This issue has zero to do with the separation between church and state. The theme park is not a religious organization, it is a for-profit corporation. It is owned by a non-profit religious organization, sure, but the park itself is a separate legal entity.
Why wouldn't they? It's a tourist draw, just like the museum. They want tourist dollars, which is why they have laws to help new tourist attractions get funding. You can argue about whether or not people would actually want to go there, but all you need to do is look at the attendance for the museum. Having 2 similar attractions in the same area would probably increase tourism overall, in fact. Why just go to the museum when they could go to the museum and then the theme park? Having the theme park would most likely increase museum attendance also.
Yeah, it's a bad example because you threw in the phrase "really slow peanuts". If they advertise unlimited peanuts, and you ask for more peanuts, and they don't give you more peanuts, or they give you fewer peanuts than you can consume, then it is not unlimited peanuts. Where's the confusion? They aren't advertising "infinite" peanuts, they're saying "unlimited". Without a limit. All you can eat, as fast as you can eat them. Now enough with the peanuts.
where are your posts decrying the absurdity of only being able to download at 52kbps despite the unlimited service?
That is not the issue here. If you want to compare against dialup, then consider a service that offers "unlimited" dialup which will give you a 52k connection, and then they sends out data at only 2400 bps. It's not a question of the absolute number of bytes you can receive or transfer, it is a question of whether the carrier is artificially limiting the throughput. The technical limitations of the protocol or transmission are not a part of that equation. It is an artificial limit that is in question.
That's why I came in this thread - one of the reasons I like building my own machines is the complete lack of bloatware. How are Alienware machines in that regard, since they're controlled by Dell are they packed with useless shit I don't want or need? Is it finally time for me to order something pre-built, or is the landscape still basically the same?
because the operating system automatically detects the VID
...which the manufacturer sets. So, if the manufacturer did not want their hardware to use the driver for the particular device that they are claiming to be, then why are they using that device's VID?
OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver?
I don't know. How does Grandma fix a blown head gasket in her car? How does Grandma fix her air conditioner compressor or hot water heater when it breaks? If a capacitor in Grandma's TV burns out, how does she replace that? I guess she just gets a soldering iron and goes for it, right?
No, it's not the point. I was responding to this statement:
You do not INTENTIONALLY break equipment that you do not own. You do not do that. No matter how you feel about that equipment. Particularly when the person who now owns said equipment has no idea that there is a problem.
Notice how there is no mention of FTDI, or USB, or drivers, or whatever else. It's an abstract point I'm trying to argue. If someone has a piece of equipment which is a counterfeit of what you make, and they know it's counterfeit (or they made it themselves), are you within your rights to destroy it? It wasn't legal for them to make or buy it in the first place. I'm not talking about making something which does a similar or the same task as something else, I'm talking counterfeiting. Buying cloth, sewing a jersey, and putting the NFL logo on it. Counterfeiting. If you walk into a warehouse and see a bunch of people assembling cheap widgets and slapping the name Wookactron on them, with the logo of Wookact Corp., are you within your rights to take one of those and smash it to pieces?
They have no right to destroy hardware.
In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there, with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.
when your company's accounting department sees they can save a few cents to a buck per device by using the less than authentic chip
... and they actually suggest this as a business model, then you fire your company's accounting department and recruit some people that have the same morals as you.
No, you give me my fucking product back and that's the end of story unless I tell you otherwise.
Whoa, we got a badass here.
Explain again why Rolex is obligated to send a counterfeit product to you via mail. Is it something to do with "hard-earned money" or some shit like that which gives you some sort of magical capitalism rights because you paid for a product with money from your hot little hand? What about the rights of Rolex to enforce their trademarks? Does the fact that you paid money for an illegal product (and then had the fantastic idea to send it to them to fix) overrule their right to protect their business?
If it's not your product, you send it back to me.
But it says right there, right on the watch face - "Rolex". That's their product, right? You sure as hell thought it was when you bought it for fifty bucks, right? Or did you know it wasn't theirs, but decided to send it to them for service anyway?
I don't know, I don't really see anything defensible about counterfeiting and selling other people's work, but a lot of people seem to think that it shouldn't be touched.
It's a regrettable accident if a legitimate operation on your own device permanently alters a third-party replacement, but I'd consider that to be the fault of a crappy replacement part.
