data-medics wrote:
Yeah, but I'm sure you agree that they've got their own backdoor into the terminal.
I've specifically had would-be customers of mine who's drives needed a firmware fix and were terminal locked, whom I've recommended to send their cases to Seagate data recovery. I'm waiting to hear back from a couple of them to see if they were able to do it.
I've lost cases due to this, which Seagate now gained. Monopoly here we come. In my opinion, it's no different than if Ford decided to put locks on hoods of their new cars and only give their service centers the key.
this is almost the exact thing John Deere do to their tractors/ farm machinery. There is a huge uprising as a tech needs to come out to do anything, and a scene exists with custom firmware and unlocked dash software. They say warranties will be void if others work on machinery even doing basic stuff as firmware "watches everything" and makes things expensive and take longer when JD techs arent available.
in regards to how it is done, there are ways that are not easy to figure out, and usually the methods are not reversed, but leaked from a friend of an employee or an employee that doesnt give a f###.
schemes like a certain value of resistor needed between two test points, jumpers, actual hardware that needs to be inbetween PC and drive (this is the case of burning firmware into some flash drive controllers)... will be very hard to stumble apon. I seriously doubt it is to stop home hackers as the engineers making firmware are so far removed from the internet "scene" and dev of new firmware is offset by years compared to what is available on the shelf. I dont think it would be to monopolise their DR centres as these would have to be running at a loss.