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129 Comments
- thewebguy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27this is my letter so far, any suggestions?
ATTN: President & CEO
17595 Mt. Herrmann St
Fountain Valley, CA 92708
I have recently read an open letter to D-Link available at the following URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/
I must say that I am disgusted with D-Link's poor choice of action. D-Link may
think that abuse such as this will go un-noticed, but that is not the case.
While I don't expect my actions to bring your corporation to its knees, I am the
"geek" of my family, and I have taken a personal stand by ordering Linksys
products to replace any and all of the D-Link networking gear that my parents,
siblings, cousins, and roomates are using. I hope that my sacrifice puts a dent
in the damage your corporate negligence has caused Mr. Kamp. - Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24If there's one thing I hate more than incompetence, it's people who don't care that they are incompetent and carry on churning out crap regardless of the problems it causes others.
According to this page:
http://www.dlink.com/corporate/international.asp?contact=Denmark&x=13&y=9&submitAction=contact#denmark
D-Link have an office operating in Denmark. This makes them subject to Danish law whether they like it or not. I don't know whether Denmark's computer crime laws cover this, but it wouldn't surprise me. - jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23Just as a technical policy... you are NOT supposed to connect to a Stratum 1 server unless you plan on being a Stratum 2 server (which would then serve a large number of NTP clients). This is an abuse of the NTP system.
- coneill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Hopefully this gets a lot of press. D-Link isn't even the first company to do this kind of crap. You'd think people would learn.
- moofree, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19""Oh and as a IT Director of a large defense contractor, I will choose not to purchase any D-Link gear until they come to resolution.""
I'd suggest not buying any afterwards either.
D-link makes trash hardware in my experience. - thotpoizn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16I don't quite get your position... Some lazy D-link developers trash his bandwidth (incurring very REAL costs) because they can't be arsed to read RFC's like the rest us, and THIS guy (and the folks that rely on his NTP services) should just take it on the chin and "quit whining"? That's just wrong, as a matter of principle. Will you feel the same way when someone pisses in YOUR post-toasties?
- reparsed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I just sent off this email to D-Link:
------
I recently read "Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism"
(http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/) and was very disappointed with
D-Link.
I own several D-Link wireless products and out of concern for the
owner/operator of "GPS.dix.dk" I am taking those D-Link products out of
service and until I hear that this issue is resolved I will be actively
recommending against the purchase of any D-Link products.
------
I know an email carries little weight so I’m dropping a hard copy in the mail this afternoon. - stoops, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12"I've never bought D-Link's network products but I've heard they have a lot of other problems too with many of them..."
I can confirm that. I had a DI-624 Rev B, and whenever my bro gamed on it wirelessly, it would automatically do a hard reset. It died when I changed some weird wireless setting (fragmentation?) and I brought it back. It was the most annoying thing in the world. Now I am happily using a WRT54GS v.4 - dossy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13Solution: move the NTP server from GIS.dix.dk to a new server. Email the 2,000 legitimate users of the change. Tell them they have until X date to make the change.
After X date, modify the GIS.dix.dk NTP server such that it returns a random time as its NTP response. Watch millions of D-Link customers freak out that "the clock is wrong, wrong, wrong!"
Even if D-Link's NTP client implementation polls several NTP servers, the resulting skew from responses returned from GIS.dix.dk will FORCE D-Link to act. - jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Your own personal MAC addresses are _not_ transmitted over the Internet. Anyone who you communicate with on the net (unless they're connected to the same router/switch, and even then sometimes not) will never see your MAC address. The closest your MAC address gets to the Internet is between your D-Link router, and the next step up which would be at your ISP. No further.
- Spug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I sent this just now:
-----
Dear D-Link,
after prominent computer news websites http://slashdot.org and http://digg.com made me aware of Poul-Henning Kamp's "Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism", available online at http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/, I have been disgusted by the legal action, or lack thereof, taken by your company.
Although I realize that one person hardly can make a dent in the tough hide of your giant, evil corporation, I want you to know that I am boycotting any and all D-Link products used by me personally as well as my work place, and I will recommend against buying your products until you have shown remorse at the monetary expenses you have and will force upon Mr. Kamp by your ignorant and arrogant behavior.
Thank you for your time,
Tobias Langhoff
spug@thespug.net - reparsed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10No NTP enabled D-Link devices have been used in the transmission of this message.
- jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10"Oh and as a IT Director of a large defense contractor, I will choose not to purchase any D-Link gear until they come to resolution."
We don't believe you. (The IT Director part. I think we believe that you won't be purchasing D-Link gear, but then again, you're probably not in the market for mass purchases of home routers anyhow.)
"I saw this on slashdot earlier, i am glad someone posted it on here because slashdot's comments page sucks."