That's what happens. The driver tells all devices to change the PID to 0. The real FTDI devices wait for a follow-up command (which may never come) to actually do the write operation. Other devices don't wait. So the devices don't actually work the same, but the clone is telling the operating system to use that driver. It's not the fault of the driver if the hardware tells the OS to use the driver, the driver tells the hardware to do a write, and the hardware does the write.
No. They're doing it to property that other people own. Just because that property advertises a fraudulent USB ID does not transfer ownership of that property to FTDI. They are intentionally breaking other peoples' property and even crowing about it.
Why shouldn't the driver be allowed to do that? If the hardware tells the operating system that it uses that driver, then why can they bitch when the driver starts telling the hardware to do things? If they didn't want their hardware to do those things, then why are they telling it to use that driver instead of their own driver?
However, this change occurs by actually modifying EPROM states, said EPROM most not being theirs.
But the driver doesn't necessarily know the hardware is not theirs, and it seems like the clones lose a lot of credibility by requesting that the operating system uses FTDI's driver for their hardware. That sort of sounds like the clones are taking responsibility for whatever the driver does to their hardware. In this case, the driver is sending a command to change the EEPROM that the geniune FTDI chips will not immediately perform, but the clones will. Once the clones give the wrong ID to the OS, it seems like they are giving permission for the driver to do whatever it wants to do to the hardware. If the hardware didn't want the driver to do things like that, then why is it telling the OS that it uses that driver?
There's evidence presented in this thread, by people familiar with reimplementing their interface. I see you didn't bother to read the thread.
I must say, I am impressed by your deductive reasoning abilities. You're absolutely correct, I clicked on the comments, jumped my scrollbar to halfway down the thread, and just posted something. Hell, I didn't even read what I was replying to. I bow to your deductive reasoning. What's still missing, however, is evidence of their intent. Since you did read the thread, and I (clearly) did not, then it shouldn't be a problem for you to point out the evidence that proves your statement: "FTDI's deliberate intent is to damage people's equipment." You made the claim so, go ahead, prove their intent.
But in this case you're celebrating denial of service to a user who may have acted in good faith. That's a shitty thing to be happy about. Why do you like taking advantage of people?
Fantastic straw man. I especially like how you added the terms "celebrating" and "happy". Well done, sir.
I can see where this "discussion" is going. I'll bow out. You take care now.
FTDI's deliberate intent is to damage people's equipment.
If you have evidence of their intent then it would be interesting to see that. Maybe they've only implemented a bug fix where their drivers are finding a piece of hardware which is claiming that it is something that it is not, which must be a bug, so they're fixing the bug. Now it doesn't identify as a piece of hardware that it clearly is not. Et voila, problem solved. It's not their responsibility to change the piece of hardware to correctly identify itself, that bug is one for the manufacturer to fix. The bug that FTDI is fixing is one in which the hardware identifies itself as FTDI hardware when it is not.
How is that not illegal?
I didn't suggest that what they were doing was not illegal, just that I support it. It wouldn't be the only thing considered illegal that I support.
They're not very good at their job anyway.
They're good enough that their drivers are apparently able to support a wide range of hardware that they didn't build. I'd say that's doing a pretty decent job. The list of operating systems and versions that they support is pretty extensive as well. What exactly are they bad at doing? It sounds like they've been doing the same thing for the past 20+ years, and that it's been working so well that other companies want to leech off them and get support and technology from them without paying anything for it.
And I hope FTDI wins. Eventually this should go back to whoever made the counterfeit chip. Those companies should be the ones who get called out by their customers that they supply to, they should receive the blame. If I'm using counterfeit chips in my products and an update from FTDI stops things from working, I'm not going to be pissed off at FTDI, I'm going to be pissed off at whoever sold me a chip and told me that it was an FTDI chip, and I'm going to sue them for selling me counterfeit products while claiming they were the real thing. And if the manufacturer knew they were buying counterfeit, then they're the guys who deserve to get sued.
Um, no. They're intentionally modifying the device ID on the counterfeit chip so it will no longer work.
That sounds like a bug fix. They've found a piece of hardware which is identifying itself as the incorrect piece of hardware (which they know, because they know what the correct piece of hardware with that ID is). So, they just... fix the bug.
Look, counterfeiting is wrong. But destroying the property of an end user, most likely unaware of the counterfeit device, is both wrong and illegal. Period.
Actually, counterfeiting is also both wrong and illegal. Period.
