A technical assessment of porting "Sugar" to Windows.

[John Watlington]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 7:52 PM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

> On 24.04.2008 20:32, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> 11. Bitfrost: initial activation security.
>> ...
>> For completeness, I will note that although passive and active kill
>> theft-deterrence systems have been implemented on Sugar/GNU/Linux,
>> only initial activation security has been deployed in the field.
>> Passive and active kill systems entail large support costs which OLPC
>> has chosen to date not to incur.
>>
>
> AFAIK the hardware side of P_THEFT alias theft protection alias
> activation security/kill functionality has not been implemented,
> rendering all software efforts moot.

In my opinion, shared by other engineers at Quanta, the proposed
"hardware side" of P_THEFT would not have slowed you down much.
Dremel-ing off the epoxy wouldn't take long.   The effect it WOULD have
is to add at least a hour (if not 24) of latency to the manufacturing
process, and to decrease the manufacturing yield, both of which would
have increased the price.   I discussed this with numerous people at
Quanta.

On the other hand, I was told at lunch today by members of the Peru
deployment that software activation is a critical and necessary feature.
In previous deployments of computers, Peru saw a high theft rate in the
delivery process.   The activation process allows them to tell potential
thieves and potential purchasers of hot systems that the laptops will be
useless bricks.

Have we made it impossible to steal and activate a laptop ?  NO.
Have we made it much harder ?  Yes.

> Unless the manufacturing details have changed since my last inquiry, I
> can unlock ~4 XO machines per hour WITHOUT having a developer key. The
> only thing I need are some really affordable tools. If someone else
> disassembles the machines for me, I think unlocking 10 machines per  
> hour
> is well within the doable range.

Here in the US, the cost of disassembling, switching SPI flash chips,  
and
reassembling approaches $60 - $70 dollars (I asked several small job
shops for quotes.)

> For the record: I will not take orders for mass-unlocking unless
> ownership is proven.

Thanks.

wad