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A comment on Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery. Parent comment

Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by drivebyacct2 on Saturday July 23, 2011 @02:28AM (#2796360)
Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) was hacked wide(r) open after they discovered that they could use it's "smart chip" to emulate a special Sony battery that left the firmware flashable.

"Pandora's Battery": http://www.noobz.eu/joomla/news/pandoras-battery.html http://www.krizka.net/2008/02/10/what-is-pandoras-battery/

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Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by lgeek on Saturday July 23, 2011 @03:19AM (#2796428)
To be more exact, a battery with ID 0xFFFF (hhm, not sure if it was 16 or 32 bit) enables service mode on older PSPs. This ID is stored on a serial EEPROM. Incidentally, you could just disconnect the data pin of the EEPROM. I don't remember if it was I2C (in which case the pin was SDA) or SPI (MISO).

So it wasn't exactly a security vulnerability, more like a failed attempt at security by obscurity.

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