Crowdfund hacker to build custom firmware?
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George Hotz would probably disagree . He was the first to jail break the iPhone and reverse engineer the Playstation 3 . Sony and Apple sued the crap out of him. But I think to some degree people like him are needed in order to keep things balanced . And there will always be a need for that . That's kind of how we got our 32 channels back .
See that's the thing, given everything else I've seen from DJI, I find it extremely unlikely they went through the effort.
If they did do signing, that would certianly be an issue, but signing requires a chip that has "efuses" or similar "write once" memory regions, and those cost more. Not even all smartphones these days do end to end signing... And what's more, the ones that do often don't do it well. It took Samsung 4 generations of hardware to finally make a system that wasn't trivial to break. Even iPhones still get jailbroken.
That DJI would go to such lengths is unlikely... What's their financial incentive? Samsung does it because carriers request it, and they sell tons of devices to corporations and governments that care about trusted execution. Apple does it to keep a closed ecosystem. DJI would do it why?
Definitely more exploration required, but I doubt this will be the nail in the coffin.
Jailbreaking is currently legal under U.S. law. Within certain contraints. Promoting piracy, and other acts related to reverse engineering certianly are not. Either way, I wouldn't hold my breath about DJI suing someone in U.S. courts.
Also, George Hotz is doing pretty well these days. The hacking stuff got him a job at Google, then Facebook, and nowadays I believe he's working at a pretty cool start up. Just saying...
Incorrect. Digital Rights Management laws protect against this. In the US you would need to seek an exception. If you buy a Phantom you don't own the firmware, you lease a license to it.
Last I checked, hardware is not software/firmware. Again, you don't own the rights to the software, only a license to use it.
The Sony PSP game system eventually had custom firmware and there was nothing really Sony could do about it.
Why?
While it's illegal to distribute modified DJI firmware, you can distribute software tools designed to make the desired changes to DJI firmware. This way it is essentially the user creating custom firmware from a original DJI release.
Why?
While it's illegal to distribute modified DJI firmware, you can distribute software tools designed to make the desired changes to DJI firmware. This way it is essentially the user creating custom firmware from a original DJI release.
Read it for yourself: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2012/2012-26308_PI.pdf
Technically only "phones" are covered under this, but no major corp has sued a user in quite some time regarding "jail breaking" or "unlocking".
They just patch and push updates. Don't get me wrong major corps are still "sue happy", but they've come to realize that antagonizing their own user bases isn't worth the bad PR. Hear about the MPAA/RIAA bringing users to court recently? There's a reason why not.
Either way, back OT, I wouldn't be the slightest bit concerned about DJI going after anyone here for modifying the firmware.
No way DJI, a fledgling company poised for massive growth would go after their user base right now.
At most, they'd just patch the exploit/modifications with a firmware update. Also, remember, they aren't an American company, they're Chinese.
Plus... cart before the horse and all that, it's irrelevant until someone actually starts working on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
"Charges laid in the case were trafficking in, and offering to the public, a software program that could circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material, in violation of Section 1201(b)(1)(A)&(C) of Title 17 of the United States Code (the Copyright Acts, including most of theDigital Millennium Copyright Act), as well as Sections 2 (Aiding and Abetting) and 371 (Conspiracy) of Title 18, Part I, of the United States Code (the Federal Criminal Code)."
I don't think it's a matter of hacking the motherboard of the phantom..
I think it's more building your own custom mother board to slap into the phantom & controller and use existing hardware. End of the day the hardware is simple stuff. The brains of it all..
Whoever wins the powerball - you know what to do
(I got my 9 tickets today!)
I think it's more building your own custom mother board to slap into the phantom & controller and use existing hardware. End of the day the hardware is simple stuff. The brains of it all..
Whoever wins the powerball - you know what to do
(I got my 9 tickets today!)
"Decided: ElcomSoft acquitted by a federal jury on December 17, 2002" - same Wikipedia article.
