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Would it be piracy if someone was able to provide tools to enable disabled parts? "You're making us lose business by providing a tool to allow customers to use

by Joakal 15y ago

Would it be piracy if someone was able to provide tools to enable disabled parts? "You're making us lose business by providing a tool to allow customers to use more than what they expected and paid for."

tptacek 15y ago
No, but it might be a violation of the DMCA. It's not necessarily a "social good" to provide tools like this. It obviously annoys nerds to no end that companies use software to detune hardware for price segmentation; the nerd worldview is, "what hardware you sell me is mine to do with as I please". That's utterly sensible. But in the long term, it means that either consumers will have to pay more, or that companies will have to waste time specializing hardware to perform the same segmentation goals. In other words: it's a win for a tiny minority of hardcore nerds, but a loss for everyone else. Also: consider carefully that similar techniques are used throughout many different industries. For instance: recreational boat engines are detuned in software to provide multiple performance categories at different prices.
- rebuttal_bot 15y ago
  Or, and here's a revolutionary thought: they can produce the single BEST product, and provide it to everyone at the same price!
daeken 15y ago
After I hacked the Emotiv EPOC headset to get the raw EEG data out of it, lots of people referred to me as a pirate. However, I firmly believe that customers have the right to do with their property what they will, and I ended up writing this in response to all of it: http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto
stephen_g 15y ago
As other comments have said, some (possibly most) of these chips likely have a core disabled because of manufacturing issues, so it's probably not a good idea... Apart from power usage (which the AppleTV doesn't have to worry about, being plugged into AC) there really isn't much reason to do it otherwise.

by Joakal 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

No, but it might be a violation of the DMCA. It's not necessarily a "social good" to provide tools like this. It obviously annoys nerds to no end that companies use software to detune hardware for price segmentation; the nerd worldview is, "what hardware you sell me is mine to do with as I please". That's utterly sensible. But in the long term, it means that either consumers will have to pay more, or that companies will have to waste time specializing hardware to perform the same segmentation goals. In other words: it's a win for a tiny minority of hardcore nerds, but a loss for everyone else. Also: consider carefully that similar techniques are used throughout many different industries. For instance: recreational boat engines are detuned in software to provide multiple performance categories at different prices.

rebuttal_bot 15y ago
Or, and here's a revolutionary thought: they can produce the single BEST product, and provide it to everyone at the same price!

daeken 15y ago

After I hacked the Emotiv EPOC headset to get the raw EEG data out of it, lots of people referred to me as a pirate. However, I firmly believe that customers have the right to do with their property what they will, and I ended up writing this in response to all of it: http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto

stephen_g 15y ago

As other comments have said, some (possibly most) of these chips likely have a core disabled because of manufacturing issues, so it's probably not a good idea... Apart from power usage (which the AppleTV doesn't have to worry about, being plugged into AC) there really isn't much reason to do it otherwise.