Quote from: Taoman on May 20, 2016, 11:16:26 PM
Quote from: SteveInWA on May 20, 2016, 10:55:12 PM
I contacted Obihai to let them know this was happening. They replied that they'd get right on it. Soon after, you found the 2886 firmware.
But the firmware was released before that time. You posted at 2:47 on the 18th you were going to see what you could find out. I can only assume it was sometime after that point that you "reached out" to Obihai.
Rchandra posted he had already paid the $10 and got the updated firmware at 2:22 on the 18th. The updated firmware (not a fix) had already been released by the time you contacted Obihai.
If you truly believe your story, Steve, you need to answer these questions:
1>Why didn't this authentication problem affect 20x devices?
2>Why did this authentication problem only affect 1xx devices that were out of warranty?
3>Why did this problem suddenly crop up after all this time and only on 1xx devices?
The answers you've come up with so far stretch credulity.
I'm not on the witness stand. I am not going to argue timelines. For all I know, Obihai already found and fixed the issue by the time I contacted them; as we know, their communications skills are abysmal. We also know that the various firmware update methods often are out of sync (***6 vs. downloading the supposedly "latest" generic firmware link, vs. downloading a build-specific firmware link). It's terrible version control, and users shouldn't have to do detective work to find the truly latest firmware.
My own experience was that the firmware update
was required to fix the issue; there is no reliable (multiple user reported) evidence that the 2872 build could be made to work. Personally, I took a first-generation, out-of-warranty 110 device out of storage and plugged it in. It was already running 2872. It was configured with two different valid/working Google Voice accounts, one on SP1 and the other on SP2. SP1's Google account had an expired password, which I successfully updated. SP2 worked out of the box. So, both then worked briefly that evening, then both SPs failed the next morning, consistent with symptoms reported by others. After updating to 2886, it worked. That's all that matters to me.
The 100 series devices have an entirely different SoC (MIPS-based) and thus, different firmware, than the ARM-based 200 and 10x2 series devices. I think it is reasonable to assume that Obihai made a mistake in either the 100-series device firmware or back-end systems that handle security for those particular devices. Digital certificates have expiration dates. OAUTH keys are periodically refreshed. Something broke that procedure. They fixed it.
This is the most plausible explanation I can offer, and yes, it is only my educated guess. If you feel it's valuable and productive to come up with a different educated guess, you're welcome to it.
Obihai's treatment of firmware upgrades on in-warranty vs. out-of-warranty devices has always been vague, inconsistent, and poorly-implemented. I don't think it's productive to try to reverse-engineer what happened with regard to a device being in-warranty or not. As we've seen, out-of-warranty devices can be updated manually, and, this case was no different; as soon as the new firmware was released, everyone was able to update their devices, regardless of warranty status.
I have no reason to believe that there was any malice or conspiracy here; just a technical error. If there had been some evil-doings, then a) the 100/110 devices would now be permanently bricked, which is most certainly not the case, and b) other evil things would have happened, such as bricking out-of-warranty 200 and 10x2 devices, which again, didn't happen. Haven't you ever made some sort of error in your work? Software companies discover f-ups every day, the hard way, in their code, when things like this happen.
Bottom line: old news about Obihai's misleading and distracting "advertisement" to buy the $10 support upgrade, but no change in the ability to manually update the devices, once a newer build becomes available.
Several of us have directly complained to Obihai about this messy situation. I've personally brought it up with Sherman. I have no way, short of a Carl Ichan-style takeover, of controlling their behavior.