Comment Re:Good idea (Score 1) 20
There may be some workarounds to that statement, but the vast majority of the Semiconductor manufacturers are not incentivized to offer anything other than locked down subsystems. The FCC rules explicitly call for electronic signatures (private keys) and that's assuredly the lowest-cost pathway to getting regulatory approval. Its not the ONLY possible way however, it's just the "easiest" with the sugar-coated side-benefit of locking down the device and giving the vendor total control "because we have to".
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/t...
While reverse engineering _might_ be a way to jailbreak a device, it's literally a fools errand, not only is every new semiconductor product going to have to require new jailbreak, even minior silicon "stepping" changes will probably move the problem space because if you own the silicon mask set for a chip, it's trivially easy to modify metal-mask ROM, or even get fancy and do PER-UNIT keying with laser-cuts or eFuse one-time-programmables. The Sony Playstation 3 chipset (IBM Cell Broadband Engine) was the first volume product to do this, so if there's any $$$ that can be had by forcing this kind of hardware resident lockdown, you know they will do it.