Yes, you will have to physically open toon to get in. There's no other way (at least not one that we know of). Quby did a good job at securing the machine from intrusion through software. Prodrive shouldn't have soldered a serial port and JTAG interface to the pcb, though . Once you're in, it's straightforward to install dropbear, and to start talking with the machine, through ssh. Telnet is a bit old school.If I understand correctly the only way to get access for now is with jtag. But if a cfw with telnet enabled could be installed then more people will be able to start working on the platform.
Once your post counter hits 10, IIRC, you're no longer pre-moderated, and discussion can speed up, so, keep talking .P.S does a moderator has to re-look every post? this really disturbs communication.
Not everybody's equally nimble with a hex editor (or a JTAG interface for that matter). But then again, if you can master one, you're probably not afraid to try the other ..The hard-coded part is not a real issue. We can edit them out with a elf editor.
grtz,
marcelr