What? So if I shoot my neighbor,
What the hell is it with everyone using violent crime analogies? What does shooting someone have anything at all to do with a company issuing a firmware update that disables unlicensed counterfeit chips? Moreover, is FTDI the first company to use a tactic like that? How about Apple Computer, Inc.? Have they ever issued something like an operating system update which would intentionally render unlicensed counterfeit hardware unworkable?
Good analogy. Yes, we are talking about a company going around committing the murders of people who are unknowingly (or knowingly, it doesn't really matter) using counterfeit technology. That is literally what is happening here. Well done.
Santa Cruz was one of the earlier cities on the internet, thanks to UCSC. Today, access is ass. And they have one of the highest costs of living in the nation. It's often been one of the most-connected cities in the USA, for example it was part of Cricket territory. But today it's ass.
Too bad they couldn't give a rat's ass while I still lived there. The local ISPs are mostly awful. Even the ones that don't suck are slow, slow, slow.
Sure but in Java you have things like Spring Framework, Hibernate, Java EE standards that have been around for a decade and they are rock-solid foundations to build upon.
To be fair, the mysqli extension in PHP which supports prepared statements has also been around for over a decade. But you can still go and find any number of tutorials teaching people how to write vulnerable queries by concatenating strings and using the deprecated mysql extension, and you can go to any PHP forum and find people posting questions about code which uses the same. And when you try to teach those people how to do it the correct way, roughly 95% of the time their response is along the lines of "I just need to make it work, then I'll learn about prepared statements." It's a failure of the programmers and tutorials far more than it is a failure of the language. It would be fantastic if PHP outright removed the mysql extension and the mysqli_query function, but that would break a ton of existing applications. And, even so, even when you point people to tutorials about prepared statements they gloss over everything and come back with code like:
$mysqli->prepare('SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=' . $_GET['id']);
Look, I used a prepared statement!
Like I said, it's a failure of the programmers who want the quick and easy way instead of the correct way.
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This issue has zero to do with the separation between church and state. The theme park is not a religious organization, it is a for-profit corporation. It is owned by a non-profit religious organization, sure, but the park itself is a separate legal entity.
Why wouldn't they? It's a tourist draw, just like the museum. They want tourist dollars, which is why they have laws to help new tourist attractions get funding. You can argue about whether or not people would actually want to go there, but all you need to do is look at the attendance for the museum. Having 2 similar attractions in the same area would probably increase tourism overall, in fact. Why just go to the museum when they could go to the museum and then the theme park? Having the theme park would most likely increase museum attendance also.
See why that's a bad example?
Yeah, it's a bad example because you threw in the phrase "really slow peanuts". If they advertise unlimited peanuts, and you ask for more peanuts, and they don't give you more peanuts, or they give you fewer peanuts than you can consume, then it is not unlimited peanuts. Where's the confusion? They aren't advertising "infinite" peanuts, they're saying "unlimited". Without a limit. All you can eat, as fast as you can eat them. Now enough with the peanuts.
where are your posts decrying the absurdity of only being able to download at 52kbps despite the unlimited service?
That is not the issue here. If you want to compare against dialup, then consider a service that offers "unlimited" dialup which will give you a 52k connection, and then they sends out data at only 2400 bps. It's not a question of the absolute number of bytes you can receive or transfer, it is a question of whether the carrier is artificially limiting the throughput. The technical limitations of the protocol or transmission are not a part of that equation. It is an artificial limit that is in question.
That's why I came in this thread - one of the reasons I like building my own machines is the complete lack of bloatware. How are Alienware machines in that regard, since they're controlled by Dell are they packed with useless shit I don't want or need? Is it finally time for me to order something pre-built, or is the landscape still basically the same?
because the operating system automatically detects the VID
...which the manufacturer sets. So, if the manufacturer did not want their hardware to use the driver for the particular device that they are claiming to be, then why are they using that device's VID?
OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver?
I don't know. How does Grandma fix a blown head gasket in her car? How does Grandma fix her air conditioner compressor or hot water heater when it breaks? If a capacitor in Grandma's TV burns out, how does she replace that? I guess she just gets a soldering iron and goes for it, right?
No, it's not the point. I was responding to this statement:
You do not INTENTIONALLY break equipment that you do not own. You do not do that. No matter how you feel about that equipment. Particularly when the person who now owns said equipment has no idea that there is a problem.
