what to with 02 when upgrading to 04? was: Re: How to bring forward the community?

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 04.03.2012 um 00:59 schrieb Michael Sokolov:

> "arne anka" <openmoko at ginguppin.de> wrote:
> 
>> but if nikolaus is ok with that (re-stocking the used GTA02 boards, that  
>> is :-), that's certainly solution.
> 
> As I understand it, he already does that.

Yes, we have some GTA02 boards w/o display...

> 
>> - what's so hackable about the calypso fw? as far as i recall, it was a  
>> major afford to get an updated fw and make it flashable.
> 
> Certain individuals in the Om community are holding personal copies of
> that firmware in "semi-source" form, or more precisely, in the form of
> object modules with full symbolic information (names of functions,
> global variables, etc) - not quite the same as full source, but pretty
> close in terms of hackability.  Unfortunately the greedy bastards are
> refusing to share, hence extracting the ware from them requires the
> use of a soldering iron, inserted rectally.  If anyone is willing to

Could it be possible that those "greedy bastards" don't even exist except
in your wishful thinking?

> perform such an operation for the benefit of the community, I can
> supply the names of the suspects and my best available information as
> to their physical whereabouts.
> 
> Alternatively, there exists the TSM30 firmware source: it's a
> different Calypso phone, and that code is full source and readily
> available from Cryptome.org and other sites.  Unfortunately the TSM30
> hardware has been very heavily modified from the Leonardo* baseline
> (whereas the GSM part of GTA02 is almost identical with Leonardo),
> hence backporting the TSM30 source to run on a Leonardo-style Calypso
> subsystem like GTA02 would take a lot more work than what we could do
> if we had the "real" GTA02 version of the "semi-source".  But the
> backport of the TSM30 to Leonardo/GTA02 does not seem impossible, just
> really difficult, and I am hoping to find the time some day to tackle
> that project - in my view, it is an ethically superior approach than
> OsmocomBB.
> 
> [*] Leonardo is TI's reference design for the Calypso/Iota/Rita
>    chipset; liberated Leonardo board schematics and chip docs for all
>    components are on my public FTP site.
> 
> There is also a possibility that someone in the People's Republic of
> China may have a copy of the same "semi-source" deliverable which FIC
> got from TI (that exact same deliverable or a very very similar one
> must have been given to *all* makers of Calypso-based feature phones),
> but who would be more open to sharing than the Om bastards.  Any
> comrades in the PRC reading this, you know whom to email.
> 
>> and how much less  
>> hackable is the new gsm chip's fw?
> 
> We shall only know if Nikolaus were to grow the b*lls to burn or shred
> his German passport, apply for citizenship in the Principality of
> Sealand, the Republic of New Poseidia or some other (micro)nation in
> which NDAs have no legal validity and in which all intellectual
> creations of every kind are automatically and unconditionally in the
> public domain, and publicly share all materials which he has received
> from the maker of whatever GSM/UMTS module he has used in the GTA04.
> 
> If and when Nikolaus does the above, I shall gladly and immediately
> buy a GTA04 - but not till then.

This sounds like shooting yourself in the foot. As soon as I would do that,
I can't sell you a GT04 any more because I don't receive any more of these
modules. So it is not a realistic option.

And you would be astonished how tiny information we really have. Almost
everything we know has been transcribed into valuable information and
is included in the user's manual. This are AT commands and the pin layout.

By going to the official product page you can also find out that there
is a QC MDM6600 inside (same as iPhone 4). But that does not mean
that we have received any information about that chip or its firmware...
We are at least on the output of the third level information filter from QC to us.

It is in this respect like buying a UMTS-USB stick in a blister pack where
you don't get a service manual included.

Finally you will find by research that there are some projects to write
alternate firmware for MDM6600 devices. But that is all, that I know that
those projects exist (I think one was mentioned recently on the GTA04
list [1]).

Nikolaus

[1]: http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/2011-December/001071.html