Some time ago, people noticed that buried in the Windows Bluetooth drivers is the hard-coded name of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. What’s going on there? Does the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 receive favorable treatment from the Microsoft Bluetooth drivers? Is this some sort of collusion?<\/p>\n
No, it’s not that.<\/p>\n
There is a lot of a bad hardware out there, and there are a lot of compatibility hacks to deal with it. You have CD-ROM controller cards that report the same drive four times<\/a> or USB devices that draw more than 500mW of power after promising they wouldn’t<\/a>. More generally, you have devices whose descriptors are syntactically invalid or contain values that are outside of legal range or which are simply nonsensical.<\/p>\n Most of the time, the code to compensate for these types of errors doesn’t betray its presence in the form of hard-coded strings. Instead, you have “else” branches that secretly repair or ignore corrupted values.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the type of mistake that the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 made is one that is easily exposed via strings, because they messed up their string!<\/p>\n