D-Link

D-Link Corporation is a Taiwanese company that manufactures wireless and Ethernet computer networking products for both consumer and SOHO users. The company was founded in 1986 by Ken Kao, Current CEO and Chairman. more...

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The corporate headquarters are located in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. As of 2006, the company has offices in over 90 countries around the world. D-Link is the largest wireless LAN provider in Europe and the People's Republic of China.

To focus on brand businesses, D-Link decided to spin off the company's OEM/ODM business to "Alpha Networks" in 2003. In 2004, 17% of Alpha Networks shares was sold to Quanta Computers.

Controversies

Timeserver DDOS

In 2005, Poul-Henning Kamp, a FreeBSD developer, noticed that the Danish stratum 1 timeserver appeared to be the victim of a DDoS attack. Research into the matter revealed that a number of D-Link network products were hardwired to consult stratum 1 timeservers (which sit at the highest level of the NTP hierarchy, and are usually intended for the exclusive use of other timeservers) directly for NTP information, instead of relying on their respective ISPs' timeservers. This activity violated accepted practices as well as wishes of the administrators of higher-level timeservers, often incurring significant expense in the process.

D-Link is not the first company to engage in this behaviour. In 2003, Netgear caused similar problems for the University of Wisconsin, which were eventually resolved.

This issue has since been amicably resolved by Kamp and D-Link.

GPL Violations

On September 6th, 2006, the gpl-violations.org project prevailed in court litigation against the German branch of the company regarding D-Link's alleged inappropriate and copyright infringing use of parts of the Linux Operating System Kernel . The judgement finally provided the on-record, legal precedent that the GPL is valid and legally binding, and that it will stand up in court. However, whilst the court order provided restitution for the plaintiff, there was no injunction or other order preventing D-Link from continuing their offending activities.

Read more at Wikipedia.org