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Why Would a Mouse Need To Connect To the Internet?
jbrodkin writes "In this hyper-connected, networked world, many more of our devices are getting linked to the cloud, whether we want them to or not. That's sometimes good, and sometimes bad, so when a basic device like a mouse requires a user to go online and set up an account to activate all of its functionality, people are understandably going to ask why? The latest entry in the saga of 'Why the hell does this thing need to connect to the Internet?' comes from Razer, which has caused an uproar by asking users to register gaming mice on the Internet. While it's mainly for syncing settings across devices, gamers are complaining that certain functionality might not be available unless you create an online account for your mouse. Razer has responded to the controversy, but its answers aren't entirely satisfactory."
razercfg!
There are mice in the clouds and it might start raining.
i believe razer synapse is what it is called... i use it quite a lot, and it is really nice for multiple computers... or even going to a friend's house or a computer lab with your mouse. it automatically syncs all settings. of course.... it isnt necessary to use synapse, you CAN manually set up your mouse every time
the mice are blocking teh tubes!
on a more serious note, this sounds like a cartload of crap.
With stories like this one I wasn't sure if this was about hardware or if there were rodents demanding to be on line.
So at the current trend of technology am I going to have to start paying a monthly fee to use my mouse, or at least the more advanced features of it. All it would take is a Firmware update, which they can force if the mouse is connected to the internet. I can see it now, a little popup inviting me to take advantage of all the great features available with RAZER Plus.
Razor products are just shitty. I've purchased only one item from them, a copperhead mouse, but that'll be all I ever buy. I returned that thing three times for three different problems. All of them were known issues that they just chalked up to being part of the process of owning a Razor product. Logitech gets my money now. It's a mouse that only does mouse stuff and does it well.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I have a Logitech, and I have an account for it. When I move computers, I log into the "cloud" and it download's my config and remaps all the buttons. I could swap computers, software, reinstall and all that, and I still have the config saved "somewhere." If I don't do that, then I get default config.
Learn to love Alaska
Never before have I had as much of a love/hate relationship with a company, and this includes Apple. Razer makes some great peripherals, that usually all have some crazy, simple, fixable flaw that they ignore for months before finally getting around to in a half-assed way. Why do I love them so much? I'm a left-handed gamer, and the pickings are pretty slim for me. So I'm stuck with them for a good left-handed gaming mouse.
Examples in the past: The Lycosa keyboards, which had a defect where the touch panel for volume and LED control would stop working after a month or less. It took over a month to get them to acknowledge a problem. Another, the drivers for the Death Adder mouse line. For four months, it was impossible to get a combination of working drivers that allowed you to rebind the left and right buttons to one another (because Razer defaulted to the primary click being on the right, for the LH models).
Razer takes forever to respond to anything, and when they do, it's typically poorly communicated and badly handled. This is a company that is just mindblowingly TERRIBLE at customer relations.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Here buy a logitech mouse:
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/gaming-mouse-g500
Onboard memory for saving settings. The. End.
... and returned it!
Basically the mouse is so hypersensitive with insane DPI that you have to run their software to mod it down. The reason the internet is required is because it uses a cloud to load your mouse settings. No you did not misread that?!
It gets worse
The profile and cloud service are several services that depend on each other and take almost a minute on my fast 2.8 ghz Phenom II and meanwhile the cursor is flying all over the machine due to the high dpi settings. Razor made it so light too which excaberates the problem. They have added weights for their $130 and it is their way of saying a Fuck you for being cheap by buying the $80 mouse??? Since when is $80 cheap? So you just have to set their and wayt for your mouse to connect to the cloud to slow down a simple setting. Sigh
This cloud obsession is silly and getting too far. I can't use logitech because they are too small for my hands. Microsoft explorer mosue 2 is big enough but htey no longer have the scroll mouse. Just a touch button that will hurt after rubbing my fingers for several hours. My dying MS mouse I will keep for now as I am disapointed in razor. It is rediculous.
http://saveie6.com/
The Logitech Harmony remotes require you to register online just to use them. There is no way to program the remote offline or without an account with Logitech. It makes sense that they don't want you having to download a massive database for every ir device you can posibly use but they should at least let you download a basic database for the devices you own.
