[Xperia Arc General] MrHassell:
The X10 has an issue with the Bootloader being protected by Marlin DRM.

There is no obvious reason and no clear benefit to end users or the general public. Most likely a precautionary measure to ensure SE applications work as intended and to assist with purchases of games, music, updates to Android firmware (often mistakenly called ROM's) and features Sony Ericsson have not explained in any level of detail or even stated that it exists as part of their obligations and your rights to know as the consumer.

According to the W3C.

What are some potential invasions of privacy?

1. User authentication - current PKI protocols limit the degree of anonymity -- we need to know who are you so we can sue you if you infringe

2. Usage tracking for fraud prevention

OK. Now you have just purchased a Sony Ericsson Android phone and all your social network contacts from any social media site can be merged with your phone book, backed up into Google's Gmail and shared beyond any one or all of these service's. The man controlling 'everything' that happens on your device is SE.

The phone at core capability is able to run Ubuntu / Debian Linux, Windows, iPhone and emulate everything you might wish to or choose to. Thanks to this 'feature' in the form of the Marlin DRM and Seacert broadband bootstrap implementation being present on these phones... it isn't going to happen.

With the Xperia models, the entire operating system is virtualized on boot and impossible to modify the behavior of the boot loader, due to a very high grade encryption system, provided by Inter Trust.

Unlike HTC, Motorolla, Samsung (who own a stake in the Marlin DRM but choose not to use it for snooping or destroying the main purpose of Android phones) for that matter most other Android phone manufacturers, allow the boot loader to be modified without too much effort and load a custom bootloader for multiple firmwares.

e.g; Gingerbread 2.3.2 is the default o/s shipped with Sony Ericsson apps, you want to keep this but also load Honeycomb, or Gingerbread 2.3.3, a modified vanilla o/s without things like timescape and unnecessary apps that do nothing for saving battery life.. it's your phone and you should be able to have this choice, in fact the reason Android is open source, is stop one company from forming any kind of monopoly.

So what should DRM so for us?

Are there general requirements from the concept of free flow of information?

* avoid unnecessary use restrictions, respect fair use

* universal service --- equal and fair access right

* support variety of licensing options

* make it easy for users to act lawfully

* seamless operation, interoperability of DRMS

* Support Information Search(engines)

* make licensing easy to reduce transaction costs

* secure operating environment: integrity and availability of content

* avoid bottlenecks and monopolies when standardizing (production and distribution)

Conclusion:

* copyright laws give free hand to those who develop DRMS

* Only few compulsory requirements from Law, but Guidelines can be derived from Law

* when hesitating, think in terms of free flow of information

Now back on over in Android world at Google HQ...

On 24 September 2009, Google issued a cease and desist letter to the modder Cyanogen, citing issues with the re-distribution of Google's closed-source applications within custom firmware.

Even though most of Android OS is open source, phones come packaged with closed-source Google applications for functionality such as the application store and GPS navigation.

Google asserted these applications can only be provided through approved distribution channels by licensed distributors. Cyanogen complied with Google's wishes and is continuing to distribute this mod without the proprietary software.

He has provided a method to back up licensed Google applications during the mod's install process and restore them when it is complete.

The exact same principle can be done with SE closed source apps and SE do provide the source code for their firmwares as part of the open source license. Anyone withing to check this out can simply head over to http://developer.sonyericsson.com/wportal/devworld/technology/android/ and start developing straight away. The source code, test keys and everything you need is either there or linked from there back to the places you need to be.

Semcboot security algorithms are not required and serve no benefit. The day that SE stop's supporting updates for this device, the same as they did with the Xperia X10 at 2.1 Eclair, your phone will be useless and stuck with older versions of Android.

If this is acceptable and your not bother by having no bootloader mod's, a hack to be able to change firmware that may someday soon be blocked and privacy issues built in as a matter of due course that you were not even correctly informed of, except for via a specialist forum (your looking at it), then good luck with your Arc, Neo or Play.. and I suspect that there is the real rationale here - Play.

Marlin DRM exists in the PlayStation 3 for the market and guide as it does in the PSP and also will in the Xperia Play. SE became rather unhappy when the master cryptographic key to the PS3 was discovered and distributed on mass over the internet (I have a t-shirt with the codes printed...) as it bypassed their protection ad allowed among other things, pirated games to play and unauthorized content to loaded, custom operating systems etc..

Sony Ericsson watched carefully at HTC and thought about how best to implement all of their technology in an extremely secure manor and this is the result. It may actually benefit end users, so far Sony have yet to state their side of the story and will be looking forward to seeing posts on anything relevant in this thread, for anyone interested in the subject and for anyone thinking of buying an Arc.

Wish I had of known this information before I purchased my x10 but is it such a perfect world? :)