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D-Link Settles Danish Time Dispute
igb writes "The Register reports that DLink has settled the time server dispute described a little over a month ago here on Slashdot. They're going to stop using an NTP server they're not really authorized to chime with, and they've reached an amicable settlement over the use by existing products. The details of the settlement are, not unsurprisingly, somewhat vague, but let's hope that the good guys aren't out of pocket any more."
It's strange these companies can't afford to set up a few of their own NTP servers instead of overloading servers that don't have the bandwidth. It it's because they are clueless or they are cheap?
Part of the settlement involves him putting on his website "D-Link is dedicated to remaining a good corporate and network citizen."
Otherwise, considering his previous level of frustration, there's no chance he would shill for them like that.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Somehow I doubt you and your friends boycott is going to cost them as much money as running their own NTP server would ;)
His NTP server access policy explicitly limited use of said server to the Danish Internet Exchange (DIX). In return, DIX provided him with a free internet connection for his NTP server. Because D-Link was sucking so much bandwidth, DIX told Kamp he would have to pay yearly for the connection. D-Link disregarded his server policy and abused his server. That's why it's a problem.
Also, his server is a Stratum 1, and, while not explicitly written, the D-Link devices should getting the time via a Stratum 2 server. At least, that's how it's commonly done.
Does that help explain things better?
Slackware
Someone at D-Link should simply have realized the mistake and paid for a few very fast servers to sit at a hosting facillity and respond to the requests -- and all the requests already using that service -- for as long as the Danes were willing to point the DNS entry for that server to them.
In the scheme of things, and from a marketing perspective, anything else is stupid and a waste of good will.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Taping a note to your front door that reads 'only enter if you live here' doesn't accomplish a lot if you leave the door open all the time.
Please, stop with stupid analogies. They are never helpful. You can leave your door open all the time, that doesn't give anyone the right to go in! In Vermont, thats criminal trespass, and the fine is much larger than the other forms of trespass defined in the act.
Has slashdot.org ever been sued for it's costly effects on small, pay-per-traffic websites? I sure hope not. That's the site operators job to protect itself from traffic overload. It's essentially the same though, you're directing people to someone elses server.
I heard about a similar case in the news recently. Whether telecom companies (ISPs) have the right to collect fees from sites like google for consuming their bandwidth, lost when a visitor hits their website.
Someone else tries to sue google because images.google.com is linking to the images on their site.
When's the last time I heard of someone intentionally giving out website addresses or email addresses on the radio, asking listeners to hit them with as much traffic as possible, and did it ever reach litigation? Probably not...
It's like leaving the bathroom door open while you take a shit, and when someone comes walking in, you sue them for invading your bubble.
I don't see anything besides sympathy for Poul coming from other people, but really, if I had set up the NTP server with links to it on public lists, I know it's publicly available to anyone who uses it, I would EXPECT the traffic to come eventually. Maybe he should sue google for providing the clueless d-link programmer with his ntp server's address.
I assure you, if someone shipped 1,000,000 web appliances that used your little home web server as a home page, you'd be pissed too. Or your DNS server as their address resolver. He doesn't mind occasional use, but these guys embedded his server address into ROM and and shipped boatloads of them.
> What D-Link did was unprofessional and irresponsible...
It was also stupid. Why would anyone buy a router from people who can't even get something this simple right?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
As long as they're rectifying it, who cares..
D-Link CANNOT rectify the treatment they and their lawyers dished out to the innocent parties involved.
I am also boycotting D-Link, but not for their stupidity in their use of ntp, but rather their bone headed aggressive response against the people they did wrong against.
When Netgear fucked up, they did the right thing to resolve what they could see was their mistake. D-Link's response on the other hand, was to sic their legal dogs onto the people who tried to rectify D-Link's fuck-up.
Geeks at the very least should be boycotting D-Link for some time to come, over this. They are happy to take take take and then trample on anyone who gets in the way of that.
Did you also stop buying Belkin when they added sw to their routers that, about one week into operation, would randomly redirect a web page request to an advertisement for their filtering service?
How about Linksys? They've done some mean things too.
And every other company out there.
Your tactics will not impact d-link. Not only that, they are unsustainable, if you want to buy any technological equipment, that is. Eventually everyone will be on your lit shist. Then you'll start trying to figure out which one is "least evil" or perhaps which one hasn't been substantially evil for the longest period of time.
At the end of the day, someone on some project made a set of assumptions, and based a poor decision on those assumptions. It's impacted someone else quite significantly, and they have remedied that.
Personally I'm glad that they eventually remedied their situation. They will make more mistakes in the future, but it's not because they are malicious, or stupid - it's just a mistake. Even with all the history we see about time servers and routers, they may have not seen that at the right time in the project that produced that code.
Given that, the only thing that we can really blame them for is the poor response to the initial problem report, and the time it took to realize the enormity of the problem and make amends.
-Adam