Why Would a Mouse Need To Connect To the Internet?
It probably wants to use your credit card number to place a giant order at http://www.thecheeseshed.com/
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
I recently purchased a Logitech Harmony 700 programmable remote to use on my HTPC (it's a highly recommended remote by XBMC users). The problem however is that there are only two ways to configure it:
(1) The official way is that you go to http://www.myharmony.com/ and register an account. Once done, you log into the site and it opens up a Silverlight interface (that's right, Silverlight - not HTML/HTML5, not even Flash, but a rarely used Microsoft plugin who's Linux equivalent, Moonlight, doesn't work properly anyway) that allows some coarse configuration but not much in the way of fine grained options.
(2) The less official way is to download the Logitech control application (Windows only, of course), which still requires an account. It also feels very much like a web application in a native window since it's still slow as it loads up various pages from the Internet anyway. But at least you get full control using it.
Point is that in both scenarios, you MUST have an account to program the remote. Now of course having this data available in the "cloud" means that should you reformat or otherwise need to reconfigure your remote after a reinstall of the software, you can still obtain your carefully-configured settings. The other idea is that Logitech have a database of pre-configured devices that can be uploaded to the remote which is continaully updated with newer models, but it's not like the native application couldn't just obtain that info without requiring an account.
Logitech deliberately made it so that they must know how your remote is being used. Not that they'll work out anything interesting with it, except perhaps what devices I use and how I use them. But fuck me, this is not a good direction to go with - requiring registration over one's hardware before it can be used fully.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
I, for one, can't think of any reason why having a driver that enjoys unfettered(and low level) access to one or more of my computer's human input devices also being internet connnected at all times could possibly pose a problem...
In fact, I'm fairly sure that the Razer Synapse2 system will make Bonzibuddy 83% more fun to be with, and any future updates that allow me to log my keystrokes to the cloud will be a lifesaver when I forget the password to my AOL account!
Great. Create another account for another useless thing because I don't already have enough of those.
If you worry about taking your settings and profiles with you STORE THEM ON THE DAMN DEVICE! It works for the N52TE which they bought from Belkin and that thing allows you to save all stored profiles back on your HD.
Why add another layer of complexity on configuration software? Especially if that extra layer includes stuff you can't control(like internet connectivity) and adds a single point of failure for all your customers. Maintenance of that cloud thing can't cost less than adding lokal storage to your devices. Unless of course you skimp on the high-availability requirement.
Congrats! You screwed up on every design aspect with that new and great scheme just to ad the "cloud" buzzword to your marketing blurb.
20 minutes into the future
A company like Razor may require online registration to unlock features because both it gives the company more information and greater consumer dependence. Such things are easily converted to profit later.
Of course, such an act damages the user experience but, as I gather from the various comments here, Razor simply has no competition from a hardware/ergonomics point of view. Maintaining, or worse improving the user experience, will just eat into profits.
Why do Razor's actions perplex so many of the people commenting here?
...On some of the extra functionality, but this is one reason why I will never, as a blanket-rule, install any peripheral device's shitware on my PC if I can get away with it. I'll either settle for the functionality provided by Windows built-in drivers or if that's not feasible then I'll trawl around support sites and community forums looking for a link to the most cut-drown driver package I can get my hands on. I say this as someone with a Razer DeathAdder and BlackWidow that I use every day and love as devices.
Every printer suite, every Adobe extention, every gamepad, mouse and keyboard driver package, every pile of crapware, even iTunes agents, Bonjour, Java, all of it that we load onto our PC is just one more thing to slow down our user experience, waste bandwidth and throw annoying popups in our faces. Not to mention all the new potential infection vectors and opportunities to have our use-habits aggregated and sent off god-knows-where into the ether.
It's much, much easier to just forgo some macro buttons on the side of a keyboard that is very nice unto itself as a piece of hardware.
