On May 22, 2008, at 11:36 AM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > On 22.05.2008 17:01, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >> On 5/22/08, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel. >> [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>>> h) hardware-protected RTC (bitfrost desiderata) >>> I'd be very interested in the reasons for that. P_THEFT is still >>> mostly >>> unimplemented for cost reasons. A hardware-protected RTC will not >>> improve the current state at all as long as the hardware side of >>> P_THEFT >>> is not implemented. It will certainly raise cost, though. >>> >> >> Not the case: epoxy-coating the motherboard was not cost-effective, >> meaning that the cost of bypassing P_THEFT by circuit-board changes >> was already expensive enough to be infeasible -- and of course epoxy >> adds to manufacture, repair, and rework costs. The economics weren't >> with it. >> > > As I stated before on this list, bypassing P_THEFT is very easy. You > don't even have to desolder the complete flash chip, one pin is > sufficient. All of this is doable for less than $1 per laptop if you > have access to cheap labor. $1 per laptop is _not_ expensive enough to > be infeasible. I am very willing to publish a video tutorial of the > procedure if you think I can't do that. The only downside would be > that > everybody then knows how to bypass P_THEFT.
If all it takes is accessing one pin, then epoxy is even less useful. >> We actually know exactly how much it costs to bypass P_THEFT in bulk, >> since some of original manufacture run ended up with a firmware bug >> which bricked them in exactly the way P_THEFT would. >> > > If you came up with a cost of more than $2, the recovery/bypass was > missing the obvious shortcuts or you had a requirement not to solder. > _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
