Netpliance Ban I-Opener Mods

After we ran this story about running NetBSD on an i-opener (and this earlier story from a Linux perspective), MrPoopyPants writes "I was considering buying one of the Netpliance I-Openers with intent to modify it but when I followed the link I discovered this notice. It appears that they will no longer sell their products without the service and they have renderd the devices immune to modification." Netpliance have also issued a press release announcing the same thing. This is somewhat ironic, as their developer's corner page says "Netpliance believes in open source development. As part of our effort to support the community, we will be developing a site that will be the premier source of i-opener product information. Please watch this site for more details." Netpliance are soliciting ideas and feedback, to [e-mail].

Is the machine a loss leader?

I guess this makes sense if they are only selling the machines at a loss to get people on their service. On the other hand, i thought that they were happy that all of the sudden there were thousands of slashdotters interested in buying their equipment.

Oh well, what states are these sort of agreements invalid in again?

Bundling like this is illegal..

Ok, I may be *way* off base here, but..

Isn't bundling one product with the requirment of a use of another against the law? According to what they are requiring, it's not a refund, discount, etc, for using their service. One requires the other, and if you buy it, you *MUST* use their service, according to their supposed 'Terms of Service', which seems very vacant from their site for some reason..

I understand what and why they are doing this, but they are making it seem like something it's not, which is not legal. They are selling a cheap internet device, at a loss, without telling you you *MUST ALWAYS* use their internet service with it..

It's like buying a Toyoto, and being told you must now buy Toyoto brand gas, imported direct from Japan, for 20$ a gallon.

If you buy a car...

The car is yours to do with as you will. Plenty of people know enough about mechanics to soup up their 4-wheel toys, and plenty of people do. I don't see the car industry on the point of collapse.

Plenty of people can get hold of a PC case, fit the motherboard of their choice, etc. Plenty of small mail-order firms started exactly this way. I don't see Dell or Compaq going under, any time soon, from them. (You could even buy Dell computers, and re-use any higher-end components in your own computers. Nothing to stop you.)

If you buy Red Hat, you're free to tweak it as you will, and re-sell the finished product, openly stating it as a derivative, if you wish. Who's going to raise a stink?

Fact is, the "bottom line" is nowhere near as impacted by the hobbyist arena as accountants would have you believe. Rather, the hobbyist market has a proven track record of dragging in additional users in excess of the hobbyists' ability to supply. (The effects of the Apple I/II and the ZX 80/81 on public perception massively outweighed the market share either of these ever took.)

The =REAL= "bottom line" is that if you deny the hobbyists, they'll go elsewhere and help in developing your competitor's market and product.

We've seen it all before. Games drove graphics cards design, and graphics cards drove CPU design. If those hobbyists hadn't started with trying to get Spacewar and Pong going on affordable machines, you wouldn't have the high-end CAD market today. Nobody would have thought of it. And without lots of number-crunching apps (such as graphics packages) around, who would have bothered with developing fast FPU's?

The only company that blocks 3rd-party development is one that's just killed itself.

Give me a break!

Oh, that's ridiculous. They may be selling these as 'loss leaders' and they may want you to use their service after you purchase one, but if you pay what they're asking to purchase an i-Opener then you OWN it.

It's not a lease. It's not rental. It's a purchase. Opening it up and modifying it to make it do something else is no more stealing than buying a Playstation and letting it sit in a closet. Both are situations that result in a monetary loss for the manufacturer, but that's one of the risks they take by relying on their business model.

Theft, indeed!

Re:ATM machine...

What do you think, they sell each unit for a loss, but they'll make it up in volume?

Hey, works for Amazon.com...

Your Working Boy,

What can they do?

It seems like they're fairly limited in their options to lock this thing down. Removing the header wouldn't help, since soldering is straightforward. Re-spinning the board to remove the header traces completely would take a fair amount of time. A BIOS change to disallow more than 1 IDE device might do it, but someone would probably distribute the original BIOS image, or a trace could probably be cut to disable the SanDisk flash and allow another IDE device...

What would it take to _really_ lock this thing down?