Their keyboards require this shit as well if you want them to do anything beyond what's stamped on the keys. Sad, sad stuff. I bought it for the Cherry MX blues so at least I still have a nice click but sheesh...
Vote with your wallet. Take it back to the store because it's non-functional.
what gamer buying a 80 to 100$+ mouse with 42 buttons on the fucker is going to have any issue with memory space (or storage space, which is what they meant, but apparently are next to clueless)
my freaking work laptop has 8gigs and a TB hard disk ... sure it can handle some fucking macro's (not that I am paying 80$ for a mouse, I hate paying 5 for a overstock OEM Logitech from the computer store)
because customers rarely care about this sort of thing and generally just click "yes."
if youre a religious economist youll grant the invisible hand time to offer an alternative market of "unlocked" mice, much like cellphones. they will probably still be tracked by your operating system (microsoft or apple, possibly ubuntu these days under crazy shuttleworth) but youll get to use them as you wish on any OS of your choice or against the original constructs of the walled garden it seems this peripheral maker is trying to grow.
theyll be called developer mice, or IDE mice, or some other wretched name implying only the nerdiest would ever want such a thing. youll pay a premium for it, it wont be supported by the game you want to play when its registered during startup and the OS will probably require hefty drivers or partially functioning ones for it to work.
the bottom line is there is very little money in peripherals. there is a fucking boat-load of cash in services because as we evolve through the 21st century our technology has increasingly grown to coddle us as though we were children. give up your freedom and the corporation will relieve the burden on your weary mind of having to think about computers or networks or any of that nonsense youve been heralding about the latest iDevice but loathe to discuss on a deeply technical level greater than a few buzzwords picked up at the bus stop billboard.
and nerds geeks and slashdotters will grumble as dogs will bark. we will adapt as we always have technology to suit our needs. windows keys will be co-opted into our operating systems as a pivotal extension of our will through tools like AwesomeWM, to never again be considered anything more than a simple stroke or clack on the way to greatness. ACPI will kneel to our demands as our resources are governed by our inherent lust for knowledge and achievement. and this "device" that so rudely begged a pittance of our precious bandwidth in the service of its master will its back have been broken, its mighty spirit crushed under the inexorable weight of our technological expertise as we have so pulverized most any attempt by a salesman with a greasegun to convince us otherwise that the PC is not personal. It will kneel, as VRRP, DVD, Blu-Ray, SCSI RAID, wireless cards, and a sea of countless E and I prefixed devices have in the service of their true master, the Nerd.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you get the Roku player, you also have to register it online even if you don't intend to use any online streaming. And the TivO works the same way: it needs to call the mothership for subscription/program guide data in order to keep functioning viably.
The Harmony remotes worked that way when Logitech bought them (they were a separate company, Logitech decided they'd like to own it). It has been that way for a long time.
The reason is for device code updates. As new devices come out the stuff can be added, including by users. Much of their support is something a user has submitted, which is also why sometimes it won't work 100% right. Also some models can have a TV guide on them, but it requires regular updates for that to work (it can only store like 2 weeks of data).
I see no big issue. It isn't like there's some evil conspiracy here to break you remote. Once programmed, you can never hook it up again if you like. Mine hasn't seen their site for like 2 years.
It does the job well, and there was no reason to redevelop the whole backend once they bought the company.
It's to stop people burning an unauthorised copy onto a blank mouse.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Drop a Beagle USB bus analyzer between the mouse and the host, try changing all the settings you posibly can, and use the recorded results to write a libusb client application that can set all of the settings. Problem solved.
I hate that people complaint about eminently solvable software engineering problems simply because they don't want to be the ones to solve them.
I have a Logitech G500 and the config is stored in the mouse firmware itself. If you hook it up to a new system, all your settings and buttons are correct, even with no driver. You have to associate it with a system (which wipes the config in the firmware) to program it, but once programmed it is self contained. Their G700 works the same way.
