Comment by doix
1 day ago
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
That probably makes it pretty easy to reverse engineer their software to bypass the restrictions.
1 day ago
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
That probably makes it pretty easy to reverse engineer their software to bypass the restrictions.
CHDK back then had quiet a few people from Canon helping - as far as I remember the floor gossip.
There are things we could do with our time...
I suppose I'm glad some people find time to do this.
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
Canon is a company that is in the business of making profit (not just software or just hardware).
If they realize that they can charge you $1 for every time you chew gum while taking photos, and people will actually pay for that privilege $1-per-chewing-gum-session (disclaimer: chewing gum not provided) they would charge you!
Remember BMW and heating in the UK (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208)??
Getting paid $6k for a camera once is good. Getting paid another $50 a year for doing nothing is even better.
I assume the great brain who came with the idea is: "we got 10 million cameras out there, if 0.5% of those camera owners pay $50 pa, then that's 10m x 0.5% x $50 = $2.5m pa. If I could get a 100k bonus for bringing $2.5m gross to my company I would also suggest this idea.
Sure, and that's why I don't think they'd invest heavily in anti-piracy measures. It requires a special skillset, your average developer isn't going to really know much about it. If I had to guess, there's a single "isProTier" function call that you just patch to return true. Maybe it's inlined and it's slightly more annoying. I doubt they did much more than that, but maybe I'm completely wrong.
Yunno, I wouldn't. Even for 100k on the table. I wouldn't suggest it. I have bills to pay, student loan debt, etc. but for one, I wouldn't want to suggest something that would have long term negative brand impact, and two, but more importantly, I wouldn't want to suggest developing something that if I were to use would piss me off. Make the world you want to see. Engineers share in the responsibility for things like this existing.