Razer

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Razer USA Ltd.
Industry Computer hardware
Consumer electronics
Founded 1998
Headquarters San Diego, California, USA
Key people Min-Liang Tan(陳民亮/陈民亮) (CEO and Creative Director)
Robert "Razerguy" Krakoff (President)
Website www.razerzone.com, eu.razerzone.com


Razer is a company that makes various gaming related peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, keypads and headsets.

Razer also makes a line of gaming laptops, called Razer Blade.


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[footnote 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[footnote 1] Etherium for GammaNow, for which Razer got compensation[3]. Later versions of SoftMiner and Gamma installed not only "ethminer.exe" (for Etherium) 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 anti-virus programs as malware, which is why there are official guides for SoftMiner [4] and Gamma[5] on how to whitelist them in anti-virus 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 expires after 12 months, which makes many things impossible to earn. The cost of electricity used for mining could cost three-four times than 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 is "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]"[footnote 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 customer's personal info had been laid exposed, 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 had discovered it and reported it to a Razer representative, it took three weeks before the misconfiguration got fixed.[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 have 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. Razer subreddit on Reddit—Razer Central Service is killing my internet. Thread started 2020-09-30
  2. Razer on Twitter—6:00 am - 12 Dec 2018. Dated 2018-12-12. Retrieved 2018-12-14
  3. Vice—Razer Wants Gamers to Mine Cryptocurrency for Store Credit, by Jordan Pearson. Dated 2018-12-12. Retrieved 2020-08-17
  4. Razer—How to Configure Anti-Virus to Permit SoftMiner Binaries. Retrieved 2020-08-17
  5. Gamma—How to Configure Anti-Virus to Permit Gamma Binaries. From Gamma FAQ on gammanow.com. Retrieved 2020-08-17
  6. TechRadar—Razer Cortex review. Dated 2019-07-23.
  7. ZNet—Razer faces backlash after asking gamers to mine cryptocurrency for rewards. by Charlie Osborne. Dated 2018-12-13.
  8. Ars Technica—Private data gone public: Razer leaks 100,000+ gamers’ personal info. Dated 2020-09-14. Retrieved 2020-09-14
  9. j0nh4t on Twitter—[1]. Retrieved 2021-08-23