I haven't encountered a Logitech cloud mouse, but I can't imagine it is mandatory to use that. The G500 and G700 are both current products, as is the M570 I use on my laptop and none of them need to be net connected. If you install the drivers and let them auto-update, they will connect to check periodicly, but they don't have to, and the mouse functions without problem with no drivers as just a HID class device.
To obtain the GPS coordinates of cats on the area?
Oh, wait a sec... you meant a computer mouse... Never mind.
Not necessarily the idea of having a remote profile. That could be nice in some situations, but that it has to download it every time.
One of the things I like about my G500 is that it stores the profile on the mouse itself. You have to have Logitech's driver installed to change the profile (and the mouse has to be associated with that computer) but you can then take the programmed mouse, hook it in to another computer, and it'll retain all its settings.
Very nice way of doing things IMO because it means the mouse is always consistent, even if you are booted off a boot disc or installing a new OS and so on.
FutureDoc just harvested a crop of Marijuana on FarmVille!
62 people like this
FutureDoc's mouse found the cheese!
PETA likes this
500 - Internal server error.
There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.
I hope you're happy. You slashdotted an entirely unrlated, innocent website.
Would you like to register online:
( ) Now
( ) Kindergarten
( ) When getting drivers license
... around our right to own things. First it came in the form of DRM for games and whatnot and now other companies want to remove the publics right to own anything and license/monitor/datamine everything. The whole "online requirement" is all about customer datamining. The same thing Steam has been doing, it provides valve exact customer data.
I have a TV remote that, before it could be programmed, required one to create an account and spill the beans about everything about themselves in order to be able to use a single button. Want to reprogram something? Plug it in, install the software and re-log in.
Problem was solved by a VM, USB passthrough, a proxy, and fake info, however I'm not surprised that more things are going this route -- customer profiles and info is big cash to sell.
Let me guess their response: "Our executives are retarded. They learned in their freshman business class that getting customers to register their e-mail addresses increased their chances of of buying new products from the same company. They were unaware that forcing customers to do this for basic functionality is the equivalent of eating your entree with your foot, while playing host to the Royal family of England. They are simply incapable of understanding the level of faux pas they have committed, coming up with the two-year old's excuse of 'if it's so bad, why are other people doing it,' and, in light of the bonuses they will no doubt receive shortly before customers permanently turn away from this company, they won't care. Again, we apologize for what passes as an education in this country, and promise, after the glorious revolution, to never speak of it again."
I am John Hurt.
Of course it needs internet access! How else do you think it will keep its anti-virus software current?
-Dave
Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Funniest post of the month!
What does God need with a starship?
This driver is seriously dangerous. I'm sitting here right now performing data recovery on an HDD that got bricked while rebooting from installing a Synapse 2.0 update.
Even light bulbs will have their own IP addresses one day.
Very wrong. My mouse stores up to 5 profiles in its whopping 128k of internal memory. Totally independent of the OS (assuming the OS supports a standard USB mouse) once it's configured. No tube required.
They are collecting mouse movements for their RNG and make a lot of $$ in the process.
USB mice are standardized self-configuring devices. The handshake when an HID device plugs in tells the host what the device can do. There's no reason that an HID device needs a custom driver.
it will save you from having your mouse accessible from the internet, as NAT on ipv4 will "protect" you.
What would you want more: every 2 months a whiny post about running out of addressspace (lol), or a mouse that runs all the malware outta there?
Your venue chose the answer; the options are obvious.
I apologise for the roughness/profanity in my previous post. But I just want you to understand - your post basically turns the onus on the customer rather than the company to provide what is missing (i.e. the ability to program the remote without requiring access to Logitech). It's belittling because it defuses any complains anyone can have with, well, anything.
It's not so much "customer" as "consumer", given your point of view. The choices are pretty simple:
1) Don't buy the product (customer level choice)
2) Return the product (customer level choice)
After this, you quit being a customer and start being a consumer, and your options change:
3) Petition the company to provide additional software (consumer level option)
4) Accept the terms and conditions, and sign in, giving them you information (consumer level choice)
5) Lie as best you can while still getting the login working (educated consumer level choice)
And finally the engineering options:
6) Hack the application to avoid the login (engineering level choice - leading to an arms race)
7) Reverse engineer and publish the information (engineering level choice - the nuclear option)
Of these, choices 4 & 5 are the ones which most resemble your "I'd rather go back to Windows" option.