Disclaimer - I think NetPliance is a pretty cool company, and I'd hate to see them fail as a result of this attention. They've certainly gotten a lot of press lately, which can't hurt, and hopefully offsets the monetary losses to the hardware-hacking geeks...

---

Re:What can they do?

Superglue in the IDE port.

Thinking about it, they could do any of the following things:

• Modify the BIOS to only boot off the SanDisk and remove the ability to break into qnx.
• Not stick the ide connector on the board. This is the easiest to do.
• Pump goo into the ide connector on the board.
• Use high secuirty bolts rather than regular phillips head screws.
• Hotglue the case closed.
• Lock out all access to the keyboard during the BIOS boot.
• Nothing. Make it a legal matter and harrass those publishing information about it.

If they do #1, then one could easily get around that by cutting traces on the board that enables the SanDisk chips and put an IDE drive into the unit jumpered as slave.

If they don't stick the ide connector onto the board, a quick trip to the local electronics parts store will fix this, plus a few minutes with a soldering iron. This will radically cut down the number of people who are able and willing to do the mod. This sort of change is the easiest to order in a mfg process.

If they pump goo into the socket, one could unstick the connector one pin at a time and put your own back on. Of course both this and the previous paragraph assume that the iopener has pin through board mounting. With surface mount for the ide connector, it is much harder to do either of these.

High security bits for my screw driver are available at the same local electronics store that I get my ide connectors from :-). Actually, I already own a complete set of all the weirdest ones that I've ever seen.

Hot glue can be cut with a good knife or dremmel tool.

The next to the last item is the same as the first.

The last one kicks it into the socio-ethical realm since nothing has changed.

One can also jumper the SanDisk from secondary to primary relatively easy. The IDE CD adapters can do this by shorting one of the pins to ground or Vcc (I don't have my docs handy).

Re:Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth...

This is idiotic on their part. Someone comes out with something which I'm willing to bet at boosted their sales by an order of magnitude, and
they cut that revenue source off? That's just stupid.

Yeah, how stupid. So what if they were losing money on every one they sold? They'd make it up in volume!

so use their service for a month

Their web site says:

By purchasing the i-opener you are agreeing to use the i-opener Internet service. The fee is $21.95 a month and will be billed approximately 2 days after the i-opener is shipped to you.

Ok ... so pay for one month of service, then cancel.

Modification of the i-opener in any way is in violation of our terms and conditions.

I can't find their terms of service on their site. Anyone have the complete terms of service?

I'm pretty sure that the doctrine of first sale applies here. Since they are selling the box to you, you have the right to do with it as you wish, whether that be replace the operating system, or use it as a pavement stone.

Anyway, several states explicitly forbid the tying of a purchased item with a subscription service.

If this is their business model, then they have shot themselves in the foot. The package they are selling (hardware plus service) has a higher salvage value (the hardware is the salvage item) then the initial purchase cost. They should have known better.

Re:Can't be a good move for them

Ummm... They sold their units at a LOSS. They expected to make up for it by the fees for the online service. A bunch of hackers opened up the boxes, installed NetBSD, and didn't use their service. So, they stood to lose tons of money on their loss leaders with no way to make it up... It's not exactly shooting themselves in the feet when they try to stop the on coming flood of future losses.

Oh, and who has open source actually helped, I'm curious? Red Hat? VA Linux? Cobalt? Well, they were all open source companies to start with.

Corel, maybe?
Netscape? No... they got bought by AOL just as they were vowing to make Linux a "tier 1 platform".
How about Apple? No... Apple's opened their kernel, but make their money on hardware sales... Plus their new OS isn't even on the market yet, so it's hard to gauge the effects of their new OS.
SGI? Okay, SGI might be rebounding... In the past few weeks their price range has gone from the low 9's and low 10's to around the 12 dollar mark.

Who else has open source helped? Please tell me!

Another point here is when companies execute according to their business plan, they're more likely to succeed. When their customers tear up their business plan and and starts taking their product from them, it's just not a good business strategy.

We've heard this before

Remember the great deals one could get in California, with the MSDN bundling with a computer? Microsoft didn't bother trying to make the internet service legally bound to the computer, because they knew it was so blatantly against California law, that they with their DOJ-fighting legal department, was certain to lose.

