@Tim_Elmore San Disk…San Disk…San Disk…they had their shit swapped out on them in the factory, if I recall correctly. Also, it is a damned chip. The product would not have come directly from FTDI. Resellers are everywhere. I have personally seen the back alley street vendors in China. This is not the same thing.
You keep talking about Sandisk, I Googled and couldn’t find what you were talking about. You’re relying on “IIRC” as your point of argument. That’s also SanDisk, not FTDI. Until it happens with FTDI, you can’t use it as a point of argument.
Every single example I’ve seen so far has come from Amazon or eBay. Those are not authorized suppliers.
Hey Tim, I’ve tried not to make this personal and while you’re definitely entitled to an opinion, I’m disappointed that you think that anyone who chooses to buy cheap goods from China are cheapos and thieves.
We are a community of tinkerers and hackers. We don’t always have the means to buy the best while we experiment and learn. Would I like to reach a stage of my life one day, where I can spend $150 on a board i’d probably wreck 5 mins after plugging it in? Sure. But I’m a poor, stupid newbie and I’ve destroyed at least 2 of them. So until then I’m gonna buy my $60 dollar board from China. Oh and of course, I’m going to complain as well when it stops working again due to a silent update.
Cheers Tim, I hope to be as successful as you one day and buy the best made in the USA boards 
@Tim_Elmore regardless of if the chip is counterfeit, it will cost FTDI alot of lawyer fees and investigation if someone tries to sue them. As I said, some people could potentially lose thousands or millions of dollars in income. There are surely non-destructive ways to detect the fake chips and kindly ask them to buy a legitimate product without risking damage to that person’s equipment or ability to run their business. This is like chopping off someone’s hand as punishment for theft because someone put a stolen item in their pockets without their knowledge.
@Eugene_Lee I never said buying cheap goods from China makes you a thief. I said that a counterfeit chip is stealing, plain and simple. You are in possession of stolen intellectual property, with a high certainty at the time of purchase that it was counterfeit. There’s just no way around that. If you feel that’s fine, great - but its still illegal.
If you’re going to complain about it as well - then you’re complaining about not getting away with stealing. What’s that say about you as a person? Nice job avoiding the question I posed, too.
@NathanielStenzel If you’re so sure counterfeits can be detected via other means, please do explain.
The chopping off a hand analogy is a terrible one. Yet AGAIN, this can be reversed in 10 minutes, on a Linux or Windows computer. You can’t put a hand back on in 10 minutes.
There is functionally no difference between this and failing to load the FTDI driver, since there’s no counterfeit-supporting driver (not that it’d ever work anyway since all the counterfeit chips use FTDI VID/PIDs.)
AGAIN:
Should the FTDI driver be required to work with a counterfeit chip?
If yes, why? Why is FTDI required to support piracy?
If no, then why the outrage? How is what they’re doing any different from simply not loading the driver?
@Eugene_Lee you mean we make controller boards for 3d printers in the USA? When I go shopping I feel like crying because I almost never see “made in the USA”. I sometimes get queezy and need to rest for a moment because it mane’s me so sick.
@Tim_Elmore the buyers may be ignorant or lied to. The people counterfeiting the chips are the thieves…
Reversable in ten minutes…maybe…if you even know about the fake busting driver update and the patch. Anyone else would be F*cked.
@NathanielStenzel Just like they would be if they were sold a board with fake MOSFETS (happens all the time on RAMPS boards).
Except FTDI didn’t set your house on fire as a result.
People can lie about anything - MOSFETs, caps, etc. Sometimes counterfeit caps take months or years to go bad. This is no different.
Buy from trusted sources, or roll the dice to save a buck. Your call.
@Tim_Elmore I really do think the easiest solution is to just not buy from China. LOL
You can’t trust a vendor from China period. Their law says buyer beware.
I didn’t mind when their drivers detected and just refused to load with counterfeit chips… But this is a dick move. All it will do is drive people to other chips. China is already moving away from FTDI and towards pl2303(ew, also often counterfeited) and ch341 chipsets and others…
Also; I looked a few months back and I couldn’t find a ‘how to tell’/Counterfeit detection tool’ beyond ‘driver won’t load’… To me that would have made more scene… Don’t punish… Inform… So suppliers won’t be trusted…
@Electra_Flarefire It already did that for me: as I cannot be sure next FTDI is legit or not I will use other choices. Arduino did switch years ago too.
If you want to continue using clones then just upload to them under Linux. Open source drivers don’t indulge in these practices.
Legally speaking, if you buy a FTDI device in a particular state, are you implicitly granting the manufacturer the right to change the device’s specification post purchase?
@Tim_Elmore When “them” become “you” is when you realize what a bad move that is. We tend to assume we are always in the “right” side.
“Why would police need a warrant to search my home? I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide”.
FTDI seems to have done their own investigation, trial and punishment in one single driver. Let the market speak.
I think we can agree that FTDI’s response was not ideal. As a consequence they will lose sales - the EEVBLOG forum thread discussing the issue is populated with folks, who were buying genuine FTDI devices, that are now seeking alternatives. Sure, they may be small players but they are now no longer going to buy FTDI product.
I don’t have an explicit opinion on the topic yet, but here’s some points that one should consider:
- FTDI have no chance of directly eliminating counterfeit chips at the source. Not when they’re made in Shenzen.
- FTDI chips are comparatively expensive, so they are a high-value target for replacing them with fakes. “Genuine” chips from untrusted sources can’t be …trusted. Neither can off-brand assembled products or clones.
- If, as a manufacturer, you want to use genuine chips, simply buy them from trusted sources. @Mouser_Electronics or @Farnell are never going to ship you clones. If a clone ends up on your boards, it’s entirely your fault.
- As an end user, your range of trusted suppliers for assembled products is limited to a few resellers as well. That usually means you’ll have to pay multiples of the sticker price of a far-east product.
- As of yesterday, cloned chips used to work just as well as genuine ones for end users.
- The driver update is very directly targeting end users, even if FTDI are saying otherwise. They are actively damaging equipment, and not even by accident.
- Of course, they have no obligation of supporting counterfeit products, but i believe that doesn’t give them the right to destroy it.
- The end user never explicitly agreed to the EULA of the driver when he’s getting it through Windows Update.
Is this unprecedented? I don’t remember any other examples of a company disabling user devices like this before. I guess you can say “Sony rootkit”, and I recall that got Sony into some legal trouble. I would hope that FTDI got its legal ducks in a row, I don’t believe they have the same resources as Sony did then. Also, this same driver update did cause me hassles on a legit Mega board bought through Ultimachine, reinstalling the Arduino IDE fixed it, because it installs the driver. The board was fine.
We wouldn’t have the PC as it is today if it weren’t for cloning, so defending this practice and being a proponent of the PC derivative platform would be inconsistent in my opinion. It’s true those were usually not counterfeits, Compaq sold cloned work-alike computers under their own brand, for example. Still, there were counterfeit chips in PC history too. Can you imagine if Intel figured out how to turn off AMD chips? While these FTDI clones are counterfeits and not under their own brand, you’d be saying that you would have been fine to using the same sabotage technique in the past to stop the PC revolution.