Actually, Digg is nice, but Slashdot is generally recognized to have a better discussion forum for technical stories. - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11"Oh and as a IT Director of a large defense contractor, I will choose not to purchase any D-Link gear until they come to resolution."
LOL - no you're not. - bek99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6A little bit of research on their part could've made it easier for them and saved putting in a bunch of entries...
http://www.pool.ntp.org/use.html
As pool.ntp.org will assign you timeservers from all over the world, time quality will not be ideal. You get a bit better result if you use the continental zones (For example europe, north-america, oceania or asia.pool.ntp.org), and even better time if you use the country zone (like ch.pool.ntp.org in Switzerland) - for all these zones, you can again use the 0, 1 or 2 prefixes, like 0.ch.pool.ntp.org. Note, however, that the country zone might not exist for your country, or might contain only one or two timeservers. If you know timeservers that are really close to you (measured by network distance, with traceroute or ping), time probably will be even better. - jeff4379, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7WTF do they care if you are going to replace all of your DLink equipment...you've already paid for it.
- algorythm, on 10/12/2007, -9/+15I saw this on slashdot earlier, i am glad someone posted it on here because slashdot's comments page sucks. Anyways...
I am sick of these large companies who think they have the right to push guys around. The guy should sue them in his courts, so they have to appear there. Of course, I am not one to sue everybody but when nothing is done for resolution or an apology at the minimum, then they deserve it.
Oh and as a IT Director of a large defense contractor, I will choose not to purchase any D-Link gear until they come to resolution. - SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I just thru out a DI-624 that a friend was using...it was a piece of crap. It worked for a year and then started dropping client connectivity to both wired and wireless clients...tried reseting and updating the firmware, but support said it was defective.
The replacement sent was a brick..wouldn't even turn on....I gave them a linksys router. - SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6D/link is crap...Everyone I know that has owned a d/link product has had a problem with it....in most cases the router or card just dies.
I'm not surprised to hear that d/link products are responsible for this...
They make crap products so it makes sense that the developers making the firmware for their products produce crap too....Hardcoding the servers in their implementation of NTP seems like good old fashioned programmer laziness. - wweasel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Here's mine, mailed in hard copy:
ATTN: Steven Joe, President and CEO
17595 Mt. Herrmann,
Fountain Valley, CA 92708
Dear Mr. Steven Joe,
I recently read an "open letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism" at URL http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/.
I am extremely unimpressed with the situation. Your company made a mistake that has caused serious harm to Mr. Poul-Henning Kamp and the people of Denmark to whom his server is a public service.
Mistakes happen and can be forgiven, but the actions taken by your company to resolve the problem, or lack there of, inspire outrage on my part and those of many others at popular technology sites like digg.com and slashdot.org.
I will make a point of not buying D-Link products until this issue has been properly resolved, and I will advise others to do the same. As mentioned in the letter, your competitor NETGEAR made a similar mistake, but moved quickly and decisively to resolve the problem. I will satisfy myself with the offerings of your competitors until your business practices match or exceed theirs.
Thank you for your time,
Michael --------- - rideagain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5hamerattack, the problem is that even if all the sysadmins go through the trouble of doing that, what makes you think that D-Link won't start using the new DNS name?
The same problem will happen over and over again, unless the management at D-Link stop thinking that they can leech off of top-level time servers and get away with it. - vegask, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I am not suprised by this. D-Link also has a defective DDNS client in most of their routers that does not obey response codes from Dynamic DNS providers like www.no-ip.com and dyndns and others. Dyndns has even gone as far as not supporting any of the D-Link products due to the amount of traffic it generates. D-Link has been contacted about this problem many times and has never bothered to fix it. No-IP.com should probably to do the same in my opinion.
- Udon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I will get some other router soon. My Dlink overheats and recently I have become quite concerned about that. Probably a fire hazard.
Couple of days ago I noticed it is good for keeping my coffee warm. Works well. - stevenb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The voice of one becomes strong when it's echoed by the voice of millions... or hundreds of thousands..
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -8/+13Referring to groups in the plural might be incorrect for American English, but it is perfectly fine for English.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8If you're the IT Director for a large defense contractor, and you were buying D-Link, you should be fired immediately.
- danieltalsky, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Y'know, this guy isn't getting any action because they KNOW that they did wrong at this point and they also know he doesn't have any intent to wield any legal muscle. I think his open letter was a good move, but for them, they can probably take the PR hit even Digg or Reddit generates and it won't hurt them as bad as having to pay damages / change their policies. So they can afford to pay a lawyer to do a little blahblah for awhile hoping the guy will go away.
