Hi,
If you have been involved in cracking a public private key encryption, can there be any doubt that the the manufacturer did not wish you to access the configuration and took serious steps to prevent it. You would also have needed to enact an advanced form of hacking to circumvent or crack the encryption. The law may take the side of the OEM against you and who knows what that could mean.
Come on. Of course, it depends of the country you are in. But generally speaking :
- The fact that the manufacturer "did not wish" us to access this information is irrelevant.
- The fact that they took serious steps to prevent it is irrelevant. Reverse engineering is even allowed by law in some countries.
- The fact that you are doing something bad for the business of the manufacturer is irrelevant.
- The fact that they are loosing money is irrelevant too.
The law and judges are not there to protect business strategies and business revenues by themselves.
However, companies may use their money and size to try to intimidate people. It's a bit like terrorism : even if your requests are not 100% legit, you try to make people do what you want by using fear. That can work. It can also backlash (as shown with the example from TI - but there are many other examples, see the Sony DRM story for an example).
Even if FLIR does manage to get the sale of hacked units to stop (I suspect many customers of hacked units are in fact very happy customers !), even if they do manage for the information to disappear from the Internet (which would piss people off), there is already a lot of people who are informed of all this stuff and who will remember it. And many those people are mostly FLIR customers.
Time will tell what will happen to FLIR. In my eyes, they look more and more like a big company struggling to keep their profits using questionable business practices, and less and less like a respectable company acting in good faith for the benefit of their customers.
And I have no problem publishing my opinion in public domain. Free speech.
While we're speculating about law, I'm wondering if FLIR actions by themselves could not be subject of a legal action too. I'm not sure selling crippled hardware is legal everywhere, especially with such a price difference for the same hardware, a price difference which can not really be justified by differences in the software.
And I think customers who bought a full-priced E8 must be very unhappy when they learnt that the E4 hardware can do the same for like 6x times less. FLIR might think that those customers are unhappy because of the hack. But even if there was no hack, no upgrade possibility, those customers would still be unhappy. They've been induced to pay a huge premium. They might feel cheated : I would feel cheated.
[EDIT] I also believe that the sale of hacked unit is legal, as long as the customer precisely knows what he is buying, of course.
Actually I believe that someone buying a hacked E4 from an eBay seller knows more what he's buying than someone buying a crippled E4 from FLIR... which customer is being cheated on ? Which seller is lying the most about the capabilities of the product ? Think about it.
Aurora, you think that a judge might fall in the side of FLIR. I think he might also laugh about their practices. It all depends of the country I believe.
uski