Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

I don’t quite understand the sarcastic, if not slightly passive-aggressive, tone in this article. This kind of attitude seems quite common in hacking and reverse engineering write-ups.

In my opinion, manufacturers aren’t obligated to disclose every technical detail beyond what a typical spec sheet would cover, such as the specific type of flash used. It’s incredibly impressive that someone as talented as the author can figure it out independently, but I don’t see why there’s a need for the constant tone of frustration or an “us vs. the company” mindset throughout the article.

View on HN

As someone who's been in a position like this before, I suspect the author is angry at the manufacturers and feels they're not being honest by not providing proper specs. It's hard to spec out a project when no one will tell you exactly what their parts can do. It's like if you were trying to buy a light truck for work and intsead of telling you how much weight it could pull or how often maintenance would be needed, the manufacturer refused to say anything more than "it can tow a speedboat" and "it requires infrequent maintenance."

The reason why we know how these media storage devices work is that our valuable data is being stored on them! We need to know how fragile that storage is and the only way we can do that is to have all the engineering data/test info.

SSD and MicroSD/thumb drive and even HD manufacturers have a damn hide by being so secretive about their devices—of course it's never the manufactures who suffer the burden of data loss, it's the customer.

What's desperately needed are open-source manufacturers who will publish the necessary data.

This problem isn't new, sleazebag Kodak knowingly released shoddy unstable color stock in the 1950s and decades later precious family and wedding photos had faded to nothing.

Let that be a lesson, this solid-state storage shit hasn't been around long enough yet to know whether we'll be seeing a repeat of that Kodak fuckup.

> In my opinion, manufacturers aren’t obligated to disclose every technical detail beyond what a typical spec sheet would cover, such as the specific type of flash used.

Some write endurance and retention figures will be ok. A 1TB flash is useless if, the moment you wrote 1TB, you cannot read it anymore or it gives erroneous values.

> to disclose every technical detail

Basic fundamental technical details are regularly missing: e.g., bits per cell.

The manufacturer may not be obliged to give the details but the hacker also doesn't need to be pathetically grateful for what they do deign to give.

Most companies are quite happily to lie, obfuscate and omit to the hilt if they can: nearly every labelling regulation is a patch over some fuckery. The relationship is often pretty adversarial, especially at retail.

Doubly so in computer memory devices, which is an industry particularly filled with flimflam and chancers.

When i buy 512G microsd it becomes my property. If i need to repair or replace my property, it should be disclosed what technology i bought, so that i or my repairman could understand my property enough to decide a proper path forward depending on my data & other environmental devices.

The author needed to reverse engineer what could have been on the spec sheet...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com