Slashdot Mirror
Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod
An anonymous reader writes with some discouraging news for hack-oriented purchasers of the new Droid X phone: "If the eFuse fails to verify [the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version], then the eFuse receives a command to 'blow the fuse' or 'trip the fuse.' This results in the booting process becoming corrupted, followed by a permanent bricking of the phone. This FailSafe is activated anytime the bootloader is tampered with or any of the above three parts of the phone has been tampered with."
Does your phone self destruct if you mod it? Where others don't... Droid does!
Seriously, I can understand your warranty being voided if you do unapproved modifications to a device, but designing the device so it blows up if you try to modify it is just wrong.
Why do hardware companies think they should have the right to own the device forever? Why should I buy a device that has a time bomb built in that may trip if the official software gets corrupted due to a bug?
The whole thing reeks. I'm done with Motorola. What is the point of this exactly? What does Motorola lose by you running a custom ROM? New phone sales when they decide after a year not to provide any Android updates?
In this case it's more a case of "Motorola Evil". Google provides the OS but the manufacturer still integrates it into the device.
My next upgrades isn't until December, but I can already say that Droid X is off the table. Hopefully HTC will have out something new and shiny by then. If not, I'll still go for the Incredible over the X. I've had nothing but trouble from Motorola phones anyways.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Termite? Methinks maybe thermite?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If I purchase the phone outright, wouldn't this be willful destruction of property on Motorola's part? Does a company have the right to destroy a purchased product - after the sale - if the consumer doesn't use it in a prescribed manner?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Ah... I guess I won't be buying a DroidX then. Sad, really... I was looking forward to getting one when the contract was up on my Droid.
And I've been very happy with my Droid. Now, one wonders...was this done to suit Verizon or if it was on Moto's own thinking that it was done. I might not have modded my phone when I got it, but doing things like this are a real put-off. I bought the phone, it's mine to do with as I see fit- and putting in things like this take that away from me. It turns it into Motorola's device or Verizon's device and I'm just renting it. Sorry, you SOLD me a phone guys and if you're concerned about "user experience" or "risks to the network" design the damn phone to not need to be concerned about EITHER- and anything else is lying to the customer outright.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
eFUSE is a chip technology developed by IBM is a special type of chip where the code isn't completely static- based on the operation of the device, an eFUSE can blow itself. This can reroute the logic in a variety of ways, or be used as a self destruct mechanism.
It's reversible, but only by Motorola directly via JTAG. They have the custom code needed to flash the chip back to its original state.
Sure they will... But I don't appreciate having them try to transform it more into a rental of the device than a sale- and then framing it in as a sale. I'm sure there's other people that'll view it the same way as I.
Sadly, I'm fairly sure Verizon asked Moto to do this- they always seem to find a way to miss the point and try to assert "control" over everything.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Because of this setup--isn't it entirely possible that some sort of malware can be created to actually attempt to brick the phone by triggering efuse?
A hardware company actually put a self-destruct mechanism in the phone when you change the software.
A. This will get tripped accidentally, even for naive users, and will cost owners money to fix.
B. This violates the idea of ownership of the device. Motorola figures that they're licensing you parts, not selling. For an "open" OS, this is insane.
C. Once you get around it, unless you can destroy the code, you still have that thing hanging around. A mistake or bad combination later on could trip it -- there's no reason to have to put up with walking through a minefield.
All this translates to "Spread the news, blacklist the phone, send a message to Motorola." Because if this goes on as a "who cares" thing, all Motorola Android phones will have it in future and other companies will follow suit.
This needs to be a black eye for Motorola, they need to notice that, and they need to quickly backpedal.
This is just another nail in the coffin for Motorola, who becomes more and more irrelevant every year, being pushed out of the market on both sides by Apple and HTC.
HTC makes the most robust and moddable phones on the planet, and do not try to stop the modding in any way - in fact one may say they passively encourage it.
This post is coming from someone who owns a 4 year old HTC Vogue that came shipped with Windows mobile 6.0, but thanks to the modders, has been upgraded to 6.1 and 6.5, and more recently ove rthe past 3 months, has been running a fully working version of Android that is lightning fast. All on 4 year old hardware.
This is what can be done when you don't shut out your customers - I am an HTC purchaser for life now.
I did follow the TFA to the origin of the story (MyDroidWorld forum), and I still don't see any code, captured data or even a photo of the said eFuse chip inside the DroidX. I understand that the original poster appears to be a reputable hacker, but come on, what kind of real reporting is this? Can anyone else verify these claims? More information needed, thank you very much whoever posts it, because if true, this is an outrage.
Compared to the eFuse, their new iFuse just works, which makes for an infinitely superior bricking experience.
There's also another OS that is based upon open source components from Mach, FreeBSD, GNU and KDE which allows me to install whatever I want without having to jailbreak, root, break bootloaders, etc...Clicky
Move along.
In reality, the main appeal of Android operating systems is that they give phone manufacturers a serious competitor to Apple and they don't have to pay Microsoft. Not to mention, they probably don't care for Windows Mobile.
The problem is that what made the Android OS a serious competitor to Apple was that it wasn't locked. If a phone running Android is locked as tight as an Iphone, I may as well get the Iphone and the "coolness" of owning an Apple product.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"Written in JTAG" implies a program written in a language called JTAG.
The problem is that JTAG is a standardized electrical communications protocol used to support debugging of ICs, and often also used to program them.
Nothing can be "written in JTAG" because it isn't a programming language. I question whether the poster on that forum has any clue what's really going on. So far the only evidence of this is one forum post that has very little detail and has some glaring technical/grammatical errors (see above). I'll believe it when I see a more in-depth analysis.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
To be fair, OS X doesn't implode if you recompile the bootloader, which is open source under Darwin. You can either download apps for OS X (many free), make your own using Apple-supplied tools (XCode), third-party paid tools (why?), or use free-as-in-speech-and-beer OSS tools.