Until there's some meaningful way to apply pressure, they won't do sh*t. I'm kinda surprised the guy posting the open letter seems so naive about expecting a corporate lawyer to negotiate in "good faith". The lawyer is there solely for Dlink's liability protection. If there were a trial threat, I guarantee the kind of vibe he'd be getting from the lawyer would change significantly.
He can't sue them, so all they have to do is hold up their hand and make a little talking motion with it while they attend to other more important business. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I never have bought DLink ...Now I never will
Irresponsible internet dwellers they are. - Spug, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Uhm, okay, trying that again. I sent this one just now. It's a bit harsh because the real incentive for sending it was that I once owned one of their routers, and it sucked and I hated their guts. :(
----
Dear D-Link,
after prominent computer news websites http://slashdot.org and http://digg.com made me aware of Poul-Henning Kamp's "Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism", available online at http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/, I have been disgusted by the legal action, or lack thereof, taken by your company.
Although I realize that one person hardly can make a dent in the tough hide of your giant, evil corporation, I want you to know that I am boycotting any and all D-Link products used by me personally as well as my work place, and I will recommend against buying your products until you have shown remorse at the monetary expenses you have and will force upon Mr. Kamp by your ignorant and arrogant behavior.
To make sure that my voice is heard by anyone higher up than your e-mail trash can, I also sent a hard copy of this letter to your offices.
Thank you for your time. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"My Dlink overheats and recently I have become quite concerned about that. Probably a fire hazard."
Get a giant bucket. Fill it with baking soda. Stick your router in it. :) - dlichteman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Had an overheating 624......love the new linksys WRT54G V4
- Aflat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Why should he have to move servers? And he still has the costs he has incurred due to them using it in the first place, why should he incurr more?
Also, it is about 2000 users, they don't need permission to use his server, as long as they meet certain criteria, which means he doesn't have email for most of the 2000 users.
Even if he does just move, this causes no real issue to the D-Link routers, as they pick from a random pool of servers, so only every once in a while will a customer have a clock be wrong, and it will only be until they get the time from another server. - thbt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4At least Netgear is working with U of Wisconsin on a resolution.
- unknowndomain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5This story reminds me of that company selling photographic equiptment a while back on digg, Lets hope some thing similar happens to them!
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3MAC addresses don't make it off the local network, they aren't included in the packets that the NTP server receives, at least with IPv4.
- splitretina, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I had to start running the windows client instead of having my dlink doing the updates. I'll never buy another dlink product again. Poor development.
- Wolfman~K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3boo... lets sony the bastards ;)
- dangmoss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5dlink needs to change this... i'm the geek in my circle of friends... dlink is off the list till they fix this...
- sapo916, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I am guessing you guys are still using the D-Link products anyway hehe.
- jerrygofixit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4That was mentioned in the article if ya read it :)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3D-Links always blown.
- Nighthawke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5STRATUM 1 access is STRICTLY limited to TLD, major node providers, and gov't entities that require that sort of precision. Access is filtered by MAC address, IP addressing and rotating key passwords.
What this kid should have done was fork the dammed POS router over to the consultant and let him have fun with it and see who the TRUE culprit was.
I wonder what that joker was smoking when he coded that in there... - jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4They should host the _TP service_ on their side, but chances are, they wouldn't want to pay the bill. LOL.
- Writher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Well how is it going to tell if the packet is originating from a D-Link or not? It's not like they can filter by MAC address - I'm sure that in over 99.9% of the cases the D-Link router/switch is not the next available layer 2 hop.
- piznut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3320 Diggs so far, and Id say a large majority of the people digging this article probably wont buy a dlink because of this.Im not sure what the markup is on a dlink device, but at 50-100 a device it wont take much more stink to remove that much money from the retail channel on dlink products.
A major effort could actually damage their profit in a non-negligible way. - SamL, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3why should they cover that? You put a service out on the net, people can hit it. Should digg reimburse people who get huge bandwidth bills when their site gets dugg?
- raano, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2My co-worker and I have had bad luck with D-Link. Both our DI-624's wireless would just drop randomly. I tried upgrading and downgrading the firmware, but it wouldn't work. I didn't bother with tech support as I had no intention of using D-Link ever again. I bought a Linksys WRT54G, and it's been smooth sailing for almost a year now -- no drops.
- oups, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe we can all can go to our local D-Link website, click on the "contact us" link and send an email. In the email we point to the article and politely ask where/when an updated firmware will be available because we feel very bad for this guy or tell them that as a customer you fear this guy might begin to charge you for the service provided... (Hehehe a little FUD certainly won't hurt in this case). If D-Link receive this kind of email from all over the world they will know what's at stake... Mine has just been sent...
- jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Bingo. You take problems to a lawyer when you DON'T want to compensate someone properly.
- pdboddy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Linksys routers are alright...
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