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aenis

Fantastic and inspiring write up, big thanks!

Here is to hoping someone will do something similar for DRM'ed BOSCH ebike motors.

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Be the change you want to see in the world.

> Here is to hoping someone will do something similar for DRM'ed BOSCH ebike motors.

Please not. Bike thieves are already annoying as they are (a ring in the rural city I live in managed to steal over 400 k€ worth of bikes in a matter of months, in my case they only stole the control unit), and so are people modding their bikes to run (way) faster than the legal limit, leading to more and more calls for them being banned off of normal bike tracks.

[1] https://www.idowa.de/regionen/landshut/landkreis-landshut/se...

Is people stealing bikes and parts a technological problem or a people problem?

you could compare with apple locking down iphones and parts, which I understand significantly reduced theft

I seriously doubt any kind of DRM is going to dissuade bike thieves. It hasn't really worked for phones has it?

It has. Yes people still steal iPhones but not even close to levels pre-Activation Lock.

If you can't fence the product then there's no motivation to steal it in the first place.

Naturally, this is why we should add GPS and a network connection to every device in existence. /s

> If you can't fence the product then there's no motivation to steal it in the first place.

Couple of big problems with this thought:

* You have to know you can't fence it. Do you think bike thieves are following exactly which e-bike models have DRM, whether it has been broken etc? I doubt it.

* It assumes that the DRM is so amazing that nobody figures out how to defeat it.

So it might be true, but it also might not.

I am not interested in either, I just want to have control over the hardware I purchased with my own money.

As for thieves, they apparently have ways of bypassing bosch drm via hardware - bosch bikes get stolen all the time. As for speed unlocks, they are trivially possible with hardware bypasses. I doubt open source firmware would do harm.

We do it at https://infinite-battery.com :) our battery is compatible with Gen2/Gen3/Gen4 (we haven't yet tested on smart systems though)

I started doing some research over the holidays and the smart system seems to be designed to prevent reversing - fuses blown both ways, so didn't even manage to read the firmware, and communication with the client software relies on what seems to be decent encryption. And from the design of the hardware bypasses it seems that the firmware does not trust its own peripheries. Good design, no doubt - will try to take it apart when i switch bikes and won't mind bricking my unit.

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