Comment by ant5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ant5 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really care, and I certainly wouldn't change my recommendation of a phone to a consumer based on this. But read to the end before you downvote :)

As a vendor, dealing with hacks, jailbreaks, and other such things is remarkably expensive. Consumers (not developers) wind up installing these things without understanding the implications of what they're doing. The OS breaks, the applications break, things go haywire, things go bad. The hardware vendor, the OS vendor, and the application vendor all take the blame and have to deal with the support costs. We get support e-mails all the time that can be traced to iOS jailbreak-induced issues.

It's a massive pain in the neck that, understandably, a vendor just doesn't want to deal with.

Moreover, as a consumer, it's incredibly wasteful to be spending so much time on trying to break into undocumented systems that the vendors just aren't interested in supporting.

Instead, I want to support vendors that provide more open platforms for a more premium price. It costs more to produce an open, supported platform, and I don't mind paying a little bit for an Android development phone that allows me to experiment with OS-level work, or something like the Ubiquity RouterStation Pro[0] as an alternative to consumer wireless routers. The advantage to me is that hacking the device is supported and I don't have to fight with a consumer manufacturer -- a company with very different priorities to my own -- to do it.

[0] http://www.ubnt.com/rspro

That's ridiculous. To make the over used car analogy, this is if you were to replace the engine on a brand new car you bought with a different one, only to have the car destroy itself, and the new engine you just put in it.

It's one thing to not support the new engine when it has problems. It's another thing to destroy property that someone bought from you after the sale if they use it in a way you don't approve.

I understand it costs more to support an open platform. But it's a choice to support that open platform, and Motorola doesn't have to do that, they can hang up on Joe Average who did installs the mod just like a dealership would do so on anyone who screwed up putting a completely different engine in their brand new car.

Motorola doesn't have to do that, they can hang up on Joe Average who did installs the mod ...

Cars aren't phones. The cost of installing a new engine is very different than the cost of installing a phone hack, the set of people likely to do so (and the associated cost to the manufacturer and other vendors) isn't the same, and there's going to be a lot more consumer awareness about what they're doing by replacing the engine. And really -- modern cars are locked down.

Modern cars are fairly proprietary, but they're not intentionally locked down. They certainly don't attempt to self-destruct upon detecting tampering. Cars actually do the opposite: they attempt to keep going even in the event of improper modification or malfunction (limp-home mode, etc...).

I find locked-down devices annoying, but not unethical. Self-destructs are simply vandalism, and should result in legal action.

I do think that Motorola has gone too far in this, they shouldn't be designing their phone to break when you mess with it.

But you bring up an important point. Many (if not most due to scale) of the people who are rooting their phones are not developers/tinkerers. I was talking to a very non-technical person the other day and they said a friend had sent them instructions on how to jailbreak their iPhone. This person just followed the instructions and then was able to download a navigation app for free. Not so much your noble hacker.

Blah blah blah, DRM is bad so people should be able to steal if they want to, I agree with that. But these companies see the same problems the video game companies have seen and attempted to solve with DRM.

-1: I agree with you up to a certain point, but there's reasonable counter-measures and totally off the wall ones, of which this one is an example of. Encrypting the boot loader as was done in Milestone is a great approach, but actually bricking the phone? I'll go somewhere else.

So you don't mind that they lock down the bootloader so you can't actually install anything else, but you do mind when they lock it just a little bit more to make sure you don't install anything else?

That really doesn't make any sense.

With the encrypted bootloader it's a a challenge to crack it, see if you're "worthy", etc. With eFuse, all bets are off, that's not fair

That is an odd argument; the purpose of either technological measure is to keep you out, and most users are just going to download somebody else's "worthy" crack anyway.

Interesting point. But don't you instantly void your warranty when you do this stuff?

I'm assuming your main point is the cost of customer contact/handling after they've done something dumb?

I'm assuming your main point is the cost of customer contact/handling after they've done something dumb?

As well as the intangible costs of what customers think and say after things go wrong. Look at how Mac application developers respond to things like Usanity's Haxies.

The implicit assumption here (in order to get from your comment to "…so it's OK that Motorola does this") is that using modded phone software causes more problems for the average consumer than having his phone bricked. Without this assumption, the fact that hacks might cause trouble cannot possibly lead to the conclusion that bricking hardware is a good course of action.

It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?

It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?

Only if we assume your initial premise. How about this one? The average consumer is never going to try to hack their phone unless someone more knowledgable than them provides the instructions and resources necessary to do it. In other words, average consumer using the phone will never, ever, ever have a bricked phone because of some sort of anti-tampering device.

Motorola wishes to sell a device with a certain set of supported functionality. They do not wish to invest effort in dealing with hacked versions of their devices, and in fact they seem to have contracts with carriers that require them to protect the devices.

Motorola sells you a device that does exactly what they say it does. If you don't like the feature-set of this device, then don't buy it -- Motorola is not required to sell you an open platform and you't not required to buy their closed one.

Again, your argument fails to justify the decision. Try reading your post with "Therefore bricking hacked phones is a good thing" at the end — it makes no sense. If the number of people who would attempt to hack it is that vanishingly small, it's just pointlessly mean with no benefit (since no one was going to try it anyway, right?). If a lot of people are going to try hacking, you're certainly one-upping any problems it would have caused without you bricking the phone.

If the number of people who would attempt to hack it is that vanishingly small.

The number of people that will try to hack it is vanishingly small, but it only takes one.

Once that one person gets their hack working, the number of people that have no idea what they're doing but will still install a hack developed by someone else is surprisingly large.

... "Therefore bricking hacked phones is a good thing" at the end

Therefor, bricking hacked phones is their prerogative, it truly doesn't matter to me or 99.99% of the people buying their devices, and if someone does care, they should buy a device from someone interested in serving the tinkerer market, rather than trying to jury-rig a product from a company that clearly has no interested in supporting your endeavor.

Why brick it then? Wouldn't it be enough to change some status string that would tell the support people that the phone has been messed with and lost its software warranty?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com