Just info seeking/curiosity. The SL3 Story?
#1
Long time reader, 1st time poster.

So I was doing some WPA speed testing as I finally got Linux working on my new laptop. The reason I'm a long time reader and only now posting is because I've always been able to work things out myself. Taking time to research is better than being spoon-fed in my opinion. Even if the research will take up lots of my time, I'll still at least be learning something new.

To clarify, I don't need SL3 support. I would never buy a phone that I couldn't do what I wanted with. I'm mainly looking for more information. So please don't kill (ban) the cat for curiosity or personal opinion lol.

As I understand it based on the little available:

• Manufacturers dreamt up yet another way to shit on the user and made Simlock 3. Something apparently harder for the user reclaim their freedom and break than previous methods.

• Then someone, somewhere would have found GPU accelerated brute forcing to be a viable method of breaking this atrocity.

• Then oclHashcat had it implemented.

• Then, it seems, it got very heated. Apparently there was an influx of noobs. Along with an exploitation of those noobs by someone who passed oclHashcat off as their own for money.

• Along with that unlocking services started popping up. People began to set up dedicated SL3 cracking servers. Presumably servers with a fair amount of GPU's for parallel cracking. Obviously because the GPU's from then could take up to 9 days to crack SL3. (I looked at ATI GPU's from around 2011 on http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm) And again, they charged money for this.

• Things escalated with a torrent of hatred, immaturity and flaming on the forums. And at about the same time, some versions oclHashcat's timebomb were cracked allowing them to be used after the author wanted those versions discontinued. Which better suited those running the dedicated cracking servers as it would obviously allow them to keep the software instead of being forced to upgrade.
However, those running these servers still had to pay for the use of oclHashcat as many were ignorant to the software they were running. This, along with the huge influx of noobs and the cracking of the timebombs apparently enraged atom. So he dropped support for Simlock 3 in future versions. Starting a heated flame war on the thread where he announced it (http://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1887.html).

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I've never withheld my opinion for fear of reprisal before and I'm not about to start now. I just hope this will be seen as a valid, harmless, opinion. And not needlessly expunged because it conflicts with someone else's opinion or because the topic is simply disliked. No one need read any of this thread if they don’t want to.

Based on the information so far. This entire situation is just awful. Manufacturers really have fucked over the end user once again. It was OK though. Those who wanted to have the freedom to use their phone wherever they damned well felt like it had a method of doing so. Assuming they had decent hardware and could read. Even if it took a month to crack many would still prefer that to forking out cash just to have their operator tell them "Yes, you can now leave our evil grasp and use your phone where you like". Personally, even if it took a year and was 10 times more expensive in electricity alone. I myself would still do it if a manufacturer subjected me to SL3! But for many, it was obviously far cheaper.

There seems to be a lot of defence around the dropping of SL3. I can only presume, and hope, that this is only because there is such a disdain for noobs here. However, it's a terrible move. All it does is play right into the hands of arseholes who subvert the freedom of those poorer than they are. The best thing would of course be for Sim locking and all the rest of that shite like DRM to die a horrible and decisive death. But that wont happen.

When researching what to say. I was unable to find an alternative to hashcat for SL3 unlocking. Admittedly because there was so many links wanting me to buy an unlocking service. But still. If I had a hard time then what chance does someone less tech-savvy than me have? That one option that could have been there, is now mostly gone. To let a disdain for noobs and the actions of a few greedy fuckers grant a free pass to the strangle of mobile users freedoms is a terrible, terrible action. I don't need SL3 cracking. But unfortunately, as long as there is greedy corporations, many do. So if the move was to try and stop greed in general. It has horribly backfired. If it was more against greed from those selling oclHashcat exclusively, you have only slowed them down. But at the expense of allowing the far more subversive and widespread greed of those who impose SL3 to run rampant.

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Anyway. Any further information would be greatly appreciated.
And I strongly encourage nitpicking. As there seems to be little information on this subject. Grammar Nazis are welcome too lol

Last but certainly not least. A huge shout out to atom and all who help in the development of all hashcats! By far my favourite hash crackers!
#2
What's the question here?

If you're asking why hashcat does not support SL3 anymore, there are two reasons:
  • the forum got flooded with übernoobs, not even able to formulate one proper english sentence, asking the same stupid questions all the time and annoying the shit outta everyone. Nobody here really liked these barbaric SL3 guys.
  • more importantly, people in the SL3 community patched hashcat to avoid the timebomb mechanism, because the new version was 0.x% slower then the previous one (or they were too lazy to upgrade their drivers) and published the patched hashcat binary. An obvious violation of the EULA. Additonally there was a beta tester (or multiple?) who patched and sold the beta version of hashcat, which was marginally faster than the current stable, to SL3 people.
#3
Well in tl;dr format.
Are my bullet points accurate?

