[Dylan16807]

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.

[zb]

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".

[Dylan16807]

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?