Solution: CP2102
A certain brand of uninterruptable power supply, I think maybe APC, used to sell “special” serial cables to connect to their monitoring ports. Connecting a normal serial cable made the UPS power cycle itself, causing a hard shutdown on anything connected to it. The secret was a 100k resistor on one of the pins, I think.
Anyway, that’s the closest thing I remember to this situation, @Jeff_DeMaagd
@Tim_Elmore Fake electronics have been found in top-of-line military equipment. A consumer buys a product from an honest vendor. Honest vendor buys parts from a long and complex supply chain, most of which is completely out of his control. Somewhere along the line, someone swaps good parts for fake, and pockets the difference. This happens all the time. Honest vendor has no way to detect this. Along comes FTDI and purposely bricks the device, screwing everyone except the actual guilty party.
Also, I am %100 certain that somewhere in the world there is someone who’s life right now depends on a fake FTDI chip. Yes, medical equipment has rigorous testing and quality control, but there are always cracks and slips of protocol, intentional and otherwise. If FTDI had their way, and bricked all fake FTDI chips in the world, people will die as a result.
@Shachar_Weis , Same deal with counterfeit caps blowing up at inopportune times, counterfeit MOSFETS catching fire, etc etc. This FTDI stuff is all much more benign. I’ll say it again, since no one seems to want to answer:
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?
@Shachar_Weis If your theory was correct, that person would be dead by now as a result of automatic updates and I have a feeling we’d hear about it very shortly. So I guess we’ll see just how “100% correct” you are - I have a feeling the answer is “not very”.
What life support device requires a serial link, AND HASN’T ALREADY UPDATED THE PID?
This will only impact counterfeits using FTDI’s PID. No reputable designer does this, you buy a PID and use the one you bought.
@Andrew_Hodel i don’t get it. Captain?
@Shachar_Weis I’m pretty, pretty sure that there are design rules that prevent life-support equipment from failing when something as trivial as a serial converter stops working. Also, i don’t see how an unqualified chip would ever end up in that kind of product.
I’d be fine with FTDI not supporting counterfeit chips with their drivers, like Thantik said waaaay back in this post somewhere, I’d have no problem with the driver popping a message about your chip being counterfeit and refusing to work.
That’s a reasonable solution.
But the solution they went with seems completely UNreasonable to me. In spite of their insistence otherwise, it IS taking out their frustrations with counterfeits on the end consumer, because the end consumer is the only one who’ll run afoul of this.
@Tim_Elmore It’s not a case of the drivers not working with fake chips. FTDI are purposely setting the PID to zero, in order to brick fake chips. This is not a mistake, or a bug, or just not being compatible with fakes. This is active measures taken by FTID to harm fake chips. This is like Guchi breaking into your house and spray painting all over a fake bag.
@Stephen_Baird , @Shachar_Weis again, how is what they’re doing any different from failing to load the driver (which you deem acceptable)? There is no legitimate driver for counterfeits, and if there was it couldn’t work with the existing counterfeits because in order for it to be a legitimate driver it would have to have its own VID/PID.
This is is nothing like Gucci spray painting a bag. This is reversible in 5 minutes. It is also the only known method of detecting counterfeits.
This is by and large a case of people being upset they can no longer get away with stealing. Oddly enough, it comes from a lot of the same people that get upset when Chinese copy shops rip off contributors to the 3DP community.
Reversing the bricking is totally beyond most consumer’s capabilities. And the device is bricked, meaning it stops working. Connect it to a different computer, it still won’t work.
There is a fine line between making your drivers not work, and altering someone else’s device so it doesn’t work anymore. One is legal, and the other is not.
Once you cross that border, from your own domain (your drivers) into someone elses domain (a device you do not own), even if technically it is a very tiny difference, ethically you are in the wrong.
Asking someone to unbrick a device is like asking my mom to replace her own keyboard. BestBuy wanted to charge her $300 to fix her keyboard. She bought a wireless keyboard for $50 (still too expensive). She could have bought a new laptop for $250. I have ordered a replacement keyboard for $12 and will replace the keyboard component of her laptop this weekend if it gets in soon enough. Replacing the keyboard is so above my mom’s capabilities and unbricking a device would be too. Unbricking a device is above many people’s abilities. Let’s face it, the FTDI change mainly affects Windows users who probably have auto-updates going on even when they tell Windows not to auto-update and for many of those users, being able to do something like 3d printing or programming or unbricking their devices is as likely as winning the lottery.
Disabling the driver isn’t as bad as bricking the device. A bricked device won’t work without being reprogrammed somehow, an unbricked but rejected device could at least temporarily be used on an older computer, on Linux or on a Mac.
The real issue here is not that FDTI have taken active measures against counterfeiting but the way they have gone about it. They didn’t forewarn anyone of their intention to act and did it through a mechanism that gave users no notice of what they had done.
By disabling hardware external to the PC and OS environment they put themselves in a dangerous position. You might take the view that their action, in disabling a previously working piece of hardware, borders on vandalism. It is certainly not the behaviour you would expect from a reputable organisation.
@Neil_Darlow Also, I believe that they have opened themselves to lawsuits.
@Jelle_Boomstra I never said using the VID/PID is stealing. Though just so you know, property doesn’t have to be tangible - it can be intellectual also. The counterfeiters are taking the IP for themselves. If taking property is not stealing, I don’t know what is.
Stealing is defined as: “to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice”
Would you deem downloading music illegally to be stealing? The court of law does.
@Tim_Elmore , illegally downloading music is not stealing and is not defined by law to be stealing either. It’s deemed piracy. Stealing deprives the original owner of access to their stuff.
“Intellectual property” is not property as defined by the word. The whole “ip rights” argument is based on an entirely false premise that an idea is tangible property.
“Under current copyright legislation, downloading music for free is definitely theft under letter of the law.”
http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/pirate.shtml
Here’s what the FBI has to say about it:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/ipr
The United States also has federal law in the form of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. §§ 1831–1839), which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret (not the PID, but the silicon) a federal crime.
Really we’re just arguing semantics here. It’s clear counterfeit chip designers are using things that they do not have the right to use. Define that with whatever word you like. If you’re going to define reversibly setting a PID to 0 in EEPROM as “vandalism”, it isn’t a stretch to say FTDI’s IP without permission is theft/stealing.