Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Geeksphone Stops Support for FirefoxOS with No Warning

posted by n1 on Monday June 15 2015, @08:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the marketing-1-customer-0 dept.

quixote writes:

Just bought a FirefoxOS Revolution Geeksphone in mid-May. I mean, sure, it's buggy and needs improvement, but it's an open source, community-driven project. That is how it was presented to consumers.

It has nowhere to go but up, right? Wrong. Without any kind of transparency or openness or communication, the Geeksphone crew let us know in a one-line comment that they were orphaning all of us.

Re: Firefox OS 2.2
« Reply #3 on: June 10, 2015, 05:34:08 PM »
No sorry, all FxOs development are finished by Geeksphone.

Thanks..... ;)

And that's all, folks. Apparently. To add injury to injury, they used a locked bootloader, according to another commenter. I didn't even check on that. It's an open source project, I thought.

I'm also mad as hell. Any other Soylentils in this mess? Anybody have any ideas on a useful way forward?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Geeksphone Stops Support for FirefoxOS with No Warning | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 25 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 15 2015, @09:36AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 15 2015, @09:36AM (#196408) Journal

    Alright - you have a Revolution phone. I hit Google, and it seems that the selling point of the Revolution is, you can switch between OS's. I went to this page, and it appears that you can still download images to load on your hardware -
    http://downloads.geeksphone.com/ [geeksphone.com]

    Maybe this page is where I should have started: http://forum.geeksphone.com/index.php?topic=6508.0 [geeksphone.com] There seems to be no known method to sign a new bootloader image. Yeah, looks like a screwup - an open source project using an Intel signing process. Coldnew posted "I still need time to write about the boot.img format, but actually it is SIGNED in RSA algorithm by Intel's tool called isu, thanks some Chinese developer, now I have the isu binary, but I need geeksphone's key.pem to signed up the boot.img."

    I guess the question is, how does one find the key.pem? Seems like Geeksphone should be able to supply it to the community.

    Yeah, I guess I'm at the same place that quixote arrived at when he posted . . .

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4  

  • (Score: 2) by quixote on Monday June 15 2015, @01:15PM

    by quixote (4355) on Monday June 15 2015, @01:15PM (#196467)

    "There seems to be no known method to sign a new bootloader image."

    That's what I'm afraid of. Like another commenter said: how is that even allowable on an open source project. And, as someone else said, Mozilla really is losing its shit. >:(

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 15 2015, @02:22PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday June 15 2015, @02:22PM (#196496) Journal

    I guess the question is, how does one find the key.pem? Seems like Geeksphone should be able to supply it to the community.

    One way is to contact Geeksphone. Another is "too bad if there's a buffer overflow sprintf() in your code wouldn't?" or code in stack .. :P
    (which would allow anyone to detour the boot sequence just like with ordinary locked computerphones)

    To the dear Geeksphone: Fix such that owners of said phones can load and install their own bootimages and kernels or watch your standing with the community go *P00F!*