Why is the name of a wireless mouse hard-coded into Windows Bluetooth drivers?

11 hours ago

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Windows Bluetooth drivers contain a hard-coded name for the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 due to a compatibility hack.
The mouse incorrectly encodes its name in code page 1252 instead of UTF-8, causing the string to be invalid.
A special table in the Bluetooth drivers substitutes the correct name for devices that report their names wrong, currently containing only this mouse.
The error likely occurred because earlier Windows versions didn't enforce string validation, and a later update added it, requiring a workaround.
The device was released in 2006, surprising as such errors were thought to be more common in the 90s.

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