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A comment on Apple kills a Kickstarter project. Parent comment

Re:Apple kills a Kickstarter project by Dylan16807 on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:16AM (#4951967)
There are various sane reasons to have a chip in there to process data.

There is no benign reason to involve authentication to shove 5V over the wire.

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Re:Apple kills a Kickstarter project by zb on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:58AM (#4952151)
The pins are on the outside of the connector. It's trivial to short-circuit them by accident, which could easily cause a fire if there were not a chip in there to control when you "shove 5V over the wire".
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Re:Apple kills a Kickstarter project by Dylan16807 on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:03PM (#4954271)
So it has to act as a relay. That's easy enough. Is the spec of how this chip works at all open or is it a DRM method with an excuse?
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