User @zephray_wenting recently appeared on Twitter Recorded purchase of laptop locked down in prison Efforts continue on eBay to jailbreak it and turn it into a working freedom-loving machine.
The laptop in question, the Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5, is equipped with the 8th generation Intel Celeron N3450, a chipset that runs at up to 2.2 GHz with four cores. It also has 4GB of non-upgradeable LPDDR3 RAM, but since this laptop was clearly intended for docked use only, there's no storage to hold an operating system. It's not very powerful, but if it can actually run an operating system, it has enough modern specs to be used on a light desktop.
By default, this unit has no operating system, no USB port, and a useless BIOS that automatically resets when power is removed, making it very difficult to flash a new BIOS. A locked password screen is also displayed at startup. However, if you like clear plastic shells for your electronics, the laptop itself looks pretty good.
But don't worry. The story doesn't end there. As always, all it takes to deal with a problem like this is an engineer who doubles as a lunatic with enough determination. As the original thread continues, @zephray_wenting proves his lunacy credentials by circumventing every restriction he finds. By using a flash programmer, I was able to find the password in her NVRAM in the BIOS and set it to zero…but in the process ran into the self-recovery issue mentioned above.
So what's the real workaround? Because if you replace the BIOS without powering off the motherboard, the original's BIOS will be automatically reflashed. This allowed me to enter the original BIOS, but I still had problems installing the OS. This laptop is also unusual in that it has a hard drive whitelist, which means that even if you insert it, you can only use very specific drives (and none). So instead, I had to manually retrofit a USB hub to my laptop to connect the boot media.
Fortunately, there was no USB whitelisting of any kind, so subsequent Ubuntu MATE installations completed without any issues. Modders also went on to install the aptly titled “FreeDoom” on their laptops. This is essentially an open source effort to rewrite the Doom engine while maintaining compatibility with existing Doom mods.
