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."

Comments

They already lost at least $120 in sales

[Omnifarious]

And likely more. I've been telling my friends not to buy them, and I know of at least one buying decision that was made specifically for that reason that cost them $120 worth of sales of USB wireless adapters.

Re:They already lost at least $120 in sales

[anticypher]

That's nothing. I'm engineering a large scale DSL rollout, around 80,000 installations in the first 2 phases during 2006, and a potential 4 million subscribers over the next 3 years. My technical analysis of the CPEs determines who makes the shortlist. I had a lot of fun at CeBit this March, watching the sales weasels fight over who would get first shot at my account.

I had even more fun letting the D-Link fuckheads know why they were on my blacklist. For two main reasons, the NTP theft of services from all the stratum 1's, and the mac ethernet framing problems. They were told quite clearly the non-response from their engineering team on these two show-stopper problems had left them permanently blacklisted. Its called schadenfreud, and it feels good.

the AC

Re:Netgear did the same thing a few years ago

[autocracy]

It would be really nice to think that it's not that hard. Yet, somehow, as a member of the NTP pool, I just keep on having issues. At this moment, I'm supporting roughly 1500 clients. 35% of my resources to supply all those clients with acurate time are being used by 40 clients. In fact, the top 10 "abusers" are taking nearly 17%... and it's a good moment.

Re:Not Vague At All

[Uncle Rummy]

He also took down the entire description of the problem D-Link caused, which used to reside at that URL. Considering how pissed he was, they must have paid him well, indeed.

Re:I've often wondered about this

[Vyvyan Basterd]

$8000 a year isn't exactly chump change for most people.

Re:Netgear did the same thing a few years ago

[KiloByte]

as a member of the NTP pool
[...]
At this moment, I'm supporting roughly 1500 clients

Somehow, I find this value flawed. On my server, also in the pool, I logged requests from 161683 different IPs within just the first 24 hours after joining the pool; thus, only those who just resolved the name accessed it. Most NTP clients do a DNS lookup only once during the startup, thus I expect the usage to increase over time.

I'm in the pool for just over a month; I'll turn on logging for another day to gather the new data.

On the other hand, the percentage values about abusers are roughly the same here.

Re:Poul-Henning Kamp got payed!

[afidel]

Since he is facing a bandwidth bill of $8,000 per year to run the server that doesn't seem like a very good settlement. I mean does D-Link think that virtually all of those devices will be off the net in less than 5 years, because if not it was a shitty offer on their part. If they do then I know who's products not to buy on technical grounds, and if they don't I know who not to buy on moral grounds =)