Notice how there is no mention of FTDI, or USB, or drivers, or whatever else. It's an abstract point I'm trying to argue. If someone has a piece of equipment which is a counterfeit of what you make, and they know it's counterfeit (or they made it themselves), are you within your rights to destroy it? It wasn't legal for them to make or buy it in the first place. I'm not talking about making something which does a similar or the same task as something else, I'm talking counterfeiting. Buying cloth, sewing a jersey, and putting the NFL logo on it. Counterfeiting. If you walk into a warehouse and see a bunch of people assembling cheap widgets and slapping the name Wookactron on them, with the logo of Wookact Corp., are you within your rights to take one of those and smash it to pieces?
They have no right to destroy hardware.
In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there, with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.
That's hardly the point.
when your company's accounting department sees they can save a few cents to a buck per device by using the less than authentic chip
... and they actually suggest this as a business model, then you fire your company's accounting department and recruit some people that have the same morals as you.
No, you give me my fucking product back and that's the end of story unless I tell you otherwise.
Whoa, we got a badass here.
Explain again why Rolex is obligated to send a counterfeit product to you via mail. Is it something to do with "hard-earned money" or some shit like that which gives you some sort of magical capitalism rights because you paid for a product with money from your hot little hand? What about the rights of Rolex to enforce their trademarks? Does the fact that you paid money for an illegal product (and then had the fantastic idea to send it to them to fix) overrule their right to protect their business?
If it's not your product, you send it back to me.
But it says right there, right on the watch face - "Rolex". That's their product, right? You sure as hell thought it was when you bought it for fifty bucks, right? Or did you know it wasn't theirs, but decided to send it to them for service anyway?
Why are people defending malicious behavior?
I don't know, I don't really see anything defensible about counterfeiting and selling other people's work, but a lot of people seem to think that it shouldn't be touched.
It's a regrettable accident if a legitimate operation on your own device permanently alters a third-party replacement, but I'd consider that to be the fault of a crappy replacement part.
That's what happens. The driver tells all devices to change the PID to 0. The real FTDI devices wait for a follow-up command (which may never come) to actually do the write operation. Other devices don't wait. So the devices don't actually work the same, but the clone is telling the operating system to use that driver. It's not the fault of the driver if the hardware tells the OS to use the driver, the driver tells the hardware to do a write, and the hardware does the write.
No. They're doing it to property that other people own. Just because that property advertises a fraudulent USB ID does not transfer ownership of that property to FTDI. They are intentionally breaking other peoples' property and even crowing about it.
Why shouldn't the driver be allowed to do that? If the hardware tells the operating system that it uses that driver, then why can they bitch when the driver starts telling the hardware to do things? If they didn't want their hardware to do those things, then why are they telling it to use that driver instead of their own driver?
However, this change occurs by actually modifying EPROM states, said EPROM most not being theirs.
But the driver doesn't necessarily know the hardware is not theirs, and it seems like the clones lose a lot of credibility by requesting that the operating system uses FTDI's driver for their hardware. That sort of sounds like the clones are taking responsibility for whatever the driver does to their hardware. In this case, the driver is sending a command to change the EEPROM that the geniune FTDI chips will not immediately perform, but the clones will. Once the clones give the wrong ID to the OS, it seems like they are giving permission for the driver to do whatever it wants to do to the hardware. If the hardware didn't want the driver to do things like that, then why is it telling the OS that it uses that driver?
Particularly when the person who now owns said equipment has no idea that there is a problem.
What if the person who now owns the equipment knows exactly what it is and did it on purpose?
why would they be afraid?
Because the ruling party has loads to lose. Namely, the most populous country on the planet.
There's evidence presented in this thread, by people familiar with reimplementing their interface. I see you didn't bother to read the thread.
I must say, I am impressed by your deductive reasoning abilities. You're absolutely correct, I clicked on the comments, jumped my scrollbar to halfway down the thread, and just posted something. Hell, I didn't even read what I was replying to. I bow to your deductive reasoning. What's still missing, however, is evidence of their intent. Since you did read the thread, and I (clearly) did not, then it shouldn't be a problem for you to point out the evidence that proves your statement: "FTDI's deliberate intent is to damage people's equipment." You made the claim so, go ahead, prove their intent.
But in this case you're celebrating denial of service to a user who may have acted in good faith. That's a shitty thing to be happy about. Why do you like taking advantage of people?
