WSJ - Article on Linux netbooks

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> You honestly think the bad guys wouldn't just sniff the wire, disassemble
> the driver and write printer exploding worms given the chance.

I didn't get the impression that they were as worried about their
printers being targeted by worms as much as they were worried that they
would be left holding the bag doing free warranty repairs on printers
that were broken by buggy 3rd party drivers.

As controllers become cheaper, hopefully the excuse of being able to
break the hardware will go away.

> I don't doubt that the printer control is done from the PC end, but I'd
> be suprised if Lexmark were dumb enough to just trust the PC commands.
> You don't DRM your toner cartridges and then act careless on the rest
> surely. I'd have thought they'd have DRM on the driver interface too !

The toner cartridge has lots more mark-up.  You can afford to put more
smarts in that than the printer. ;-)

In case it wasn't obvious, I'm not the slightest bit happy about
companies not releasing programming information either.  I just don't
think that MS co-marketing dollars is the answer all of the time.
Sometimes it is just laziness and a false sense of security through
obscurity.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht              Android 1.5 (Cupcake) and Fedora-11