Story time! Back when I was in automotive I had this idea:
We sold modified ECU firmware, in competition with other companies. Each company had their own pros and cons so we were never in direct competition. There is almost no one with software experience in the field. Files are "closed source", encrypted manually for every customer, then sent to users via email. Companies "need" to maintain their IP, that's just how it is, not for competition (I built a tool to crack the encryption, not hard) but mostly for pirates. The hardware devices that we targeted were locked down and closed source, so we just had to deal with it. The encryption software is protected by legalese, and only runs on Windows so I had to uh, dance around it...
With that in mind, most competition really doesn't understand how to run and maintain custom software. The idea was to host the storefront ourselves but paying companies would have a store that users could browse and purchase their firmware options. We would send them a server software package that gave them a nice UI to load files into and they would remain on their premises. Their machine would "host" their dedicated storefront (websocket with jrpc to our storefront). So files never left their control unencrypted, and they had control over their personal storefront on their own servers. I even wanted to defer payment handling to their nodes too. It was a complicated mess but I was and still am certain we could have sold it without much trouble.
#sillyideas #funtimes #automotive
ChipTuner
npub1qd…3fqm7
2024-08-20 03:05:29
Author Public Key
npub1qdjn8j4gwgmkj3k5un775nq6q3q7mguv5tvajstmkdsqdja2havq03fqm7Published at
2024-08-20 03:05:29Event JSON
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"content": "Story time! Back when I was in automotive I had this idea: \n\nWe sold modified ECU firmware, in competition with other companies. Each company had their own pros and cons so we were never in direct competition. There is almost no one with software experience in the field. Files are \"closed source\", encrypted manually for every customer, then sent to users via email. Companies \"need\" to maintain their IP, that's just how it is, not for competition (I built a tool to crack the encryption, not hard) but mostly for pirates. The hardware devices that we targeted were locked down and closed source, so we just had to deal with it. The encryption software is protected by legalese, and only runs on Windows so I had to uh, dance around it...\n\nWith that in mind, most competition really doesn't understand how to run and maintain custom software. The idea was to host the storefront ourselves but paying companies would have a store that users could browse and purchase their firmware options. We would send them a server software package that gave them a nice UI to load files into and they would remain on their premises. Their machine would \"host\" their dedicated storefront (websocket with jrpc to our storefront). So files never left their control unencrypted, and they had control over their personal storefront on their own servers. I even wanted to defer payment handling to their nodes too. It was a complicated mess but I was and still am certain we could have sold it without much trouble.\n\n#sillyideas #funtimes #automotive",
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