[chatmasta]

Wouldn’t it be pretty trivial to remove the blacklisting code?

It’s not like this is a cellphone sold to my mom. It’s an extremely specialist product aimed at a group of users with vast electronics and reverse engineering knowledge. Probably won’t be long before one of them reverse engineers the device and releases the code to ignore the blacklisting.

Anyone know the technical details of how the blacklisting works?

[discreditable]

If you unintentionally buy a blacklisted phone online, do you try to break the blacklist or report the seller and get a refund?

[chatmasta]

The blacklisting code is in every device, even those sold legitimately. That is, the device “phones home.” Some users may not be okay with that.

In my experience, the kind of person who buys an SDR is (a) unlikely to appreciate a $400 device that phones home on boot, and (b) likely to reverse engineer the blacklisting code simply for the fun of it.