We’re still looking to get an I/O ticket for trevorj, so anyone who’s willing to sell or knows someone selling theirs please contact either him or myself via email (one_of_our_usernames@droidmod.org). Either full shot or academic, doesn’t really matter.

We didn’t find out till a few days after the registration was filled that his schedule allowed it, and everyone expected it to be open for a bit longer anyways, but these things happen.

We’re only interested in the ticket, not the surprise gift phone, so you effectively get a free phone, and maybe even a bit more cash in your pocket than you started with

All offers will be considered.

Thanks for all your continued support,

sgx, on behalf of trevorj and the DroidMod team

EDIT: Trevorj  has a ticket now, and we’re booked for I/O. Now for the hard part, waiting for the 18th so we can fly out…

An unofficial from-source engineering snapshot of Project Durden was dropped in IRC a few hours ago, and aside from wifi not working due to a missing driver and launcher2 freaking because of landscape, it’s apparently working good.

No direct support will be given, as this is an unofficial snapshot, but members of the community can most likely help you out if you do need it.

Webkit and superuser are from the Cyanogen repository, and our vendor overlay is based on Koush’s. You can browse the manifest in our repo at git.droiddev.org. This is only the beginning of whats to come, we are looking forward to working with as many teams and people as possible to create something really great.

The snapshot is an update.zip format file with an md5sum of 62a5a149a354a9da30d5abbd3a845083 please verify this before instalation for some peace of mind. Data and cache will need to be wiped before install.

Let me stress again that this is not a fully finished release, or even an alpha or beta. It’s a snapshot of what we’re doing that we felt we should let out. It’s plain vanilla.

sgx, speaking on behalf of the DM team

EDIT: A wififix.zip that cures the wifi issue has been dropped on irc, md5sum of 7d3720320bd3e1a955175c0e91a6b0d7

I’ve been getting a number of chargebacks over the past few days for the SMUpdater application, so I’d like to explain what chargebacks are, and why you should only ever send them as a last resort.

When you purchase something with a credit or debit card, you give authorization for that purchase by signing off (electronically or otherwise) on the transaction. If someone were to steal your payment information, it would be trivial for them to fool the seller and the payment processor in to accepting and approving fraudulent payments. To protect you against this type of fraud, there is a thing called a chargeback. If you choose to dispute a charge, the payment processor will take back the money from the seller, and tack on an additional fee (that the seller has to pay) for the service.

The most important thing to know about a chargeback is that it is fundamentally different from a refund. When you are refunded, the seller credits you the amount you were charged, and everyone goes home happy. When you send a chargeback, your bank forcibly removes the money from the seller’s account, and fines them for making an unauthorized charge. If an account receives too many chargebacks, these fines can get huge (hundreds of dollars per chargeback).

There are a number of legitimate reasons to send chargebacks, but none of them are applicable to this post, so I won’t go in to detail. These include identity theft, duplicate billing, items returned but not refunded, and advertised services not being provided. What I’m focusing on here is simply buyers’ remorse, which is not a legitimate cause for sending chargebacks.

It’s actually very common for people (assholes) to abuse the chargeback system in this way. People will purchase items, change their minds about wanting the product, and send chargebacks to get their money back instead of dealing with the seller in an equitable way. Disputing these illegitimate chargebacks is nearly impossible for online services (it is usually impossible to prove that services were rendered), and when it is possible, it is almost always cost prohibitive.

In the case of the Andriod Marketplace, the chargeback fee is $3.00. As the number of apps that cost more than $10 in market can be counted on one hand, it typically costs more money for a seller to dispute a chargeback than it does to pay the fee, so there is really no point in trying.  Because of this, Android application developers bend over backwards to grant timely refunds, usually with no questions asked. It’s simply not worth the risk of having to pay a fee that, usually, is many times more than their profit margin was to begin with. If an app costs $1.00, the developer only takes home $0.70 after Google takes its cut. That means that for every chargeback the developer recieves, they have to sell the app more than 4 more times to make their money back on the chargeback fee – just to get back to zero.

In the case of the old SMUpdater app that I pulled off of market, I have not once refused a refund to anyone that has asked for any reason, and it was made clear in the application description that the money was a donation to the project (Read: buyers’ remorse is not even a legitimate [i]feeling[/i]). By sending me a chargeback, you are not only taking your money out of the pool, but you’re taking an additional $3 out of my personal income. It is a completely unnecessary and insulting step.

Chargebacks are bad for everyone – it’s a lose-lose scenario. They make you (the buyer) look back for sending them, because fraudulent charges mean you were not careful with your personal information. They make the seller look bad, because they approved a fraudulent charge. They’re even bad for Google, because if they receive too many chargebacks, Google will end up making less money (Visa or whoever will rapidly increase the fines associated with each chargeback).

So, the next time you think about sending a chargeback over a tiny charge, you ought to give the seller a chance to do the right thing privately. It will not hurt to ask, and if the seller still refuses to refund you, only then should you consider taking such a hostile action.

