[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] E:V:A:
Constructive Criticism

Constructive Criticism

As I have been on holiday and it's been raining here quite a bit, I have had a

lot of time to spend on this project. I have been posting all I have found and

tried to clarify this material so that other people who is also working on this,

can be kept up to date and informed, and help out. However, I feel that I'm just

dumping all this information into a black hole, as I don't get or see any

(or very little) constructive and useful feedback, to my questions and posts etc.

So I must ask you all the following.

Is anybody actually working on this?

What does it mean "to be working on" this? It means that you are actively doing

one or more of the following:

a) Answering relevant questions related to this topic and posted in this thread.

b) Finding, reading and sharing information that is related to this topic.

c) Come up with new, well formulated and well though through ideas about how to get "unlocked".

(Search first! You're probably not the first one who have thought about this.)

d) Provide technical documentation, inside skills or other relevant knowledge to this topic.

e) Provide experimental results answering some clearly defined problem/question. For example:

Q: So you want to verify that after reboot, the phone does W when writing to register X.

A: So, you wrote to register X by using this command Y, with the resulting output Z.

Then after reboot, you got W as shown. Question confirmed.

f) You are not blindly performing senseless experiments with the only result

of bricking your device and not having learned anything.

g) You are asking for and listening to good advice from reliable sources,

and if you are a reliable source, you are happy to share and provide

evidence for your advice.

In the last couple of pages there have been some completely senseless posts

about flashing some random firmware from a completely different device, and

thinking that we would actually learn anything. Let's stop this insanity now!

(Or I'll have to leave this thread for good, to keep my own!) It's not very

Zen to do something extreme without any well founded thought behind it,

especially when your going against the well established ideology.

Case Study

When Adam bricked his phone, I really started to get upset. It was a complete

waste of time, effort and motivation. And I was wondering why I bother with this

at all, and the head-line question undoubtedly entered my mind. At least

based on the information I had at the time. There are many many reasons why this

would not work, and we were several reliable people telling him not to do it.

(So why did he?) Then after seeing what he actually did, we could have predicted

with 100% certainty that it would be at least be soft-bricked. Some reasons why

this case was particularly bad:

1) Overwriting a file system you are currently using will kill you!

(This can only be done in certain circumstances like in Linux, which has

this capability where you can transfer execution from disk based to memory

based. But Android is only memory based and very complicated at that,

as code execution occurs in several different memories and processors

at different times.)

2) No consideration seem to have been taken that Odin/Heimdal (most likely)

put the phone in a special mode for flashing firmware. (See 1) In any

case, there is a good reason why people generally doesn't just "dd"-flash

their devices. That reason is that Odin/Heimdal probably make use of the

special Qualcomm communication protocol(s) QMI or DM as discussed here.

3) No consideration was taken to the fact that the firmware belonged to a

completely different device and need to be signed. (At least nobody provided

any information to prove it was the same or even similar enough.)

4) No consideration was taken that the firmware was of a different size

than the original.

5) No consideration was taken of the previously posted Secure Boot procedure and

information.

6) No consideration of good and well founded advice, from reliable sources.

7) Not sharing his initial thoughts (if any), nor the expected results.

This is very demotivating, although it is nice and sometimes inspiring

to see that someone is actually taking some action. BUT...

Let's not be(come) headless chickens!

PS. There are many more case examples, but Adam know I respect his work and

can handle the heat, so I just used his case as a recent example...

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