Elbox dispels rumours about usb.device
[13 November 2002]

For long years, our company has been making efforts to make users of our hardware proud that they receive the best software support. This support is also the most dynamically expanded in the Amiga market.

Some persons/companies do not like this situation, as they would like to compete with Elbox. They know they cannot, though: they have no knowledge or employees to work with or determination to provide on-going support for their products. However, we continue receiving signals from various sources on attempts at disassembling and hacking our drivers for the purpose of stealing the results of our efforts and work.

In recent days the Amiga community witnessed rumours related to our latest product: the Spider USB 2.0 card. In order to clarify this we feel obliged to respond officially to them.

Rumour: Using the Elbox usb.device with an USB PCI card other than Spider USB 2.0 High-Speed may lead to trashing the disk RDB.

Answer: Not true.

If anyone is trying to run the Elbox usb.device with any USB PCI card other than Spider USB 2.0 (for which this driver is dedicated), the only result is that the driver does not work with this card and a requester window appears on the screen: 'No Spider USB 2.0 card found.'

Rumour: Whoever has a Mediator may modify Spider drivers so that they support USB PCI cards from other parties.

Answer: No.

The Elbox usb.device is software protected by international copyright law. Only owners of the Spider card are licensed to use these drivers (the drivers are bundled with the cards). The only legal way to acquire the usb.device drivers is to buy the original Spider package. The software is always licensed for a specific person and only that person. The licence for using the driver does not give any right to modify the code (which is property of Elbox).

Rumour: The usb.device driver has some procedures, which may damage hdd RDB if any external program accidentally damages the driver code.

Answer: No.

Elbox pays much attention to protect its drivers against any improper operation in case of accidental damage to their code by any external events. To ensure this, Elbox drivers are encrypted. When run, they automatically decrypt themselves and verify internal checksums to guarantee the maximum security of operation. This is the best way to prevent program crash if, due to any reason, the code is damaged when read from the media.

Obviously, even such protection measures cannot protect the program against a hacking attack, that is against a program, which purposefully modifies the code to make some part of it operate in a way different from the original intention. No software available for Amiga computers, including Amiga operating systems, can be 100% protected against such hacking attacks.