3COM's Ergo Audrey Hacked

It looks like the 3COM Ergo Audrey hacking scene is finally taking off. A guy named Sowbug has hacked the 3COM Ergo Audrey to shell. He has pictures of it here(1) and here(2). Another site has opened to cover this hack, here(3). And of course the Linux Hacker messageboards are covering it quite a bit.

Re:Be careful folks.

[cgenman]

Remember back in the days when we could freely modify systems on the completely undubious grounds that we owned them? Chips could be slipped into playstations, Ms. Pac Man tables could be overclocked, and freaks could weld together Wonderswans and GBA's to the amusement of the world.

From what I've seen of this trick NONE of it falls under the DMCA: no encryption/decryption involved. It can be argued, probably successfully, that getting an image of the software that runs the system is copyright violation. However, estimating the value of the code per copy at less than 100 dollars, a single copy under the non-profit copyright laws would be insufficient for jailtime. Of course, I could be remembering the statute incorrectly: it has been several months since I last looked at the law.

As for a licence... that's a civil matter. Thank goodness that so far no company has managed to convince congress that violation of a click-through or shrink-wrap agreement should result in incarceration.

Someday these companies will realize that what we want is to pay a fair price for a box that works on our terms. In the mean time, let's pay an absurdly undervalued price and hack away.

Not a fake

[Anonymous Coward]

You lazy dweebs, check the links before you distribute your ignorance to the world. I swear, /. is a colossal stupidity amplifier. As was widely reported (including here on Slashdot) Audrey ran QNX. So no, you wouldn't see any Linux in there. I was on the dev team for Audrey at 3Com, I've read the procedure described, and it would in fact work, he obtained a shell in a Photon pterm. I'm pleased to see that people will get some use out of the hardware. We put a lot of work into the thing, it was highly depressing that 3Com was/is in such financial trouble that it was terminated before we got a chance to rev software and address many of the complaints people had about the product. (I personally would like to buy all of the available inventory on Ebay and shove them one by one sideways up 3Com's inept CEO Bruce Claflin's ass, a sentiment shared by many of the company's long-suffering shareholders - but I digress). What is not widely known even within the product team was that there was an internal under-the-table project to run Linux on the Audrey almost from go. The big hang-up was getting X to run, and fit in the 16MB of flash in the Audrey. The main advantage to QNX was the availability of the Photon environment, which was a great deal lighter-weight than X with a toolkit.

Faked Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the screenshots of the Audrey's shell prompt are faked. No, they are not faked the way some posters seem to think they are.

All the people pointing out the tiny little pixel-sized inconsistencies in the pictures are going to be disappointed to know that the the screenshots are real. The guy didn't do any graphical manipulation to make these; they're actual legitimate photo images of what was being displayed on the monitor at the time.

What's faked is the shell prompt itself. Look at the top of the screen. See the little menu bar? That ain't Linux, that's Audrey. All the guy did was display a bunch of text on the screen that looks like a shell prompt, or take a screenshot of a real shell prompt and display it on the Audrey's screen.

That is all. You may now return to writing conspiracy theories.