aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 21, 2005

HP Invent?

Now this is cause for real concern. Via BoingBoing:

Ian Hogben discovered that his HP laptop stores a whitelist of allowed Mini-PCI cards in its BIOS. If the WiFi card you buy isn’t on the whitelist, your laptop won’t boot. The anticompetitive implications for this are stunning: if you don’t go to HP on bent knee before shipping your cards, they’ll lock them out of their hardware and none of their customers will be able to use your card.