PS (from trevorj): If you do request a chargeback, it is legally considered bank fraud, as it was a donation, not a payment for any sort of service or product in any way, shape, or form. It was a donation, get over it.

I’ll be performing some miscelaneous updates/upgrades to the underlying systems on git.droiddev.org today. (mainly updating to latest version of git/gitweb and adding mirroring to github)

I’ll try to keep impact minimal, but be advised that clones might fail randomly throughout the day.

Snapshots will still be downloadable via the gitweb interface.

sgx

EDIT: updated to git/gitweb version 1.7.0.4 from 1.5.6.5 (damn Debian takes FOREVER to update to the latest packages… sid FTW!) next stop gitosis…

http://www.mediafire.com/?jgt1gjgx5gv

[mbm] was kind enough to provide this.

That should help people going from stock ESE81 OTA 2.1 get a root friendly recovery. No more downgrade, root, apply zip, install update fun.

Just flash that, and you will have the latest SPRecovery version installed.

Please note that this WILL reflash the boot image to stock ESE81! This is required to keep recovery from being overwrote on reboot. A few bits in the boot image were changed to break the checksum hash that the recovery update checks.

The md5sum of the image is:

9b6a336cd8f067d4487935468c758d89  SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf

PLEASE VERIFY THIS HASH! This is the ONLY way to verify that you have the correct image!

Linux users can run “md5sum SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf” in the folder you downloaded to

Windows users can download md5sum.exe from http://etree.org/md5com.html

Place md5sum.exe in c:\windows\system32 to get it into your path

syntax is the same as for linux

As always, we are not responsible for user errors, and it’s your responsibility to obtain any other tools that you may need.

For those that would like a step-by-step guide, please follow this link.

Hello, I am looking for an I/O ticket.

If anyone happens to have one they want to sell to me, let me know

TY
~trevorj

Many people have been asking when 2.1 will receive a “proper” root exploit. The answer is probably never. This is not because we believe it is impossible, but is simply due to the fact that the phone already has been rooted. It would be nonsensical for any developer to waste their time working on this when there is already a way to root the phone.

To anyone who is waiting around for DMUpdater to be able to root 2.1 directly (without flashing recovery via sbf or other means): You’re waiting for something that will never come. No one is working on this, and no one will.

Edit (@trevorj): This does not mean anything about the 2.1 based DM. We are still at work on this, no worries there. I edited this post to include this last part because it was being misread. This post is about using DMUpdater to root phones running stock 2.1 directly without flashing recovery back to an older unpatched version. Thanks.

I thought I would post some clarification about the 2.1 OTA update, since there is a shockingly large amount of misinformation being spread throughout the community. If you are running DroidMod, you should accept the 2.1 update. The phone will reboot in to recovery, and SPRecovery will block the update outright. Even if you are not running SPRecovery, there’s really nothing to worry about, because the pre-install checks internal to the update will fail, and the update will not be applied anyways.

Many people have been renaming otacerts.zip to stop the notification from appearing, so I’d like to address that. Renaming otacerts.zip will indeed stop the notifications from being presented to you, but it does so by breaking the updater mechanism in a way that makes it think that the update file is corrupt. This will cause it to re-download the update file indefinitely, which will severely impact your battery life. This is why we didn’t remove the file from the ROM entirely.

So, to put it simply, if you are running any non-stock ROM at all, you can safely “accept” the 2.1 update to stop the notifications; the update will not be able to patch the modified system files, and will not make any changes to your phone.

Following on the heals of trevorj’s post, I’m going to give everyone a bit more info on our Windows CE prank, and the background of it.

First off, we really could have done CE, since TI has a nice SDK  for the Omap processor available at their site. It’s not the direction we are going however, because quite frankly WinCE makes me wince.

Secondly, the domain was an accidental thing (don’t ever ever ever renew domains when you’re running on 30 minutes of sleep…). I had jokingly priced it back in February, and it stayed in my shopping cart till I renewed 2 other domains. This was my out of pocket expense, and the $8.88 for a year was well worth it for the sheer shenanigans factor.

Third, all credit for the logo goes to Vlcn, who is an absolute wizard.

The idea to play the prank was mine, so I am to blame, Trev decided on WinCE and was a good sport agreeing to be the brunt of it, and Vlcn kindly agreed to do up the mock logo on short notice.

On behalf of everyone here, happy April fools!

Hello all! We are pleased to announce a new mod, NakedTrevMod.
We felt that we had to change names to something more professional that suits us better.

With this post we are stopping development on DroidMod to focus on a much better alternative:
NakedTrevMod: Bringing Windows CE to the Droid.

Honestly, Android is just too closed source for our liking. Windows CE has everything laid out in the open (including your data), so we took the obvious right choice.

Our new home: http://nakedtrev.com

Windows CE for the Droid