Members of the Open Source community, or more technically, the engineering community -- which is to say, Slashdot, where this commentary was published -- are most likely to fall into category 6 & 7. The place the story on which the slashdot commentary is based are most likely to fall into categories 1-5.
Your complaint about being told about option 7 in a posting on slashdot isn't really a valid complaint. It'd possibly be valid if I had posted my comment on the Ars Technica site, although it also being a technical site, it's probably more aimed at preventing customer purchase/advocating customer boycott of the product - categories 1 & 2.
Ask the question on Slashdot, get a slashdot answer.
And to be crystal clear: I've done this level of reverse engineering before, commercially, for pay, and I was not talking about option 6, I was talking about option 7: writing a from scratch native windows driver and control application for the thing using raw USB packet information decodes.
Viewed strictly as an engineering problem, this is solvable with the hardware in hand and about $10,000 worth of my effort, which I figure is about two weeks worth of work total. Add another $5,000 if you also want a Linux driver and command line control program (getting it accepted into the Linux tree is your problem, I won't deal with that political mess), and another $10,000 for a Mac OS X driver and System Settings item.
This is not an offer to do the work for that price, I personally prefer people exercise options 1 & 2, and let Razer use their in-house talent and the source code they already have to solve the problem, or lose sales to punish them for not documenting their hardware interfaces, and for not putting in the effort to separate the online synchronization from the settings in a local replica data store. And if they can't hire software engineers to solve that problem, I'm perfectly happy letting them go down the same drain as the Diamond Viper video cards, which also failed to separate the data (mode line PAL input values) from the code (INT 10 BIOS implementation) because they had hardware engineers doing a software engineers job.
Ok. Slashdot, let's keep this simple so people can understand:
Question: What makes you alive?
Self awareness? You could say scripted programs inside a game are self aware, they defend themselves by ducking and covering.
Procreation? You could say games like Spore introduce the concept of procreation. So that is not a unique function to humans.
Feelings? You could say a game character elicits Fear, emotion, and anger. Take a look at the game Tron.
Productivity? DO you consider sitting in a cube farm looking at a screen all day long... productive?
hmmmm;....
Here's my point... When slaves were brought over from Africa, they were owned, correct? Was there any registration for owners of slaves? Negatory....They just went and 'farmed em' (much like Chinese farmers do with gold in video games), and brought them over to the States.Horses were branded. Same thing goes on for most diamonds (many are stamped), same thing holds true for Playstation 3s, same thing goes on for smart phones...
Now. Let's consider what you've classified as life...
Isn't it amazing how we overlook what is and is not slavery, based on our naive perception of what is deemed, by our logic and consciousness.. to be alive...
Especially when Einstein made it so perfectly clear that everything is energy.
So let's flip this around. Why would a SLAVE WANT to be branded?
a) To have a master held responsible for it's abuse
b) To create a union of other like thinking entities to communicate with to guarantee fair and equal rights.
c) To create community and share.
d) to explore that which is life in all it's facets...
So let me ask you this. If a mouse, as in the rodent, evolved into a robotic form, then evolved into a more useful form that's connected - LIKE you are - to computers...
Do you even consider the implications of a plan that reinforces community?
Cricket bugs, evolve to cricket phones to be connected...
Ford trucks evolve to .. well we have all seen the movie Transformers... They evolve to actors and still let people drive em..
You see, humans are incredibly naive and also amazing at the same time. We walk blindly not realizing our own creative minds are creating and spawning infinite realities with our ideas. When much of the electronic and robotic world is.. just waiting for us all to .. intellectually.. understand the beauty of our creation....
