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Yes, this. It's good that the mouse, by default, only returns dx/dy/buttons. It's bad that you can't reprogram it easily if you want to and it's bad you can't view the source code of how it works.

I expect reprogramming to require a JTAG board. Easily reprogrammable (via USB) peripherals will be a malware vector really quickly.

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Not just that, but also - it's not as though there's a single Optical Mouse Interface which every mouse uses internally. There's probably hundreds of slightly different sensors, all of which work differently - having a single, standard interface to them (USB HID) is a lot better than having to support every single one with its own driver.

(And that's even without getting into the bandwidth issue - the camera on a modern optical mouse captures far more data than it can transfer over USB.)

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