Being an ordinary hacker person in an industrial country such as Sweden, I own lots of random technical devices that I either have and use in my home or carry around for my use and enjoyment. Most, if not all, of these provide a fair amount of features and bugs. Many of them are controlled by an internal microcontroller.

My dect phone, my gsm phone, my DVB-T boxes, my TVs, my music players, the “entertainment system” of my car, my DVD-players, my wifi-router, my printer, my digital camera, my GPS, my video camera and the likes.

I seriously wish I had the docs and the source code for all of these, and thus the ability to change them to behave more like I want them to. I don’t believe I’m alone either. I wouldn’t even have to do most of these changes myself, we would have communities built up around basically all of these devices so that people from all over would share their ideas and code to improve your device. I would hack them all, if I could.

Of course, some of these devices aren’t at all possible to upgrade since they’re produced and sold without that ability and for those I’d have to accept this (and buy a different model the next time around), but a lot of these things can be reprogrammed at will already if we only knew how.

If only the manufacturers didn’t hate us.