Why would the mouse want you to register? To meet others like him and to correspond about the state of it's.. owner :-)
Here's a secret that a lot of people on /. seem to be unaware of:
Marketing - the process of getting people to say "I'm interesting in buying something from you" - is hard.
It's not a particularly exact science at the best of times - sure, you can run two different ads and see which one gets the best response, but nobody's yet figured out why it might get the best response and been able to turn that into a formula. Get it wrong, and you can actually turn prospective customers against you.
That being said, there are a few people you can target who are far more likely to buy from you.
One of the easiest markets to sell to is people who have already bought something from you once. Problem is, a manufacturer might know which distributors and even which resellers are stocking their product but they probably only have a vague idea which customers are buying it. On the face of it, using a driver that connects to the Internet (and requires compulsory registration) is a great way for a manufacturer to solve this problem and develop very tightly targeted marketing campaigns.
(This, by the way, is also why you're encouraged to "register" your warranty even though in many countries consumer protection law makes this totally unnecessary)
Of course, as I said if you get it wrong you can turn prospective customers against you. Which is precisely what's happening here.
Is it stated anywhere on the packaging or the sale description if bought online that it requires an online connection to work? Like other always on software do? I know its hardware but to use the advanced features it requires that you register the software and have that always online.
Well I wasn't aware of this issue before I purchased it, and it's not a big enough deal to go through the effort to return it (particularly since it was bought online). I mean, it's just something that I see as a negative with a product that overall is fine for my purposes. But aren't I allowed to vent just a little bit?
FWIW - I'm part of the engineering community (FPGA and embedded systems developer), but I don't want to have to hack or reverse something just to get what I want, even if I can. As for the type of posters on Slashdot - well, my signature I hope explains how I feel about the quality of posts here (sometimes anyway).
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
To check its cheeseMail?
Honestly, that is the first /.ing I've seen in a while. If that single post killed their servers, they have bigger problems. Or don't anticipate having more than 50 people surfing their website at the same time.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You do realize that it creates TWICE the data! Next you'll want no cords. I'm done with you technophilliacs.
Sent from my Naga
*presses the + and - buttons on his Logitech MX518 gaming mouse from like six years ago, notes that they work without any drivers whatsoever, in Linux, no less*
*thinks Razer just wants analytics data and is willing to annoy its users to get it*
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Why indeed?
How else is the mouse going to order cheese?
Just put some flash memory on the mouse. Supporting people who can't use their hardware because your "cloud" is down will cost you far more than a little memory.
Before the only reason I had to avoid Razr was the price. Now it's price and stupidity.
If you give a Mouse an Internet....
it's going to want a Web Browser.
If you give the Mouse a Web Browser...
soon it's discovers porn.
If your Mouse discovers porn...
he's going to want a tiny box of tissues.
If you need a tiny box of tissues...
you're going to need to leave the toilet seat up so he can flush them when he's done.
If you leave the toilet seat up....
your Mouse is going to fall in the toilet.
If your mouse falls in the toilet...
where are you going to take a dump?
Is it possible to reflash a Roku and put a new useful/useable OS on it?
A few days ago I bought a 2TB Western Digital hard drive, which uses the newer 'Advanced' (4KB) sector format and an emulation layer (in controller firmware) to present normal 512-byte sectors to the host. To avoid a massive performance hit, the drive has to be partitioned using WD's special sector-alignment software - an 80MByte (Windows-only) download with mandatory account registration and validated email address.
What massively fancy, complex thing does this 80MB worth of software do? Move all the partitions forward by 1 sector. Yes, literally! (For legacy reasons, most disk utilities partition a HD with a 63-sector offset; the alignment utility moves it to 64 so that all disk structures will align on 4KB boundaries.)
(Why not just ship the drive with a default 4k-aligned partition? Where's the money in that?)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I hope you're happy. You slashdotted an entirely unrlated, innocent website.
Schadenfreude, is the best kind joy. And I honestly didn't expect there to be that many people around on slashdot anymore. Also thecheeseshed came up as one of the first hits on a Google search for online cheese, so I didn't expect them to run their website off of Windows server on a pogoplug.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame