alt Hacker NewsI had to upgrade the firmware in my HP printer a couple years ago.
It’s a printer that I think was released in ~2009 (I am not able to check right now), and in order to upgrade the RAM to 256MB I needed to do a firmware update.
I dreaded this, but then I found out that all you do to update the firmware was FTP a tarball to the printer over the network. I dropped it in with FileZilla, it spent a few minutes whirring, and my firmware was updated.
Then I got mad that firmware updates are ever more complicated than that. Let me FTP or SCP or SFTP a blob there, do a checksum or something for security reasons, and then do nothing else.
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> Let me FTP or SCP or SFTP a blob there, do a checksum or something for security reasons
Whose security are we talking about here? Mine, or the manufacturer's?
I think my favorite is wifi access points that support tftp to load a firmware image (with some kind of hardware switch to enable this state). These can be made effective unbrickable and it's really nice for experimenting.