D-Link relents, agrees to halt its "NTP vandalism"

Although we never got that press release we wanted from D-Link addressing accusations that it was engaging in so-called "NTP vandalism," the company has apparently seen the error of its ways and been shamed into come to a settlement with the Danish admin whose time server its routers were programmed -- without permission -- to regularly query. In the absence of any government-sponsored options, Poul Henning-Kamp had set up his own NTP server (with donated bandwidth) so that 2,000-odd Danish server administrators could reliably sync their clocks, but because D-Link began coding the server's address into all of their hardware, Henning-Kamp's traffic skyrocketed and his ISP threatened to hit him with a multi-thousand-dollar bill. After writing an open letter exposing D-Link's misdeeds, Henning-Kamp finally heard back from the company that had previously been ignoring him, and the two parties apparently agreed that products already on the market can continue to query the server (which means some sort of payment was probably made), but that D-Link will remove its address from hardware manufactured in the future. Lesson learned: if you've got a problem with a big, faceless corporation, instead of wasting your time in fruitless attempts to contact their lawyers and executives, just make a big public stink until someone pays you to shut up.