Netpliance should try keeping up with industry news. Watch for the price of the I Opener to rise soon, as they find that the loss leader strategy will still fail.

Also watch for a failing IPO. :-)

Oh, and as far as making it tamper-proof: Keep in mind that the original hacker was able to see through their reversed IDE port. Unless they switch to an unflashable BIOS, that doesn't support hard drives, Netpliance's attempts at that will also fail, I believe.

I don't think this could be true (yet)

I don't see how they could have modified the hardware so quickly to do this. Some discussion on i-opener-linux.net [i-opener-linux.net] (where I saw this story last night) considered whether this was possible or not, and the upshot was that maybe the BIOS could have been modified, but there hasn't been time for a hardware modification. And BIOS that has been changed once can certainly be changed again (although this might be difficult w/o a floppy drive). The terms-of-service argument doesn't bother me at all, since I didn't agree to any at Circuit City, and I don't plan to even boot the thing until after adding a Linux drive and so forth. You only see the warning linked from the story above if you buy an i-opener from Netpliance's site.

I ordered my i-opener on 3/16, so I'm not sure if this announcement will apply to it or not. I haven't received it yet, but on the other hand it may have been shipped from Netpliance before 3/20, and just not received by Circuit City yet. If the worst case is true and it's unhackable, my CC receipt allows for 14-day returns (with 15% restocking fee).

It is strange how Netpliance has bounced back and forth on the mod issue - sometimes they seem to be really cool about it, but then they go and do something like this. I hope the open, "friendly" personality eventually comes through, because I'd be happy to recommend one of these to a relative who wanted a simple web browsing appliance, and I'd even consider buying a more-expensive i-opener-type device which was specifically designed for modification. Meaning more and more accessible serial/parallel/USB ports, VGA output, a slightly larger case to allow more room for onboard drives, etc., official developer's information such as pinouts, etc.

Re:kiosk ideas

I went looking around the net for cheap lcd's and came across this [73.com]. They sell surplus laptop parts including 10.4" LCD screens for as low as $90/each.

From their site:
HITACHI 10.4" LCD SCREENS
300 pcs Hitachi 10.4" Dual Scan LCD screen model LMG9300XUCC, new pulls. As low as $90.00each for the lot! DA408

So the screens by themselves are available for fairly cheap prices if someone is willing to just go out and hack together a system. Mainly you would need to find an embedded PC system which has an onboard LCD driver (available quite commonly in industry), wire together, add a hard drive, enet if necessary, and that would be all.

Several embedded versions of Linux floating around (look at http://www.linuxdevices.com [linuxdevices.com]) that would work great.

They have a business model to protect.

If you read the articles about this you will realize that the hardware is so cheap because they are anticipating sales of the service. They actually loose money when they sell the hardware w/o the service. So this company that uses some really neat technology (QNX) is going to go under if they keep selling cheap toys to linux geeks without selling their service.
Think about that before you get terribly upset at them for forcing you to buy the service, or changing the machine so that it can't be moded. These people are struggling to make a buck just like the rest of us. Also I think we should be supportive of companies who are seeking alternatives to Microsoft products in light weight appliances. We need more companies like this to enhance competition so that we see more innovation.

Jeff

i-opener pricing model

What's the big deal! This is _NOT_ complicated. The pricing is analogous to a cell phone. If you agree to a two year contract, the phone is *FREE*. a.k.a. Sign up for i-opener service and the box is $99. --or-- If you pay $199 fro this neat phone, we won't lock you into any long commitments. a.k.a. You can buy this no-strings-attachedf i-opener for (what's a fair price?) 300? 400? 500? Then you can pay for i-opener service month-to-month or not at all. Think about how little cell phone companies care what you actually do with the phones as long as you fulfill your contractual obligation. As long as you have a rational pricing model, all of these "oh my gods the nerd are opening them up" worries vanish. I just don;'t get it.

Re:circuit city

With Regards to pressuring them for a 'linux-ready,' 'easier to modify' model, this is there nice reply to a letter I sent them. I also asked for a copy of the QNX license, and the root password:

=-==-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dear XXXXX

We appreciate your interest in our product and our company.

