Andre Jute wrote:
Bret Ludwig confesses to, indeed brags about, more theft and conversion
for profit of another's intellectual property, these particular thefts
being from Apple Corporation and its shareholders:

We all burned Mac IIx boot ROMs for
hackers-it was $50 and they supply the blank ICs.


Yeah. I also engaged in "wholesale theft and conversion" in regard to
the EPROMs in the LaserWriter Pro 6xx (EX series engine) printers.
Apple Computer deliberately designed those printers so malicious code
could hork them "irreparably", overwriting any value in those ROMs.
People would set passwords or run a virus and the printer was inop, and
the only fix was a logic board swap at $700 or thereabouts. Or.....we
would erase and reflash the ROMs with images gleaned from a shop unit
or one we talked another client into bringing in on a pretense. We'd
reset the page count and ESN with a hex editor and they were good to go
for $125 instead of the $700+125 they were otherwise looking at. We
did at least ten of these before word got out that if you had one you
had to be really careful. I think the virus that was horking these died
with a OS upgrade, too.

There were all sorts of shenanigans we engaged in back then. Most of
them died out when Apple decided to price its hardware a little closer
to reality than was the case before. Then too, the Apple user base
boiled down from a lot of general purpose users into mostly
professionals running page layout and Photoshop on one hand and a few
low end appliance users on the other. When Windows 98 and its Intel
hosts got cheap enough most of the middle-of-the-roaders switched,
aided by the long 68K-to-PPC and then Classic to MacOS X transition.
The hardcore M$ haters, often on Amiga or Atari anyway, who would have
occasionally considered Apple pretty much all went to Linux.

Apple Computer did far, far, far more to **** every single one of its
dealers and business partners than the sum total of every technical
offense against its IP put together, many times over.