25 karma · joined September 20, 2014
That would be having them access the file in a restricted environment (literally, guards and stuff). You can't have people accessing your secrets in the comforts of their own homes and at the same time not be able to reproduce them in some form – even if an exact duplicate of the original data would be infeasible to obtain.
Not quite production-ready, I think.
Whatever the code for changing the PID is, it (supposedly) would work as well for a malfunctioning but real product, as well as a counterfeit.
It's their driver, it operates in a specific way, perhaps responding to possible device output. Using it with non-compatible parts advertising themselves as compatible and any resulting behaviour, including unwanted, is the responsibility of the user. To play it safe, don't use any drivers with incompatible hardware.
[1]: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....
(Furthermore, there is nothing "C" or wrong with regular pointers. Their only "flaw" is that they can't manage an object, but they're still the semantical way to refer to one.)