[Elecraft] Elecraft K3 USB Drivers

[w3ab]

Ted,

I have never received unapproved updates to any of my computators or 
phones. I always decide if I want the update, and if and when it can be 
applied.

Your own the hardware, you license the software/firmware from the owner. 
The owner can make any changes they want without your input. But you can 
turn off updates.

When you first load a program you have to agree to terms and conditions 
before you can proceed. You should read those, quite enlightening.

Ted sez:

  This may be an instance of a much larger problem, one that has been 
discussed with regard to automobiles and light machinery among other 
environments of computer-type programming.  It is, I suggest, a problem 
as much jurisprudential as electronic.

When I buy a computer and an operating system, who owns it?  Does it 
belong to he who bought and paid for it, or does it continue to belong 
to the company that produced it?  Windows is not alone in this.  Mac OS 
has its own version of forcing unrequested and often unauthorized 
updates, as is Samsung / Android or whoever makes those systems.  
Updates are installed at the producer's election, and as often as not in 
my experience with all three systems they disable or scramble the 
functions of some application I had been relying on.

I don't recall granting permission to any of the operating system 
producers to enter my computer unacknowledged and change it, however 
benevolent their purpose may be.  It is not a stretch in my mind to say 
that this is not much different from an automobile maker keeping the 
keys to the car I bought, finding it in my garage and entering it some 
night, and changing the color of the upholstery without my knowledge or 
consent.  Absurd, right?  From a macro-legal point of view, it's not a 
bad analogy.

And then the complaints are met with silence.  If a fix is offered, the 
user has to go hunting for it.  No-one has ever told me that they 
patched something they fouled up.  Elecraft itself it very different.  
Updates are announced; they are optional; the changes they make are 
described; and when a bug appears, the discussion even by the company 
owners is prompt and responsive.  My ire is directed rather at the Big 
Three of the nether world.

Users of the world unite!!

Ted (normally not at all revolutionary but really quite annoyed), KN1CBR

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73 de W3AB/GEO