Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
Ok interest peaked. Please name me one hardware that came with services and failed completely.
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I-Opener
It was a device for browsing the Internet with hard-wired connection to the internet provider (modem-based) that paid for the device. The up-front price for customer was $99, the actual value was somewhere between $200 and $300.
People very soon found out that inside that "internet appliance" is an ordinary PC with a hard-disk wired to the motherboard using some proprietary cable (with a few leads swapped, when compared with a standard cable).
People also got motivated to have a closer look at QNX operating system with Photon GUI that was powering the device. Once tinkerers had a look, somebody discovered that the UNIX shadow password file that QNX uses is non-standard and broke the allegedly-one-way-hash used to encrypt the root password. It was one of first devices to be [literally] "rooted" by customers ;-). You downloaded an *.exe program from the net [to your normal windows-based PC], fed it the hash from /etc/shadow file and got your root password in a second.
I am pretty sure that designers of Kindle, various Apple devices, carrier-locked phones, and many other interesting modern gadgets study this early example with a very keen interest.
Please see the examples of similar failed devices in the above linked
Wikipedia article