Of course they are perfectly entitled to offer such a defence, and if they've got sufficient evidence to create reasonable doubt about their guilt then they should be acquitted by the court like anyone else.

Somehow I suspect that if this ever gets to a court, that will not be the case, however. If the reports of what's happening here are anything close to accurate, it seems that a significant amount of code has been written specifically to determine whether a component is a genuine FTDI one or someone else's, that the new driver is actively doing something that impairs the operation of only one of those types, and that anyone with the slightest experience programming in this context would readily know these things.

It would take an impressive lawyer to overcome those (presumed) facts, and it would probably be quite difficult to cover up the entire development process and related documentation to make this look like an accidental side effect if it was actually a deliberate decision.

Their EULA could say that if you use their software with something other than a genuine FTDI component they may send a hit man round, but I doubt that would stand up too well in court either. If they think they're going to get away with deliberately breaking someone's gear because of some weasel words in the EULA, they need better lawyers. Or they needed better lawyers, I should say, because if the reporting of what's going on is accurate then by this point I suspect they're already in serious trouble even if they don't realise it yet.

Never mind your feeble class action lawsuit. Let their executives or other staff responsible travel to a country where unauthorized computer access causing this kind of damage is a criminal offence!

Then let them stand up in court and argue with a straight face that the user of a device that without the user's knowledge contained an alleged counterfeit component had authorised them to install software that was actively designed to impair the use of that device.

It really isn't. Helvetica is actually a relatively awkward typeface to work with, particularly for body text. Its default tracking/kerning are tight for extended reading, its glyphs have quite inconsistent width fittings, and it has various problems with similar-looking glyphs that are easily mistaken for one another, which also makes it a less than ideal choice for user interfaces. Don't mistake popularity or endurance for quality.

It's not as if Cisco's acquisitions have always been completely independent, though -- look at their connections to Insieme Networks for example -- so I'm not sure you're really comparing apples to apples with those figures.

That's a horrible oversimplification, but let's take it as read for the purposes of this discussion.

Unfortunately, if you adopt that policy, you have immediately and severely restricted your ability both to hire and retain the most effective staff and to build the most productive teams.

It is obvious that HR would love for employees to be plug-replaceable in such a way, and it is obvious why. However, the reality is that in a creative industry, and particularly in one related to technology, no two employees offer exactly the same potential contributions. If as a matter of policy you won't hire or depend on anyone with unique contributions to offer, then almost by definition you're only going to have staff with typical combinations of widely available skills and no special experience or unique insights to draw upon.

However, given that the creative component of technology companies is often where much of their value comes from, a business that can't or won't hire the most creative people is always at risk of a competitor disrupting their business model with a new product, service, distribution model...

Moreover, technology can be a dramatic effectiveness multiplier. A single smart, creative person using the best technologies can sometimes outperform an entire team of mediocre people with average technologies. More importantly, in scalable fields like software and on-line services, a relatively small team of smart, creative people with complementary skill sets and the best technologies has the potential compete with a much larger organisation on raw effectiveness, before you even consider the overheads that the larger organisation must bear.

Finally, one of the major factors in maintaining productivity and developing existing technological assets and IP is keeping sufficient knowledge and expertise available within the development team. That can be done through good documentation, tools, processes and so on, but in reality this very rarely happens and word-of-mouth advice is a far more efficient and effective way to pass information around. Of course, if you treat everyone as replaceable you not only forego that most efficient mechanism but also incur the very substantial overheads of trying to use other documentation and tools to compensate. In short, high turnover is an efficiency killer in technical teams where shared knowledge is a vital asset.

If you think all of this is nonsense, you might consider that this is a discussion about Cisco, whose main business model is currently facing an existential threat from modern technologies like SDN. I'm guessing you're a business studies or MBA student, so you might like to consider the commercial relationships between Cisco and the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google as a case study for what can happen. Cisco's recurring model of spinning out and later buying up side companies to do the R&D for innovative technologies would also make an interesting case study.

Gosh, I'm running out of "I told you so" moments lately. First it turns out that Open Source networking software can have spectacularly serious security vulnerabilities after all. Then it turns out that Linux is not immune to worms and other malware. Now you're telling me that outsourcing everything to a remote system and remote staff of unknown competence, unknown security, unknown reliability, unknown solvency and business planning, and assorted other uncontrolled risks might not always be the best solution to every problem in computing? Seriously? :-)

Thanks. I hadn't come across that site before, and it looks useful.

Does anyone know of a site or mailing list specifically dedicated to checking out the new updates and rating how safe and reliable they are to install? I've had far too many stability and performance problems after installing recommend updates to trust Microsoft's "Install this update to make {some important but unspecified change} to Windows" messages any more. However, life's too short to keep running a search on every update ID every month to see which ones are getting red flagged.

I decided four quotations was enough to make my point, but that observation by Mencken was nearly the fifth. It comes to mind every time some government minister talks about repealing the Human Rights Act and cites the difficulties they've had in deporting a tiny number of high profile people as their justification.

To borrow a well-known retort, if you outlaw encryption then only outlaws will use encryption. How does opening everyone else up to fraud, identity theft, and all the other problems encryption helps to fight on-line do anything to prevent bad people from communicating securely when encryption tools are widely available?

That is all true, but it's difficult to have that sensible debate when one side's argument is expressed with approximately the intellectual and ethical rigour of "there are scary people out there who you should be scared of, and if you don't let us do anything we want no matter the other consequences then those scary people will kill other people and it will be your fault".

I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make here. Do you understand that the Human Rights Act is national law, and that the rights and freedoms within its scope can therefore be protected by our own courts without necessarily resorting to any action at European level?

Are we talking at cross-purposes here? My point was that plenty of people who do presumably have access to the whole picture, including sensitive details about security procedures and threat assessments and whatever else goes on behind closed doors, still lean toward liberty over security on this issue.

For example, right now the Lib Dems are in government. Their leader is the Deputy PM. They have MPs on relevant select committees in Parliament. As such, it is reasonable to assume that at least some senior Lib Dems have access to sensitive information about any identified threats that are out there. And yet they still all seem to oppose the so-called snooper's charter, citing similar civil liberties concerns to the rest of us.

Of course. But when people who have literally led governments or armed forces can still maintain that position, any appeal to blind trust by an authoritarian government must surely demand a healthy degree of scepticism.