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bifferos

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Everything posted by bifferos

  1. Synology is not going to intentionally destroy or ransom your data, just because they deem you guilty of software piracy. Even bad boys Micro$haft don't get up to this sh*t, they just cut off your updates. The negative PR would be too great, and they'd be opening themselves up to lawsuits. If you disagree, name one corporation who's done this! There is no parallel with anonymity on github IMHO, because the source is open to scrutiny. Also, github is policed in a way mega.nz is not. They won't tolerate malicious code on their servers without taking action, at least not unless it's clearly labelled as such (perhaps for research purposes). I am not attacking this Jun guy, (or girl?) I'm simply questioning their motives, which I don't currently understand. One motive is money. Another is helping people. Unless I understand the reason for withholding the source (which doesn't appear to have been given), it's surely natural to question things? Most of my projects are open-source and always have been: https://github.com/bifferos The only exception was Biffboot (previously closed-source, now open-source), because I used it to make money. My motives are (or should be) transparent. The projects are just there to help people, and also a nice way of keeping a (free) store of stuff I've worked on, so what have I got to hide? There is no hidden agenda here. Jun, on the other hand doesn't seem to be selling anything, and so that removes that reason for staying closed-source. I don't think they can monetize this in the future either. So I'm left to wonder. This is understandable, and perfectly OK. They are worried about future legal action. I don't think protecting your anonymity online has anything to do with releasing closed-source software. If you want to help people you hand over as much info as you can.... about the problem! I don't need a list of home addresses to use some software, so it's not important. I can read the source, and it's good enough to trust community feedback if anything is amiss. This is how almost the entire internet works on open-source and is (relatively) safe. Understood!
  2. I'm surprised you think this is in any way comparable. If Synology do something malicious and someone finds out they get their asses handed to them in court. There's no such protection for this closed-source loader. Who is Jun? What is his address? Where would any court papers be served? I've no problem with closed-source software per se since I make a living out of it. I use open and closed-source software as I feel appropriate. I think you have to have a balance. Thanks for the tip about Redpill. It sounds like I should definitely try it, it came across as a bit Alpha but if you're using it successfully I will give it a go, especially if that's where the dev effort is now. I have tried FreeNAS but I'm not a fan. Yes, I eventually got it to do what I wanted but nothing like as painlessly as DSM. As for buying another NAS (Orphee's suggestion), yes I could do that, but I'm running Proxmox 24/7 already, so it would be nice to combine the two boxes, save some space in my house etc... I have 8 disk bays free in the Proxmox server, seems wasted right now. Cheers!
  3. Yes, that's a very good point. I don't know. My understanding is Jun's loader works best for most people, but for me closed source isn't acceptable. Most of the info on youtube, google searches leads to Jun's loader. I've only skimmed the info on this site but it seems redpill isn't really 'production ready' yet. I trust Synology DSM to some extent so no particular interest in looking at their sources. About the other three I've no idea. Do they work well? The reason why I'm looking at this is because although I have a DS213j it's quite old and not that powerful. I'd be happy if I could just transfer that system to a virtual machine (serial number and all), but it appears to be arm7, so not likely to be all that fast under emulation. I guess Jun's loader is only for the x86-based devices and that's where the development effort goes? I'm just mulling over whether I should try to contribute here. But usually people reverse-engineer so they can re-purpose hardware. Once it's done it's done (until a new version of hardware is released). But in this case it seems it's reverse-engineering an internal Synology interface which could change at any time with version updates. They could bring to bear all kinds of protection features that would just kill the project and waste all the work that's gone into it.
  4. I guess like the OP, I arrived here with the same question. I downloaded the loader. It appears to be a HD raw image. It has 3 partitions. The first appears to contain the grub config and bzImage. The 2nd partition contains the initrd, a kernel and some lzma files which I haven't looked at, the third partition is not recognised, and I can't mount it, but it contains data (I don't much like that latter point, but never mind for now). Just to clarify, what sources are we looking for here? Where is the clever stuff done? Some initrd binary that performs the download of DSM? Or something in the bzImage? thanks!
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