Elcomsoft is still in business. They reverse-engineer a wide variety of major corporate products for "data recovery" and "password recovery" purposes.
Things like MSFT's EFS... NTLM hashes... stuff that you have to "reverse engineer the original product" in order to be able to reproduce.
~~~
As far as I'm concerned, if DJI can retroactively add constraining features like GEO, I can choose not to implement said features through whatever means I like.
If they want a lawsuit over my removing not-legally-required and not-legally-binding restrictions in an aircraft that I own and that did not originally ship with those features... well, I'm prepared to deal with that eventuality.
Thing is, DJI cares about:
#1) Making money (obviously)
#2) Selling more units of product to facilitate #1
They most likely won't care about a few users trying to modify their P3s as long as it doesn't conflict with #1 or #2.
If the FAA *mandates* that consumer UAVs include NFZs and then I still remove that functionality... well, there might be a problem there.
Cross that bridge when it inevitably arrives.
That and of course, internally, I'm sure DJI has a way to disable NFZs entirely. If we could just find that...
You know, coming from the home-built and open-source UAV world, it never ceases to amaze me how many of the folks on DJI's forums think that the rest of the world is like the DJI universe. I can buy dozens of different UAV's that are not locked in any way and fly up to a couple of thousand feet for under a thousand dollars. And, for about the same or less, and a couple of weekend's work, I could build one that could go even higher. Heck, I could build a plane that could go into commercial airspace and stay up for an hour, and have been able to for 10 years. This is nothing new.
Someone "jail-breaking" the Phantom is no danger to our sport. It will happen eventually. And, no, these machines are not that complicated. My cell phone has many times more processing power and complexity than the P3.
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I can help fund, I have the P3 Standard though but I can wait until after a custom firmware is available for the professional/advanced.
Does this relate to the Mobile-SDK? I know there is not one available for the standard yet, but the pro/advanced has one.
Mobile-SDK - DJI Forum
Does this relate to the Mobile-SDK? I know there is not one available for the standard yet, but the pro/advanced has one.
Mobile-SDK - DJI Forum
I hope jailbreak will come some day. This is not "landing on the moon" technology. Its just a PC, with gyro & GPS trying to stay in air. That's all. counting CPU-s and talking about it's complexity makes no sense.
This geofence. What? i think it's gonna be massive fail. To try to restrict people to fly.. Ba haha, educate people,don't try to limit them.
DJI is on a mission to take lot's of money. That's good cause they produce kind cool/geek pricy stuff, but i'm starting to hate this company reading about their customer relations, quality control and stuff like that.
This geofence. What? i think it's gonna be massive fail. To try to restrict people to fly.. Ba haha, educate people,don't try to limit them.
DJI is on a mission to take lot's of money. That's good cause they produce kind cool/geek pricy stuff, but i'm starting to hate this company reading about their customer relations, quality control and stuff like that.
A skilled programmer can decompile firmware really easily. Then it is only necessary to use a third party app to avoid all checks.
Yes, its Linux
Linux version 3.8.0 (zhongwenhui@Precision-T5600) (gcc version 4.7.3 (Sourcery CodeBench Lite 2013.05-24) )
If they can get into apples hi tech phones I'm sure the phantom wouldn't be so hard. Apple has men dedicated to preventing jailbreaks and they still do it!!!
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Guys how many devs we have here? I'm one, but not experienced in embedded systems. Mobile/Web stuff.
Could we start this with documenting what we can and asking for help on stackowerflow.
Why. well, looking on DJI quality.
- i respect them but starting to have some anger on them
- GEOFENCE, umm. it's 2015 yeah, guys are going on Mars and some Chinese company think it's ruler of the airspace, because they build quadcopter and went popular, go f""k off
- quality controls, spend grand then got partially working unit, i got camera out of focus, and now without anything waiting and praying not to spend more
- let's burn the chips. addon 1: buy heat sink and push camera to max. 100MBps bitrate.
- for fun
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