We understand that a group of individuals recently developed a way to run
the Linux operating system on the i-opener by making modifications to the
hardware and removing our software. The modifications allow these highly
technical users to bypass the i-opener service network. These modifications
are isolated to the i-openers purchased by those individuals and have no
impact whatsoever on the Netpliance service network or its customers.

It's worth noting that the work-around these individuals developed does not
provide them with free Internet service. While it has opened up a complex
route to other Internet Service Providers, virtually all of our i-opener
customers have no interest nor the technical skills in manipulating the
complex inner workings of the device to achieve that goal. i-opener
customers are looking for one thing: simple, inexpensive Internet access
without a computer. As this is our primary audience, we do not provide
documentation regarding the QNX operating system.

That said, the small community of users who developed this work-around
actually offer a complement to the core technology behind the i-opener -
that it's robust enough to run an operating system like Linux. Netpliance
does not endorse the modification of the i-opener device to possibly support
alternative operating systems or other uses. However, these developments
have uncovered an additional opportunity that Netpliance had not been
focusing on, but will now consider. We'll keep you updated as to how
Netpliance plans to work with the growing community of Linux developers.

Regards,

Kristi Copeland
Director - Sales and Support

What about backlog orders?

I just called, my unit shipped yesterday. When I asked if I would still be subject to the new terms and conditions, I got the answer (from the customer service person) that I was.

However... This would mean that I would not receive the same product that I ordered, and that I never agreed upon these new terms and conditions upon ordering the product. Right?

I guess they might have wrapped the unit the same way lots of software is distrubuted -- by breaking the shipping package you agree upon the terms...

kiosk ideas

I need some small, cheap, durable Linux machines to use as web kiosks. It sounded like these I-Opener things might do the job nicely, once fitted with some manner of ethernet. But I guess not any more.

The thing that's killing me here is that I'd really like to have flat-screens, since real monitors are just too damned big. But you can't get a flat-screen for less than around $1500, which is way too expensive.

Is it possible to re-use just the flat-screen from these I-Opener devices? Can you just plug them in to another computer, or are they specialized hardware? Because an 800x600 flat-screen for $99 still sounds like a good deal to me.

Any other suggestions for how to do kiosks cheaply?

In particular, I want something that you stand in front of, and that doesn't take up a lot of floor space.

They had to do this

The bottom line is all powerful in a public held company. Netpliance literally *had* to do something about this situation or else the stock holders would likely have filed suit against them. They probably had no choice. I like Netpliance, I bought their stock when it tanked because I liked the way they responded. As a stock holder, I'm glad they took action to keep the other stock holders happy and hopefully to force the stock value in the positive direction again. As an open source advocate, I'm hopeful that they'll follow this short term action with some moves more like what they claim they wanna do (which is to work with the open source guys and the Linux guys in particular to get more applications ported to their tiny footprint machine). Personally, I believe they will. They just had to do what they did to keep the shareholders off their back for a while.

I asked about it.

I just called to check my order. When I asked if I would get the new one, the rep asked why. When I explained I wanted to be able to have full control of it he cancelled my order because I expressed interest in violating the terms of service. :(
-Davidu

I'm glad you got your order cancelled.

I think anyone else who has an order open for one of these and intends to modify should cancel their order, too.

Look, the manufacturer was stupid to not have an air-tight contract required you to use their service. That should have been in place the day they shipped their first unit. But to modify the unit and avoid using their service still feels to me like you would be running a rip-off on the manufacturer.

No way are they able to manufacture the device for $99. It should be really clear to all of you that they were intending to amortize the cost through their online service.

Us Open Source folks are supposed to be more ethical than the rest of the software crowd. This whole deal puts a really bad taste in my mouth.

If anyone else has a pending order and intended to modify the device, please cancel your order.

Thanks

Bruce

Oh well... It was a good idea at the time.

And I had one on order from Circuit City, too. This'll be interesting - a whole lot of people have ordered them from Circuit City and put deposits down - and now when/if they arrive theoretically they are no longer modifiable.

Well, if we all cancel our orders then suddenly there will be a huge inventory of these things piled up in Circuit City's stores, and Netpliance'll have some issues to deal with there...