This can be done in any combination of interfaces, from CLI and X11 to Cocoa and Carbon.
None of this, or even (to make an accurate analogy) installing Windows or Linux on your Mac, is going to make the Mac go boom. In fact, if you buy the system and install the exact same Linux distro as you did on your IBM or Compaq... it'd work.
Someone will find a way around this very quickly
It's not even clear if this information is real. TFA links to a forum post which doesn't seem to actually contain a source of the information (the OP states it's a mix of "hard information" and "conjecture"). Said forum post then links to the eFUSE wikipedia article, which lists Droid X as having an implementation of eFUSE. However, if you look at the Droid X wikipedia page linked to from there, you'll see the original mobilecrunch.com is what is cited for the eFUSE inclusion bit.
I'm not saying there is something fishy going on, but this could easily not be true.
I hope Motorola get's a nice class-action suit out of this.
Imagine a nice little virus, designed to trigger the 'self-destruct' and some innocent users getting infected.
Markus
Apparently, this is not the Droid you're looking for.
Except for the Droid Eris and Droid Incredible, which are HTC.
So a guy [p3droid] few know posts a speculative comment
and /. takes it as fact? At least p3droid has the courtesy to warn his readers what a conjecture is and that's all his post is.
Where's you god now, Googlebots? WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?
Come over to the iSide, it's shiny!
I've heard that Cyanogen and other groups that do this sort of technical work on Android phones have sworn off the Droid X because options that are equally good as phones and won't make getting a custom ROM on a process that will destroy several phones and be risky every time someone flashes it themselves exist.
This is not the FCC's doing, this is Verizon's. The FCC has no laws against having an open phone. Please put the blame where it belongs!
is that Verizon will be the first one out of the gate with Block C 700MHz LTE service -- which will put them on the spot: they are *required by the terms of the license* -- thanks, Google -- to allow any device that meets their published tech specs to connect to that network.
So if the do this to their handsets for LTE700, then they'll just lose sales *directly*.
Fun to watch massive corporations try to turn on a dime.
Microsoft couldn't do it.
Betcha Verizon can't either.
If that were in true in any way, shape, and form, then every other vendor would be doing the same. Only Motorola is taking this stance.
Which is isolated from the Android environment via serial or USB connection. This lockdown has -nothing- to do with the 3G baseband, which runs on its own processor with its own memory and storage.
This is Motorola's doing, as HTC's phones have similar security features in the CPU (bootloader encryption is enforced by TrustZone) and yet they don't use it.
Go back a couple years and you can find papers from Motorola discussing how to lock down the user environment against modification. They're all about locking users out of their property.
That opinion... You're holding it wrong.
Baseband firmware's separate from Android. Nobody else locks it down like that, and if Moto was so worried about fiddling with the baseband, then burn it into an non-writable ROM chip. The eFuse is watching for any modifications to the OS Kernel and Bootloader, the "computer bits."
eFUSE can blow itself.
Lucky eFUSE!
Tom Geller
I would like to take this moment to give a shout out to T-Mobile, which actually offers a bring your own phone plan for less than the subsidize your phone plan.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
In fact the "eFUSE" feature is present in a staggeringly common component in many different Android (and other...) devices, so the presence of an eFUSE is not in any way demonstrative of the functionality claimed.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Droid, DroidX, Droid2 and others -- they all have this efuse, it's nothing new. Perhaps rather than making assumptions based on the presence of a device, someone could do some actual research to find out if this is really a concern? Just because the chip is present does not mean it's configured to brick the phone - it certainly hasn't done so in other Android devices using it.
I've worked with security systems and I can definitely say that the guy who wrote that post doesn't know what he's talking about. I've hever heard of "resettable" eFUSEs. He keeps talking about eFUSEs as if they had some kind of power to control or supervise the boot procedure, which is bollocks - eFUSEs are storage elements, you need some kind of boot ROM to make use of the data and make decisions. And you don't "write programs in JTAG". Until someone writes something technically coherent about this issue, I'd take all of this with a huge grain of salt.
eFUSEs can indeed be used for this kind of self-destruct-on-tamper behavior, but honestly I would be very surprised if it were actually implemented this way on a retail handset. Deliberately designing brickage into a unit is just a bad idea overall (except for security devices, e.g. HSMs and smartcards).
In past days this would be properly seen as a hardware quirk to be worked around. Like a buggy SCSI controller which trashes your disks when you hit it with an obscure command sequence. You don't throw up your hands, foam at the mouth, and threaten the manufacturer! You figure out what you need to do to avoid the undesirable behavior.
My God, you modder people are turning into a bunch of pussies and whiners. THE WHOLE POINT OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING is to have fun and push the hardware into areas it was not meant to go. In this case, the manufacturers have laid a few things in your path to make life interesting. Take it as a challenge, as we've always done in the past, rather than acting like a whiny bitch. My God, the hacker spirit is well and truly dead.
"Tivoization"
Tivo
GPL v3, which, if it had been the license of Android instead of the Apache License, might have prevented this travesty.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here!
In case you hadn't noticed, this is a technology site where a large number of people are dedicated to "fucking with stupid shit" on a regular basis. So talking about modding your phone is kind of right up the proverbial alley here...
"But this one goes to 11!"
If I paid for the hardware then it's mine, I own it, in spite of what big telcom wants you to think.
I was actually considering getting this phone, I guess they just lost a customer.
^^vv<><>BA