On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.
The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.
I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.
(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)
Irony is part of life.
One of the “secret” kind of manufacturers out there which refuses to provide docs to their chips unless you sign an NDA and God-knows-what, requires a user name and a password on their web site before they hand out docs. It turned out they only protect themselves using javascript so you can just read the HTML pages and the embedded javascript in them to figure out the exact URLs to use and wham, the data sheets are downloadable…
No, I won’t tell you the exact company nor site (or even exactly when this was discovered or tested) since then they might discover this and fix. I’ve tried this myself and it works fine, but I was not the one who figured it out.
Yeah, this is a moral dilemma: should we tell the manufacturer about their problem and thus close the doors for users to get this docs? Or would that risk backfiring on the guy(s) that tell them? What would you do?
curl, open source and networking