I think I'll look and see what happens when the order arrives - maybe the box has a production date. If that's the case and it's a new, supposedly unmodifiable one then I'll just refuse it, given that it's not the unit I ordered. This whole thing has serious amusement potential.

What Netpliance should have done is considered moving upscale a little bit. Imagine almost that exact same unit shipped with a small hard drive, an Ethernet jack instead of a modem, and a P233MMX for $200-$250 or so as an Internet terminal for business. To heck with PC's, I'd buy a coupe of dozen for my company at that price. If $50-$75 more could get a TFT screen instead (remember, it's only a 10.4" screen and those are relatively cheap) it would still be a no-brainer. The ISP service is fine, but it's brilliant hardware packaging and design.

- -Josh Turiel

circuit city

I spoke with Circuit City and they said they would be selling them as soon as they are restocked (in two weeks) up here in Minnesota. I have verified this with several of the stores in my area.

I suspect this affects only web-based purchases. I will also point out they are cutting off a revenue stream - these are perfect birthday presents for people who are maybe not as computer-literate as you or I (like our parents). Increasing the price and/or forcing this kind of TOS makes that kind of purchase impossible... which is very unfortunate.

It's a nice idea.. and having them use linux was a neat hack.. I would pressure them to come out with a "linux-ready" version at a higher price.. as you must recognize that they can't support their revenue model with us eating into it - $99 probably does not even cover wholesale costs of the device.

TANSTAAFL

I'm surprised more of the geeks around these parts, likely being Heinlein readers, don't think of "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as soon as they hear something like this. Instead they go out and order dozens, and when the loophole is shut down they get all indignant.

This device sounds exactly like what FreePC tried. Remember them? Hey, get a free PC, all you have to do is agree to look at our ads. Every geek I know said "Dude, I'll hack the system! I'll fix it so i never have to look at ads, *and* I'll get a free computer! I'll set up fake accounts and get a dozen!" There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The PC was free because it was a loss leader. At least they were smart enough to put you into a contract right from the beginning. To get around that deal by simply failing to hold up your end of the contract, well, that's not a hack, that's just plain illegal and doesn't take a great deal of intelligence.

I used to have a boss in my first job who liked to say (being a lifelong salesman), "Give away the razor. Sell the blades." During meetings when a good idea came up, he would ask "What's the razor? What's the blade?" The razor is the PC. The blade is the monthly service.

Netpliance's problem seems to have been that they forgot to lock in the contract up front. Somebody in there must have figured that only people who want the service would get the machine, since after all that's all the machine was good for. That was their mistake, underestimating the power of geeks who smell a free lunch. Yes, to hack their device was very cool indeed. But to set up a small business whose purpose was solely to buy them by the dozen, hack them, and then resell them? I'm glad netpliance closed the loophole. (Note, I don't know for a fact that anybody did that -- but almost everybody I heard did say that they were buying them in plurals, so I can quite logically assume that the most rabid free lunchers would be buying them by the dozen).

And how many people actually did the math? Ok, $100 box. Personally for me, not being a hardware hacker, I figure it's going to take me several hours to do the necessary soldering and such. The first time (since I'd only buy one), it might take what, 4? If somebody wanted me to work on installing software and hard drives for a living, what would I ask for pay? $150/hr? Ok, so now it's a $700 device. I have to put a hard drive in the thing, right? How big do I want to go? Plus what do the other parts cost? So maybe I throw another $200 or so into it? Now it's a $900 device. Throw in the shipping most people paid, the throw-away first month of ISP service, etc etc... and you're up over $1000 very likely. For those that primarily wanted the flat screen, ok, this is still a good deal. But it's one hell of an expensive MP3 player, if that was your plan.

Lastly, I love the logic of people that say "This is actually good for Netpliance, because most of the hardware hackers that buy them will never hack them, and just end up giving them away as gifts or something." How pray tell does that make Netpliance any more money? It doesn't, unless you count the slashdot effect as a marketing technique.

So, to sum up. Some clever hacker found a loophole, and benefited from it. Many followed. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, it was never Netpliance's intention to give away $100 machines for no return, and now it's closed. Don't whine about it. Go be a clever hacker and find the next loophole to exploit, and act a little quicker next time.

d