Razer

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Razer Inc.
Type Private
Industry Gaming hardware
Consumer electronics
Financial services
Founded 1998
Founder(s) Robert "Razerguy" Krakoff
Headquarters Irvine, CA 92618 (USA)

1 one-north Crescent, #02-01
Singapore 138538
Key people Min-Liang Tan (陳民亮/陈民亮) (CEO and Creative Director)
Patricia Liu (Executive Director)
Khaw Kheng Joo (COO)
FCC grantee code RWO
Website https://www.razer.com/

Razer is a company that makes various gaming related peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, keypads and headsets. They also make a line of gaming laptops, called Razer Blade.

The company started in San Diego, CA (USA) as a subsidiary of kärna LLC in 1998, but after that company ceased operations in 2000 Razer was founded by Min Liang-Tan and Robert Krakoff after procuring the rights to the brand. Currently Razer is a dual headquartered company in Irvine, California (USA) and Singapore.

Controversies

Razer Synapse

Razer peripherals require the application Synapse for most configuration of such things such as mouse resolution, backlighting and keyboard macros. Synapse 2 had been available for macOS while newer peripherals require Synapse 3 which is for Microsoft Windows only.

Synapse stores profiles on an Internet "cloud" server, and requires the user to log in to an account for full functionality of their peripherals. Synapse has received a lot of criticism for being a "cloud" application. Not only because of nuisance of having to log in often, but also because it would have the sort of issues with security, availability and privacy that often plague cloud applications. Current revisions of Synapse 3 allows locally stored profiles and a "Guest mode" to bypass the login.

Synapse has been criticised for its size, both on disk and its memory consumption. It also has a reputation of not being stable: either that servers go down, causing the application to not function properly, or that the application often crashes.

Synapse has also been criticised for absurd amounts of network traffic.[1]

Razer SoftMiner and Gamma

On Dec 12, 2018, Razer announced Razer SoftMiner in partnership with GammaNow. It was a cryptocurrency mining[Note 1] program that users could run on their computers in return for "Razer Silver", a store credit to use in Razer's store.[2] In August 2019, the SoftMiner app was discontinued in favour of the app Gamma, still associated with Razer and Razer Silver, but run by GammaNow.

Early SoftMiner apps mined[Note 1] Ethereum for GammaNow, for which Razer got compensation.[3] Later versions of SoftMiner and Gamma installed not only ethminer.exe (for Ethereum) but also ccminer.exe, nhegminer.exe and sgminer.exe. The names of the added programs match open-source miners for cryptocurrencies Zcoin and Zcash. All of these programs are flagged by many AV programs as malware, which is why there are official guides for SoftMiner[4] and Gamma[5] on how to whitelist them in AV software.

The SoftMiner app had been bundled as an optional install with Razer Cortex: a program that tweaks Microsoft Windows to provide more system resources to games while gaming.[6] Razer Cortex has been an optional install with Razer Synapse.

When it was introduced, critics quickly noted several issues. Each unit of Razer Silver expired after 12 months, which made many things impossible to earn. The cost of electricity used for mining could cost three-four times the value of the store credit, not to mention devaluing the equipment faster because of increased wear.[7]

Misleading marketing

Razer's official marketing sometimes uses established terms in wrong or ambiguous ways compared to established convention within the industry.

  • "Membrane" to mean rubber dome, not membrane keyboard.
  • "Anti-ghosting" to refer to avoiding blocking of keys as a result of multiple simultaneous key presses, when anti-ghosting actually means to avoid unintended key activation as a result of multiple simultaneous key presses. (Blocking is a type of anti-ghosting)
  • Claiming 10-key or 14-key interface-limited rollover over the USB when supporting only up to 6 arbitrary keys + four types of modifier keys (Control, Shift, Alt, Windows). The industry convention is to count the smallest possible combination of arbitrary keys: which in this case would translate to "6-key rollover".

Razer is one of the brands that has a "mecha-membrane" keyboard product: the Razer Ornata. It was touted as the "best of both worlds of mechanical and [rubber dome]".[Note 2] It is in fact a rubber dome keyboard with dedicated clickers to only make additional noise like clicky mechanical keyboards.

Security problems

Leak of customer data

In August 2020, it was discovered that more than 100,000 customers' personal info had been exposed and become available to hackers. The server cluster had not only been exposed to the public, but also indexed by public search engines. After a security researcher discovered and reported the issue to a Razer representative, it took three weeks for the misconfiguration to be corrected.[8]

Insecure installer

In August 2022, it was revealed that merely plugging in certain Razer peripherals into a Windows PC could automatically launch an installation program that allowed any user to easily gain administrator privileges on that PC.[9]

Products

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Cryptocurrency mining consists of a brute force attack against a cryptographic hash, with rewards in new currency given to whomever does it first. Cryptocurrency mining has been accused of wasting unnecessary power (spending natural resources and producing greenhouse gases) and inflating the price of graphics cards.
  2. ↑ The word "membrane" had been misused to mean "rubber dome" in this case.

References

  1. ↑ ThreeStripeThrowaway — Razer Central Service is killing my internet (Reddit) Posted 2020-09-30. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  2. ↑ Razer — Post encouraging users to check out Razer SoftMiner (Twitter) Posted 2018-12-12. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  3. ↑ Vice — Razer Wants Gamers to Mine Cryptocurrency for Store Credit by Jordan Pearson. Dated 2018-12-12. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  4. ↑ Razer — How to Configure Anti-Virus to Permit SoftMiner Binaries (direct download). Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  5. ↑ Gamma — How to Configure Anti-Virus to Permit Gamma Binaries (direct download). Quoted by the Gamma FAQ (currently only reachable through the Wayback Machine) on gammanow.com. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  6. ↑ TechRadar — Razer Cortex review by Stefan Ionescu and Richard Sutherland. Dated 2022-03-15. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  7. ↑ ZNet — Razer faces backlash after asking gamers to mine cryptocurrency for rewards by Charlie Osborne. Dated 2018-12-13. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  8. ↑ Ars Technica — Private data gone public: Razer leaks 100,000+ gamers’ personal info by Jim Salter. Dated 2020-09-14. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  9. ↑ j0nh4t — Post dated 2021-08-21 at 1:55 PM (Twitter). Retrieved 2024-04-30.
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