On DRM and Charts

A couple of nights back we had some pretty heavy rainfall and a fair amount of water leaked into the chartroom. The water got into the power supply for the chart computer, shorting it out. Fortunately, that appears to be all it did to the computer. Unfortunately, the water also got into this:

That label says “Endeavour(R) Security Dongle”. I’m not a fan of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) at the best of times, but this is ridiculous. If the water has wrecked the dongle, then we will have lost access to our electronic charts. (We still carry and use paper charts, of course, and do all the chartwork on them in parallel.) Making the electronic charts depend on a non-waterproof dongle is a textbook Bad Idea.