seems like AoA pretty plainly stated that Dunlop SP 8000s are the tire which belongs on the SPORT PKG.<p>Kirk<br>

I am curious if anyone on this board has depleted the fluid in the reservoir to the point where the low level indicator graphic appears. When it did appear was there any fluid left to squirt on the windshield or was the reservoir completely dry?<p>Mike L.<br>‘97 A4QM<br>

Do you need to have purchased the trip computer to get a warning light for low windshield washer fluid indication, this seems to be so indescriptively cheep from Audi not to have put a warning light with the basic car or is there an indicator that I haven't seen ?

If the socket and chip hold some encryption key/pair or whatever, wouldn't someone that's trying to rip the software just get all the pertinent info by using unsoldering the socket and then testing with the Garret chip in it? The pinouts of the socket MUST be the same as stock, so all someone would have to do is read at the socket pinouts instead of the chip pinouts.

Just a thought,
Warren

My understanding of the situation relates more to the bigger more reputable chippers getting ripped, ie GIAC, Wett, APR, etc. There are quite a number of grey market chippers, and even some performance shops, that gain their codes this way.

As to Warren Wang's comment about just reading from the contact points, its a bit more complicated than that. While they can see what's coming out, with encryption it's much more difficult trying to get the algorithms that generated the signals. In other words its easy to read what's coming out but hard to figure out how it was made. The whole point in having a computer is that it can dynamically and almost instantaneously react to road and driver inputs. And that's where the algorithms come into play, upon receiving information from the outside world the chip reacts based on the programming.

It's basically a computer program with a hardware lock to prevent the copying of the program. Sure you can open up Microsoft Word and copy what is generated by you the user but it's damn near impossible to crack the source code to figure out how they made that stupid little animated paper clip.

Along the same lines, Garrett knows that given enough resources anyone could probably crack the encryption. His goal in the encryption is to make it so hard to crack that it would be easier to make your own chip.

Sorry this was so long. I'm game if anyone thinks otherwise, what the hell do I know.

<ul><li><a href="http://www.giausa.com/">http://www.giausa.com/</a</li></ul>

I wasn't questioning the concept of using an encrypted socket but rather the statement that stealing other peoples code was a "big problem". I'm thinking specifically with respect to A4's and not coding in general. There is only a relatively small number of tuners catering to the A4 market so it begs the question if there is truly a "big problem" with theft then who is stealing from whom? Hmmm....

Sean..

Maybe Garrett is just protecting against user to user copying, not tuner to tuner copying. For instance, I don't think that Garrett is thinking that another tuner is going to copy his work and sell it as their own.

The more likely scenario that he would want to protect against is if someone copied the Eprom and made it available for anyone else to use (at least anyone else who had a socketd ECU). The internet has made it very easy for people to distribute electronic code very quickly, such as the big problem Nintendo is having with N64 ROMS, and all software vendors are a little worried about protecting their interests.

BY using a special socket, Garrett at least has some assurances that his code will only work with his socket, much the same way that a dongle or a smart-card enabled program works.

I'm not Garrett, and I'm not speaking on behalf of him, I'm just throwing out a possibility.

I've been told by some "well connected" sources that the APR .8 bar is a "rip" of the Neuspeed .8 bar.

Apparently, they tried to increase the turbo boost to 1.0bar without reconfiguring some other settings in the mapping which is resulting in some of the pinging problems we've heard in the forum.

I too have been told that there are really only about 4-5 original programs available and all the rest are "rips" of those.

I hate to be a purveyor of rumor, but personally believe this to be true.