Posts by Dan Daniels

Open-source hardware hacking effort 'smacked down' by USB overlords

Re: There should not really be any problem here

Keep in mind that the Vendor ID and Product ID together tell the OS what driver to load for the device.

The reason the USB-IF is heavy-handed with allocation of Vendor IDs is to ensure that vendors do not accidentally use conflicting Product IDs. If multiple products are available to the public with the same Vendor ID and Device ID, drivers will conflict with each other, leading to erratic behavior and kernel panics.

Part of the charter of the USB-IF is to promote interoperability and reliability of USB devices.

Re: looks like rent seeking, smells like rent seeking ...

> This is one of those really stupid committee decisions. There will never be more than 64K vendors in the whole world.

The USB configuration header was based on the PCI configuration header to make it easier to reuse plug-and-play driver infrastructure. Basically, USB discovery works a lot like PCI discovery, at least as far as driver loading goes.

PCI was created in the early 1980s. FPGAs did not exist and creating ICs was limited to large corporations and universities that could afford to tape-out designs. Transistors were expensive and had to be justified, so at the time, it was reasonable assume there would be few vendors capable of creating PCI devices and to limit the Vendor ID size to 16 bits.

> Is that unique ID sent out over the Internet along with a directory listing of what's on the USB device?

The USB Vendor ID is a hardware register within the USB device itself. It is used to support plug-and-play driver discovery along with the USB Product ID. It is unique to a USB vendor, but every USB device from that vendor will have the same USB Vendor ID, while different products will have different USB Product IDs.

Re: looks like rent seeking, smells like rent seeking ...

> so if this is a volunteer led effort, where the hell is the 5 grand going ?

The website listed is a public Linux-USB ID database; it is not the USB Implementers Forum, which maintains the real database.

Besides operational costs, my understanding was that the high "entrance" fee exists to ensure that only "serious" vendors are assigned a Vendor ID. The USB Vendor ID, which is a hardware register within a USB device, is only 16-bits per specification, greatly limiting the number of vendors that can sell USB devices. At the time the specification was created, no one considered that a USB peripheral could be implemented with a microcontroller or FPGA, so it was assumed there would be a limited number of manufacturers capable of creating USB devices.

American cable giant joins data pimping club

Opt-out of what?

The article says that we can opt-out using a local cookie. That means we cannot opt-out of the deep-packet-inspection, only the delivery of targeted advertisements, yes? I don't know about anyone else, but it really ticks me off that my ISP plans on inspecting the *content* of every packet I send and receive. Unfortunately, I live 250m too far from the telephone exchange to switch to DSL.