Nanotron 3000
Because of the immense amount of time it will take to brute force the 3G and the 4G by hand, the Linux4nano team has hatched an ambitious idea. We have decided to build a brute forcing robot with LEGO Mindstorms. We can leave this bot running overnight and hopefully find out the correct addresses. If the LEGO idea is not feasible we can resort to using transistors like Sto used on the 2G. This would be more expensive but easier IMO.
Technical details for 4G
- Time to hold down menu and center buttons to restart: exactly 5 seconds
Cable disconnected
- Time to reboot to main menu: 17.5 seconds
- Time to reboot to disk mode: 2-3 seconds depending on how quick you can press it
Cable connected
- Time to reboot to main menu: 35 seconds
- Time to reboot to disk mode: 11 seconds
For some reason booting up with the cable connected doubles the time to boot up, but we pretty much have to use the cable.
Using the times I've gathered, we can make a timeline of how our process will work, starting from disk mode:
- Take off old note file, put in new one (half a second)
- Hold down menu and play to reboot (5 seconds)
- Wait for boot (35 seconds)
- Find out what state the iPod is in and react accordingly (5 seconds if we have to force reboot)
- Boot to disk mode and start from beginning (11 seconds)
So the amount of time to test one file would take roughly 56.5 seconds (most likely 60 seconds with some delays in between). With that time we can test about 1440 files a day. With a 16-byte step (4 instructions, maybe we should do 2?) we could bust through a whopping 23040 bytes a day (0x5A00). Some addresses will have to be skipped for UTF-8 reasons.
We might end up having to try both the freeze and the crash files for the same address, which would double the time, but still be very practical.
TODO: work out ways from the robot's perspective to determine how the iPod reacts to the notes file. The easiest way seems to use the backlight, but this needs to be looked into. Perhaps we could use the iPod's USB status to tell...
If the iPod is frozen, lsusb waits for the iPod to respond for about 30 seconds, but finally finishes after giving up on the iPod. We could use this to determine if the iPod is frozen in our computer-side software.