Fantastic straw man. I especially like how you added the terms "celebrating" and "happy". Well done, sir.
I can see where this "discussion" is going. I'll bow out. You take care now.
FTDI's deliberate intent is to damage people's equipment.
If you have evidence of their intent then it would be interesting to see that. Maybe they've only implemented a bug fix where their drivers are finding a piece of hardware which is claiming that it is something that it is not, which must be a bug, so they're fixing the bug. Now it doesn't identify as a piece of hardware that it clearly is not. Et voila, problem solved. It's not their responsibility to change the piece of hardware to correctly identify itself, that bug is one for the manufacturer to fix. The bug that FTDI is fixing is one in which the hardware identifies itself as FTDI hardware when it is not.
How is that not illegal?
I didn't suggest that what they were doing was not illegal, just that I support it. It wouldn't be the only thing considered illegal that I support.
They're not very good at their job anyway.
They're good enough that their drivers are apparently able to support a wide range of hardware that they didn't build. I'd say that's doing a pretty decent job. The list of operating systems and versions that they support is pretty extensive as well. What exactly are they bad at doing? It sounds like they've been doing the same thing for the past 20+ years, and that it's been working so well that other companies want to leech off them and get support and technology from them without paying anything for it.
And I hope FTDI wins. Eventually this should go back to whoever made the counterfeit chip. Those companies should be the ones who get called out by their customers that they supply to, they should receive the blame. If I'm using counterfeit chips in my products and an update from FTDI stops things from working, I'm not going to be pissed off at FTDI, I'm going to be pissed off at whoever sold me a chip and told me that it was an FTDI chip, and I'm going to sue them for selling me counterfeit products while claiming they were the real thing. And if the manufacturer knew they were buying counterfeit, then they're the guys who deserve to get sued.
Um, no. They're intentionally modifying the device ID on the counterfeit chip so it will no longer work.
That sounds like a bug fix. They've found a piece of hardware which is identifying itself as the incorrect piece of hardware (which they know, because they know what the correct piece of hardware with that ID is). So, they just... fix the bug.
Look, counterfeiting is wrong. But destroying the property of an end user, most likely unaware of the counterfeit device, is both wrong and illegal. Period.
Actually, counterfeiting is also both wrong and illegal. Period.
What? So if I shoot my neighbor,
What the hell is it with everyone using violent crime analogies? What does shooting someone have anything at all to do with a company issuing a firmware update that disables unlicensed counterfeit chips? Moreover, is FTDI the first company to use a tactic like that? How about Apple Computer, Inc.? Have they ever issued something like an operating system update which would intentionally render unlicensed counterfeit hardware unworkable?
Good analogy. Yes, we are talking about a company going around committing the murders of people who are unknowingly (or knowingly, it doesn't really matter) using counterfeit technology. That is literally what is happening here. Well done.
Santa Cruz was one of the earlier cities on the internet, thanks to UCSC. Today, access is ass. And they have one of the highest costs of living in the nation. It's often been one of the most-connected cities in the USA, for example it was part of Cricket territory. But today it's ass.
Too bad they couldn't give a rat's ass while I still lived there. The local ISPs are mostly awful. Even the ones that don't suck are slow, slow, slow.
What do you have against ass?
Sure but in Java you have things like Spring Framework, Hibernate, Java EE standards that have been around for a decade and they are rock-solid foundations to build upon.
To be fair, the mysqli extension in PHP which supports prepared statements has also been around for over a decade. But you can still go and find any number of tutorials teaching people how to write vulnerable queries by concatenating strings and using the deprecated mysql extension, and you can go to any PHP forum and find people posting questions about code which uses the same. And when you try to teach those people how to do it the correct way, roughly 95% of the time their response is along the lines of "I just need to make it work, then I'll learn about prepared statements." It's a failure of the programmers and tutorials far more than it is a failure of the language. It would be fantastic if PHP outright removed the mysql extension and the mysqli_query function, but that would break a ton of existing applications. And, even so, even when you point people to tutorials about prepared statements they gloss over everything and come back with code like:
$mysqli->prepare('SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=' . $_GET['id']);
Look, I used a prepared statement!
Like I said, it's a failure of the programmers who want the quick and easy way instead of the correct way.
SQL context aware eval() routines with safe default marshaling assumptions are relatively trivial to write.
Could you post a trivial example of one?