[marshray]

I haven't seen the connector myself, but I would not expect it to be devoid of all innovation. But I do find it somewhat disturbing that after 100+ years we're still finding patentable modifications to ordinary low-voltage plugs.

Someone should make a Kickstarter for a compatible charging connector that unambiguously avoids all the patents. Something dirt-simple like just a few bare metal pins sticking out providing voltage and alignment.

Now that would be disrupting the ecosystem.

[JohnTHaller]

You can't. Apple built DRM into their cable with a proprietary security chip. All DRMed and patended up nicely to lock everyone out of just about everything.

[czhiddy]

A minimal amount of googling would've uncovered the actual purpose of the chip: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/

Care to provide any sources describing the DRM capabilities?

[marshray]

From your link, the discussion doesn't seem to have a definitive conclusion:

The folks at Chipworks has done a more professional teardown, revealing that the connector contains, as expected, a couple of power-switching/regulating chips, as well as a previously unknown TI BQ2025 chip, which appears to contain a small amount of EPROM and implements some additional logic, power-switching, and TI’s SDQ serial signalling interface. SDQ also uses CRC checking on the message packets, so a CRC generator would be on the chip. Somewhat confusingly, Chipworks refer to CRC as a “security feature”, perhaps trying to tie into the authentication angle, but of course any serial protocol has some sort of CRC checking just to discard packets corrupted by noise.

So until someone finds a truly dumb Lightning charging cable, the question as to whether or not DRM prevents it is alive.

[marshray]

Bastards. Well, as long as someone has a cable somewhere that your DC supply can proxy communications to...