AmpBenzScientist @AmpBenzScientist@qoto.org

I think I found something quite disturbing in my work. I think there was a GPL violation and that was raised sometime back but never resolved, it just disappeared. I know that many companies have a long standing record of GPL violations.

The moral of the story is that it's almost pointless to fight these people. They will abuse legal systems that are designed to protect owners but as thieves. Reverse Engineering work has to be done correctly or it will be killed off. Justice has to battle corporations that could influence the USA, Russia and China.

I stated earlier that it was almost pointless and I meant it. People can be made to suffer from doing what's right. If one wants to do the right thing and learn how much more pain can be experienced than they thought possible, they will be the people who make a difference.

Having to install regular Windows is painful. I liked the institutional licensing that just let me reimage 40 computers at once without any registration harrassment. Clean and easy.

I thought that I would say something positive today. I'm thankful for those who have given me encouragement and those who critiqued my work. It takes a true friend to step in and tell someone that they did wrong.

I'm going to get to work on the programming of the BL602 in a few days as hardware and software changes currently have my systems downed. When it's close enough to functional and stable, I will make the source code available online. I've made progress but I have a long way to go.

I think I can.

It keeps tripping me up that I'm not writing firmware for an SoC but writing the wifi part of the firmware on an SoC. Looking back to when I was doing the RE work, it didn't make sense. A driver and an OS do these tasks. If anyone wondered, this isn't BL code, based on their code nor compatible with their code. This is a completely different implementation and I'm learning a lot about how wifi works at the controller level. It's pretty cool.

I was completely lost and overwhelmed a moment ago. So I thought I had a massive workload ahead of me. I kept seeing RTOS and didn't put it together in my head. This is not a typical firmware and driver setup. This is that with parts of the os embedded. This is far more simple than I feared but not as easy as I hoped.

I checked again and these are the people I had trouble with before. I'm going to go ahead and work on this code. I hope that I am able to get this out before they do. I'm not doing any Reverse Engineering with this. My code will be unquestionably pure and my past involvement won't matter. This is different code.

My custom firmware project is on hold now and I'm going to finish off this BL602 wifi blob problem. I might use a different OS in the process. This has a greater effect on Free Software than my previous project and therefore it is my priority.

I'll give it up soon but only to a few people. It's out of respect for Mr. Lee, Mr. TL and BL that I do this. I don't know when I will get it up because I need to review it and refine it.

They would probably publicly denounce it and implement it in private if they even thought it was worthy. That's how it works. Maybe I should take a longer break from my current project and be the first to get wifi then bluetooth working on it.

I also have other ideas about the effort. Sierra Wireless is Canadian and patents might be limited for their "IP" in other countries. It's already been posted many times online. I can respect the Clean Room process but the competition has announced some insanely capable hardware that is coming soon.

I'm currently having a moral dilemma. I took a little break from my project and went back to examine my previous work on the BL602. I looked into the Nutcracker official repo and I found no reference nor honorable mentions for work that I know that I at least assisted in. No wonder my Professors acted like I did nothing of value, not being mentioned nor having work cited to me. Can't put that on a CV.

So I continued to read through the repo. All is fair in love and war.
I'm fairly confident that I have a way to get wifi working on the BL602 but it will take time to get correct. Do I turn the information over to the same people who'd rather take credit for everything or just keep it to myself?

Once again I'm stricken with terrible insomnia. I think I had a good sleep 3 or 4 days ago. The passage of time is distorted and memory is running on a swap partition.

On to my project, it's going to run slow and likely at a reduced capacity. This particular MCU is going to require a lot of development to get working. I've been looking into what documentation I could find about the MCU and the firmware that I intend to port forward to it. The firmware can be flashed one piece at a time after I break whatever security I find. I also need to use a copy of Windows for some of the work and that's what I'm waiting on. Allegedly, flashing the firmware from AMD powered computers is more complicated and I might have to deal with trusted platform garbage.

The work is still progressing and I'll get it working, produce documentation and release code that I wrote.

I believe that my original goal was to document how the flashing of firmware takes place on harddrives and I'll definitely be doing this with code.

A Mathematician once said that being a Mathematician was similar to bipolar disorder. At times, one feels like a complete idiot and unable to grasp what they are after. Other times, one feels like they have reached a new level of conciousness after a discovery.

I'm going to get all the information off my test drive and do some more investigating.

Next I will begin to port existing open source firmware to the S11.

Finally I will go full send and use a flashing tool, or perhaps make my own to keep it FLOSS, to flash the experimental firmware to the drive.

I believe that I have enough information to make it functional. I'm going to need to adapt everything to work in Linux too. If I mess up, then I will learn even more.

If I had to estimate how much is done, I would have to say that I'm approximately 60% ready to flash.

I recently realized that my project could be extended to more MCUs than I intended. It's within my ability and I don't see a reason why I shouldn't continue.

Not much progress on my project today but I did manage to fix my PocketCHIP. It is perhaps the most powerful flashing tool that I have.