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

[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.

> - 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
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.

MS