[E3-hacking] Making life easy for you

[Peter Riocreux]

Cliff Lawson <clawson at amstrad.com> writes:

> Fair enough but shortly the job of recycling our subsidised hardware is due
> to get a bit trickier for you I hope.(Assuming we've implemented SHA256
> hashing and MD5+RSA signing correctly ;-) 

If that is your plan (and I have no beef with it - you are perfectly
entitled to try to protect your investment just as we are perfectly
entitled to try to evade it :-)) then it would be good to continue to
have the modem part of the new hacker board populated. My intention
was to use one as a means to interface a VoIP system to a POTS line
for non-VoIP calls IYSWIM - so that I could merge incoming POTS calls
with the VoIP system and/or manage my own VoIP-or-POTS decision
making.

> This isn't an attempt to break the "fun" that you guys have been having 

For a few sick, twisted individuals it will make it more fun ....

> but realistically, if some Eastern European (for example) outfit
> decided to use the "backdoor" technology you've come up with to then
> buy up 10,000 of our phones at £50 and then recycle the electronics
> into some completely new product with their own software or even
> continue to use the h/w for their own telephony then we'd make a
> HUGE loss. We can't afford to run that risk so have to protect our
> investment in the per unit subsidy. 

Why not offer it at a higher price that makes a profit *on the unit*
and had no hardware-hacker-defeating mechanism? You could even do that
now with the E3 and make it flashable with an image from the SD card
or a USB memory stick or somesuch. And thinking along those lines, it
has no need of the larger of the two sets of flash on board if it has
the SD card socket - it can boot from the small flash bootloader and
then take its image from the SD card. I don't believe it would be
cannibalising your own market as I think it would be a completely
separate market. It may of course be that if you remove the subsidy it
becomes more expensive than something that could be assembled at home,
but the fanless, single boardedn-ess of it is attractive.


Peter