brick than accept its freedom.