No, there is a clear distinction between what is being sold and what is being demonstrated. The latter requires additional hardware and software NOT provided with the advertised USB-PD probe being sold. Reading the end of the blog or even the product page immediately makes that distinction clear.
A thief who breaks into a car using one of those hook things for the window still needs to know what (s)he's doing. That doesn't mean you don't get a lot of police attention if you're wandering around a car-park with one of them...
The eye of Sauron will blink, swivel, and focus hard towards these guys, IMHO. Hope they have good^better lawyers.
Of course, a lawsuit may always be filed even if they have no belief they will win.
They do, actually. Someone tried selling computers pre-configured with the correct hackintosh configs and Apple shut them down via a lawsuit[0]. They also got Wired to take down a video on 'how to hackintosh'[1], however the theme with these two events was that they occurred pre-2010. Given that a multitude of people have now created hackintosh tutorials, the only thing Apple would C&D now is someone doing what Psystar did and selling pre-configured machines.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation
1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/breaking-apple-suing-wired-for...
Maybe Wired is a sufficiently large distribution that the same thing applies, but if these guys had just released the details, I suspect Apple would just quietly patch stuff along the lines above. Selling it means they poked the bear. With a burning torch.
They have a real purpose as research tools...
A good friend of mine went head to head with the Dutch tax service. It was obvious from the start the tax service could never win. So he won...after about 5 years of legal proceedings and having to finance the whole thing up front before getting his money.
Remember you have to fight them in your spare time, for them it's just work time.
In Canada, for example: potential lawsuits must be signed off by a judge who believes the case has merit. This means that you cannot decide to bury someone in legal paperwork simply because you have the money to do so: you must also have a reasonable complaint.
Yes: I skipped over the fact that the US has arrangements with other countries and therefore there are other countries where you can still do this, but the US’s legal system makes it easy.
You can't normally run code on the T2 but I don't think that has much use outside of research. You can't run code on an SSD controller either.
Your point about SSD controllers is embarrassingly incorrect; there exist many hackers of SSD controllers, including OpenSSD [0], an entire open-source community of folks working on the problem.
Please stop apologizing for Apple's walled gardens. They intentionally limit access to hardware, even after it's legally sold and belongs to the new owner.
Edit: Downvoters, provide evidence or knock it off. Nobody's interested in Apple apologia this morning.
Yes, Apple limits access to program the t2.
Maybe we should stop paying a fashion company to sell us chips that we aren't allowed to touch.
What basis would they have for that? Seems it falls squarely into the exceptions for any law that could conceivably form the basis for a complaint.
1) Apple will have a problem with this. They generally don’t care about small-scale things like hackintosh, but this is a bit different. Selling a device to automagically hack a key logger into a modern Mac goes over their ‘line in the sand’, I’d expect. Openly selling it is ... brave, IMHO.
2) I can see some further work on their part to beef up the security over usb-pd. Perhaps the first thing is, as the article suggests, to force external attention from the user (hold down both shift keys...) but ultimately I could see it going to challenge/response and sha256 keys or similar.