Basically I saw SL3 and was like "ooo whats that?", found out, thought "Great! Wonderful that oclHashcat lets people unlock their phones!", then found out it was removed and couldn’t understand why. So I was asking for more info, partially hoping it's worse than just noobs and greed that caused its removal.

Even now after getting the gist of it I still don’t get why.
Sounds to me like an awesome feature. Seems so horrible to remove it just because the noobs were overly nooby. As for the EULA breach. Sadly people will always rip stuff off. I know oclHashcat has been sold for more than SL3 (I have personally seen listings of it on pen drives on Silkroad). I think its terrible that things should be different in this case just because there happened to be a lot of noobs. IMO.
#4
Well, I can guarantee you that people making money with hashcat has never been a concern for atom. He stated at several occasions that he is perfectly fine with people making money with hashcat and there is absolutely no limitation of such actions in the EULA. There isn't actually much that hashcat's EULA asks from its users, but these people did not ignore the EULA once, but even multiple times. It can't be this hard to respect a coder's work, can it?

Besides, cracking SL3 is no devil's work. It's a single iteration of salted SHA1 that can be done by every hash cracking tool out there. Well, except hashcat. (I think/hope atom implemented some SL3-blocker) All these SL3 people are free to use other tools.

here are some valuable contributions of the SL3 community to our forum:
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1346.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1557.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1347.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1588.ht...hlight=sl3

bonus points for people pointing out a single proper english sentence by the thread authors.
#5
Honestly it was the blatant disrepect, demands, and incredibly terrible culture they brought with them. They were basically given 3 strikes, and took 5. After a lot of deliberation it was just decided that it would be removed. This solved all the problems by removing the people causing them, and further obsoleting the software due to requirements from drivers etc.

There are a lot more posts of them that have been removed so the whole conversation surrounding them would die.
#6
(08-31-2014, 11:59 PM)undeath Wrote: Well, I can guarantee you that people making money with hashcat has never been a concern for atom. He stated at several occasions that he is perfectly fine with people making money with hashcat and there is absolutely no limitation of such actions in the EULA.

I see. So it was just many in the community that hated this? That's not so bad. I think its fine too, so long as its electricity and service that they pay for and not oclHashcat.

(08-31-2014, 11:59 PM)undeath Wrote: here are some valuable contributions of the SL3 community to our forum:
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1346.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1557.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1347.ht...hlight=sl3
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1588.ht...hlight=sl3

bonus points for people pointing out a single proper english sentence by the thread authors.

lol. I don't know how I'd feel after months of exposure, for now I just think its just amusing. But yes, very poor language. However many simply be from non English countries. Then, naturally get frustrated and start flaming when they cant get help or can't formulate a sentence capable of attaining help. Wrong yea, but devolving into hate, ridicule and such as I saw from my searches of SL3 is just as bad. If I didn't want to help I'd just ignore the threads, maby a single link reply.

(09-01-2014, 01:56 AM)radix Wrote: Honestly it was the blatant disrepect, demands, and incredibly terrible culture they brought with them. They were basically given 3 strikes, and took 5. After a lot of deliberation it was just decided that it would be removed. This solved all the problems by removing the people causing them, and further obsoleting the software due to requirements from drivers etc.

Was It really so terrible? Is it really that people were just sick of SL3 support so it was removed because it was the easiest option?

(09-01-2014, 01:56 AM)radix Wrote: There are a lot more posts of them that have been removed so the whole conversation surrounding them would die.

Ah! Makes more sense now. Perhaps this is why SL3 removal seemed overly abrupt.

(08-31-2014, 11:59 PM)undeath Wrote: Besides, cracking SL3 is no devil's work. It's a single iteration of salted SHA1 that can be done by every hash cracking tool out there. Well, except hashcat. (I think/hope atom implemented some SL3-blocker) All these SL3 people are free to use other tools.

So with a bit of elbow grease hashcat may still work? What are the others? I had a look but there's so much rubbish about buying time on peoples SL3 server it seems impossible to have a proper hit on Google.
If its posted here people from Google may at least be able to find a reference on their quest to unlock their phones. Since I know many of my hashcat queries have similarly been solved by coming to these forums from Google.